Game On with Bing

Yesterday we went off to London courtesy of Electronic Arts, who had arranged an all expenses paid (perhaps my favourite three words) trip to the Game On exhibition at the Science Museum with free beer (perhaps my favourite two words) and a talk from Bing Gordon, EA's Chief Creative Officer.

Just before we boarded the magic bus

We set off at 10:30 prompt, bound for London. The M1 was kind to us, so we got to the big city in good time. I'd taken the big camera, so it was time to go off and take some snaps.

The Natural History Museum looking good

We piled into the tube and took a ride up to Oxford Street.

Oxford Circus

Fruit and Veg

Then, at 6:30 the doors opened and it was, quite literally, Game on.

EA had set up some gamer pods around the museum. That big shiny thing at the back is the wing of a Spitfire plane.

Bigging Up Bing

First up was the talk from Bing Gordon. Very interesting. Some good comments about life, followed by some more specific discussion of video games.

Health note: these are pulled from my recollections, if anyone who was there remembers differently then I apologise in advance.

From the life point of view:

• Find out what you really enjoy doing and then try to get to do that as your day job.
• Don't be afraid to fail.
• Set yourself big goals (but make them testable so that you can decide when/whether you reach them)
• Maximise your learning opportunities
• Set very high standards and give everyone who fails to meet them a really hard time. There is nothing more demoralising than a boss who accepts poor quality work.

This is all good stuff. For me what was also interesting was that one of Bing's heroes is a chap called David Ogilvy. He was an advertising executive who ran some of the most successful campaigns of all time and went on to set up one of the largest Ad agencies in the world. I remember reading one of his books a long time ago (I've always found the advertising field fascinating) and I would advise you to take a look as well. Then the talk turned to games. More from Bing:

• Games are becoming hobbies (people play them in the same way that they would build model railways, or go fishing)
• Games are including things like searching, trading and community..
• .. and search engines and other tools are starting to behave like games
• By around 2012 we can look forward to movie level realism in games

There was a very good question and answer session at the end, and then the doors to the Game On exhibition were thrown open and it was time to get in there and start playing.

..but first a drink

Game On indeed

Not the kind of high score I'd take a picture of, but there you are

Jon Purdy gets back to basics

One of my all time favourites, Ridge Racer

Not sure quite what this is, but it looks fun.

I used to own quite a few of these....

Then, at 10:00 we all clambered onto the magic bus and headed back to Hull (I had a kind of bet with David Byrne from EA that all our students would turn up on time - and they did. Kudos guys).

Many thanks to the highway engineers who added around an hour to our journey back just because they wanted to play with their big Meccano near one of the bridges. I finally managed to hit the sack around 4:30 am, just as the birds were starting to sing. But it was a good trip.

Thanks to EA for setting it up and making us so welcome.

Name In Print

My name is actually now on the web page for the book that I'm involved with. And I've also signed and sent off the contracts. All I have to do now is the writing part......

Snow on the Road

..and so there is

Email Etiquette

I sent some emails out last week and got no reply. Nothing.

There is a difficult etiquette issue here. Do I assume that the message has not got through? Do I assume that the person who received it does not think the message worthy of reply or would rather not talk to me?

This is tricky. If I send a further message saying "Did you get my email?" I force them into responding when they'd probably rather not. If I do nothing, and the mail didn't get through, then they might think me rude for not getting in touch, or I miss out on a conversation which may benefit both of us.

In the end I solved the problem by checking my junk email folder. Which of course is where the responses had ended up. I'm no further forward on the etiquette issue, but I'm going to check through my junk email more frequently....

Building the Future

We had an admissions Open Day today. As is our won't on such occasions, we put on a hearty buffet and sat around with candidates and their parents eating sandwiches and chewing the fat.

One of the parents made the point that he thought Computer Scientists were an enviable bunch because we are "building the future". I nodded and smiled, and managed to avoid mentioning the half a day I spent a while back trying to get Aero Glass running on Vista, so my windows would have semi-transparent borders.

"It is an awesome responsibility" I managed to reply eventually. And then changed the subject.

Eight Hours Driving

Well, we were on the road at 6:00 am, over the Humber Bridge at 6:20 and in our first traffic jam at 6:35. Fortunately we managed to get around this road closure (I felt sorry for the big trucks that had no chance of turning round) and make it with a few minutes to spare.

It was nice to see some people that we haven't seen in a while, the circumstances were not the happiest, but the weather was kind to us, there were lots of flowers, and the service was a celebration of a good life lived to the full, which is how it should be.

And then it was time to get back into the car for another four hour drive back to the homestead.

Best Laid Plans

We had to be somewhere else today. Not a particularly happy somewhere else, in that we are attending a funeral, but a somewhere else nonetheless.

Unfortunately the weather had other ideas. We set off as planned for our overnight stop and we turned the radio to the traffic news, as you do. At the Humber Bridge we stopped to have another listen. The RDS system that automatically flips between travel news on different stations was having a field day. We didn't manage to hear the end of four different reports. And all of them were telling us that today was a bad day to travel. Basically, all the roads between where we were and where we wanted to be were full/broken.

So we went home and had some fish and chips. It will mean an early start tomorrow to get where we want to be, but I don't think tonight was meant for traveling.

Inside a Wii Controller

I was sitting waiting for an ebay auction to nearly finish so that I can pile in with a last minute bid when I wondered to myself if there was anything about the inside of the Wii remote controller out there on the interweb. Turns out there is.

Very interesting, and lovely pictures.

EA Good Sports

If you are a student at our university you might be interested in a little event that we have been invited to. Hull University has been recognized by Electronic Arts as one of their key partners, which is rather nice (well, they did hire a whole bunch of our students last year).

Anyhoo, they have very kindly invited our students to a "do" at the Science Museum in London. It is based at the Game On exhibition, which traces the history of video gaming by means of a whole bunch of old consoles and arcade machines.

Which you can play on.....

I was going to make a trip down there myself later this year, but the chance to attend for free, and with a talk from Bing Gordon, EA's Chief Creative Officer, is just too good to miss.

Hull students can apply here.  Note that unfortunately, because they have an exam on the day of the trip, first year students will not be able to attend, but any others can. Places are limited people, so get your names down as quickly as possible.

Make Anything

My co-writer on the .NET Micro Framework book put me on to this. This is a machine which can make anything. So called fabbers can be regarded as three dimensional printers. We have one at the university which is used in the engineering department and it is amazing. It even makes spare parts for itself.....

Anyhoo, you can now think about making one of your own. Take a look here.

Oh Yes We Did

We went to see the pantomime tonight. Just the two of us, which meant we felt a bit out of place amongst all the complete families that packed Hull New Theatre, but number one wife has always liked the Chuckle Brothers and I like watching professionals drive an audience so off we went.

One of the reasons we ventured out was that we heard this was a good one, and so it turned out. The Chuckle Brothers are the kind of comedy institution that it is popular to throw rocks at in this interactive, multi-channel, reality TV driven world. However, the simple fact is that you can put them in front of an audience and they will give darned good value for money. And so they did. Very funny.

I found it interesting to look across the theatre and see three generations of a family all laughing like drains at the antics on the stage. I enjoy a good pantomime. There aren't many traditions like it in the world and I love the idea that successive generations will turn up as grandkids, parents and grandparents and all enjoy something which, with a modicum of tweaking, has stayed fundamentally the same for many years.

The rest of the cast were well up to their roles. The story was Cinderella, and the ugly sisters were suitably nasty, the prince dashing and the fairy good mother flew about the stage with the right amount of bangs and puffs of smoke. They all had real barnstorming voices too, and belted out their versions of recent pop songs with great gusto. I'm very impressed that they managed to keep up the pace and the volume even after a month of solid performing. Good stuff.

Retro TV

With number one wife out for the evening number one son and I had free access to the big telly, and so a night of retro TV was in order.

First up was Thunderbirds, a puppet series which had me enthralled in the 1960's. I must admit it looked pretty darned good on the large screen, and the remastered sound was fantastic. Even after all these years it still packs a punch. In the episode that we watched all the trouble was caused by a "World Navy" exercise which went wrong when a missile strayed off course. Until now the idea of a world navy seemed quite sensible, but tonight I was wondering just who they would be fighting against. Anyhoo, it all ended well, although there were some rather large explosions. The really weird thing was that as we were watching a story of a gas rig in peril there was a real life drama of the same ilk playing itself out in the North Sea less than a hundred miles away.

Next we fired up "The Prisoner", a strange spy series of the sixties which was filmed in the wonderful Portmerion (which I really must visit one of these days). This stands up pretty well, it seems no more or less silly than things like "24" or Prison Break, with a cast of all the greatest TV actors of the time. Familiar faces kept popping up all over the place. Great fun.

Delinquent Children

Number one son keeps getting busted by the police. One of his little prangs has just cost me 34,000 dollars and things have now got a lot worse. He's gone and bought a motorbike. Fortunately this is not real, this is Test Drive Unlimited for the XBOX 360, which is slowly taking over our lives. We've won a few races, run a few errands, bought a new house and spent a while exploring the neighbourhood.

I'm impressed with this game. The graphics are very believable, and the roads go on for ever. You start to explore places just to find out what is round the next corner. Perhaps we'll soon identify a few haunts to hang out at and get to know some of the locals.

If you like driving games and exploration you should track down a copy. Maybe we'll meet up in Hawaii.

Five Things to Know About Me

I've never been "tagged" before. But all that has changed. Alfred from Microsoft has tagged me. The idea is that I have to write five things about myself that you probably don't know. And then tag other bloggers to get them to do the same. A bit like a chain letter. Without the chain. Or the letter. So, here goes:

1. I once had a whole page of poetry published in "The Indepedent", a UK national daily newspaper. It was illustrated by Heath, a famous cartoonist. It was in 1987 and was fallout from my first ever lecture in rhyme. I have a copy of the paper in my office, one of my most treasured possessions. It is getting a bit yellow now, I must scan it sometime.
2. I used to present on Hospital Radio. My show was called "Better by Miles" as I remember. After the wonderfullness of the title it was all downhill from there.... I made my own jingle machine using eight track tapes and still have some recordings in the loft. And they are staying there.
3. I wrote the software which puts datestamps on bottles of Budweiser beer (I'm very proud of this). It controls a special disk drive which puts metal masks in the way of a very powerful laser which blasts ink off bottle labels as they fly past. I do Asahi Beer as well, in addition to Cadburys Roses, Wheetabix and a bunch of other stuff.
4. I teach Sunday School. I've been going to our local methodist church religiously every week for years. I'm not particularly evangelical, it is just that for me a universe with a god in it makes more sense than one without.
5. I own a pinball machine. Oh yes. It is a Twilight Zone from 1993, one of the best machines ever made and great fun to carry up flights of stairs.

And now I have to pass the tag on to other people. I'm going to tag Jay Wakefield, Matt Jones, Carrie Francis, Geoff MacDonald and David Grey.

Travels with a GPS Logger

I'm writing some software which works with GPS. It is for the .NET Micro Framework book and will let you use a Micro Framework based device to log and display location information (assuming I can find a copyright free source of aerial maps).

Anyhoo, it occurred to me that I'm going to need some test data for the system so today, as we drove about East Yorkshire dropping people off and getting free food of friends and family, we took the Samsung Q1 with the Microsoft GPS sensor and a little program to capture the data stream. If you want to relive last night's epic journey from Howden to York you will soon be able to do this. Oh yes.

Your Brain and How To Use It?

The Sunday Times has been advertising a new feature aimed at improving the mental prowess of the nation. On Sunday you will get a free DVD which will let you measure your brain power. Whoopee.

I hate things like this. I hate IQ tests, I think they are silly. If you get a low score you get upset because you think you are thick. If you get a high score in one of these tests you get upset because you are not running the country (not that this is necessarily an advert for cleverness).

Of course the real reason that I hate the tests is because I get very confused/irritated by them. When confronted by a "pick the right answer/odd one out/next in sequence" kind of question I can usually think of a whole bunch of reasons why any one of them could be the correct one, depending on the whim of the person setting the test. So what I'm really finding out is if my interpretation of the situation is the same as someone else. Who presumably has a "gold standard" of cleverness in their office.

You might find it strange that someone who often has to measure how good people are at something by setting exams and exercises dislikes IQ tests so much. I think the thing is that what I try to assess is how useful somebody would be. Given a bunch of learning outcomes (which is what courses have these days) I'm going to set questions that will try to find out how useful you can be with the knowledge that you are supposed to have.

I'll start by asking a few things which will determine whether or not you have taken the trouble to learn the fundamentals of the subject and then give you a bunch of situations where you can demonstrate that you can use this understanding to achieve things. Finally, I'm going to try and get you into a place where you can say "There are no right answers here, just different compromises which reflect different priorities" and then tell me all about these.

Of course not everything can be nailed down like this, and I'm also going to want to see how well you can present your understanding (which is why we get the first year students to demonstrate their programs), but it is a good start.

I've nothing against doing stuff which keeps your brain agile (I love the little brain power games for the Nintendo DS). But I am strongly against dodgy pseudo-scientific tests which don't really prove anything useful.

Leeds Bargain Hunter

Leeds future sky

Went to Leeds today to look out for cheap clothes in the "Shop for strangely shaped people that cares not for style, quality or its customers". A tip, oh managers of such shops. Bearing in mind that the aim of a retail establishment is to entice shoppers inside to part with funds for goods, do not put something eerily tasteless in orange and brown directly inside the front door. Things did not improve much once we got further inside. A duffle coat that looked good in a picture turned out to be made of fuzzy felt and one of the buttons fell off as I tried it on.

However, we did manage to find a couple of tasteful items worthy of investment (thank heavens for Ben Sherman shirts) and so the trip was not a complete waste. And we did get to to go Ikea for meatballs.

In Praise of Insomnia

I've started waking up in the night every now and then (last night it was easy because number one son and daughter got up at some ungodly hour to go to London). Quite often I find it hard to get back to sleep, but this is sometimes a bonus because I do have some of my better ideas at that time (or perhaps it is because my critical faculties are asleep at that time as well).

Anyhoo, last night I had a neat idea for the "Flashlight for the Fiftieth Century" (US version) or "Posh Torch" (UK version) that I'm developing as a worked example for the .NET Micro Framework book I'm presently writing. Yesterday I got a GPS interface sort of working. As I was lying in bed it occurred to me that it would be nice to add some mapping features to the software. So now I'm going to download some map images so that the device can have a "you are here" kind of display for certain areas. 

Mouse Waggling

Many years ago I got hold of the first version of Windows NT (Version 3.1 for some strange, marketing related, reason). This was the beginning of "proper" 32 bit operating systems underneath Windows, a trend which has continued all the way to Windows XP and finally Vista.

However, as it was based on an Intel 486 chip with only 64 MBytes of memory the operating system used to struggle a bit. We used to have a game called "mouse waggling", where you would fire up the performance counter and see how much CPU load you could create just by moving the mouse pointer around the screen. Sad but fun (particularly on somebody else's computer). A good player could get up to 50 or 60%.

I tried the game today on Vista (it has some really nice performance displays in the sidebar). Except this time I was dragging a window, complete with contents, over a large and complex desktop.  The needle does move, but nothing like as far as it used to. I guess this is down to the use of the graphics hardware to underpin the display system, either way it is impressive.

Boomerang Settings

I've just about got Vista how I want it. Every now and then I do something which means I have to load or configure another program I used to use, but most of the time I can putter along and get things done. And I rather like my new workplace. Except for one thing.

Settings that I've changed keep reverting back to their previous values. I'm using a network storage device which is based on a Linux processor and uses SAMBA, so I have to modify a Local Security Policy to make it work. I can make the change fine, and the drive works fine for a while. Then the setting flips back to the original value. Similarly, to get Outlook to log on to our Exchange server I've had to add a registry key. Which keeps vanishing.

The only thing I can think of is that the system thinks it is under attack, and puts things back to their safe values. I've had a cursory dig around but nothing out there tells me how to fix it. Very strange.