Presentations for Fun and Profit

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The .NET masters students got to present their projects to us today. We made them all stand up in their teams and talk about what they have been doing for the last few weeks.

I was very impressed by the way that they all got into the spirit of the occasion; I think there were some who managed to surprise themselves with how well they did. I made some notes during the talk, which I'll pass on to the whole wide world (or at least both my readers....) They don't reflect any particular person, just my general impression.

  • At the start of the presentation it is good form to introduce the people in your team who are going to be talking. But as the person being introduced it is important that you acknowledge this presentation by nodding at the presenter, and then at the audience. It helps in building up a bit of relationship between team members and the team and the audience.
  • During your team presentation, if you are not talking you should be looking at the person who is talking, and at least giving the appearance of paying attention, even if you are not actually listening. It is distracting for the audience if you look at the floor, shuffle your feet, whisper to the person next you about plans for tonight or whistle (nobody actually whistled though). From a planning point of view it is a good idea to put "idle" team members on seats or stools, to stop them swaying in the breeze as the presentation continues.
  • The presenter must make eye contact with the audience. This is hard but necessary. Just about everyone did, but some didn't, and it makes an amazing difference. Remember that if you are more than 10 feet or so away it is impossible to look at just one person directly so if you just look at empty seat in the audience that will work fine.
  • Nobody used flashy slides transitions. Good on you people. Some folk used bullet by bullet drop down of points. This is OK, but you need to be careful that you pace these bits, otherwise the audience spends two minutes with just a slide title to look at.
  • Nobody actually read off the slides. Well done. Never do this. The slide content re-enforces the message and gives you hooks to talk around. It does not tell you exactly what to say. You should/must know that already.

For more links to good presentation content and some very funny videos you can go here.

Don't Answer the Phone

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Went out to see a real, live, play tonight. Dial M for Murder, made famous by the Hitchcock film staring Ray Milan and Grace Kelly. We had "that bloke from Taggart" and "one of the girls from Steps" instead of those two, but the play was great nonetheless. Faye Tozer as the heroine (can you say that now - or does everyone have to be a hero?) was just right, and the role of the evil husband was excellently taken by James MacPherson. Everyone else played their part very well too, although I was initially a bit taken aback by the detective with the comedy brummie accent (unless of course he actually comes from Birmingham, in which case I apologise).

I love going to live theatre, even if someone on the front row treated us to a first class display of freestyle coughing (even going as far as the "triple whoop with a double gurgle finish" which I don't think has been heard since we had smog) for most of the first half.

I was pleased to see that the theatre was pretty full, and gave the players a well deserved round of applause at the end. The show is in Hull for the rest of the week and is on tour around the country.

Evil Weather and and Hungry Robots

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Bank Holiday : like a normal day, but with much worse weather.

We had all kinds of plans for today. We were going to drive out into the country, walk round some rocks and eat scotch eggs in the car. And maybe even drink coffee from a flask whilst sitting on a piece of cloth on the grass.

As if.

After practicing on Sunday with a horrid display of freezing wind and rain the weather gave us a full on "Bank Holiday Experience" today with a pretty much perfect display of nastiness, even down to the hint of sunshine around teatime, when it was too late to go anywhere.

We stayed at home instead. We turned the robot vacuum loose in the bedroom and it ate my headphones. Not good. After spending a few minutes untangling the wire from the wheels I managed to get the robot back on the road (although I gave it a stern telling off) but the headphones looked to be a write off, with part of the earpiece missing.

So we went out and got a replacement set. At which point of course, the earpiece turned up and the original phones were found to be working fine. Wah.

I love bank holidays.

Best Cafe in the World

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I've found the best cafe in the world. It is in York station and the coffee is good, but everything there is annotated in a most amusing way.

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Message coated sugars

I know that all the slogans and clever artwork were actually concocted by a bunch of soul-less advertising executives for a franchise owned by an uncaring global corporation working out of an anonynous office somewhere in Slough, but I still think they are neat.

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Indeed it is, but we got one anyway

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York station looking good.

Gone to Print

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The key turned in the lock and the door opened slowly. The print foreman flicked the light switch and high above them the fluorescent tubes clicked and popped into life. In front of them stood the printing press, seeming to jump around on its base as the lights around it flickered and got brighter. The smell of fresh paper, ink and machine oil filled the air. The foreman walked purposely around to the control panel and pushed the gold disk into the slot at the top.

The courier stood speechless in the doorway, catching his breath and watching the room come alive in front of him. He had been traveling since dawn the previous day to bring the precious data that was now being prepared for its final journey onto paper.

The control panel lit up, sections turning green as the pages were loaded into the memory of the vast machine. In the background the foreman could hear the print rollers and cooling fans coming up to speed. Finally the "Print Ready" light came on.

He glanced down at the lever that set the number of copies required. "Rob wrote some of this" he said to himself, as he pulled the lever all the way to the right hand end of it's travel before jabbing the Start button. The printing continued long into the night, vast trucks appearing out of the darkness to load up with copies for distribution to the furthest corners of the world....

Or,to put it another way, our book went to print this week. You should be able to find it in all good bookshops (and probably a few dodgy ones) by the end of June.

You can buy it at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk.

Surviving Marking with the Gitaroo Man

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I've found a way to survive marking. It goes like this.

Seems to work a treat.

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Only got to level 3 so far, but great fun

If you've got a PSP you ought to get this game. Recommended by number one son (there is no higher recommendation, believe me) it is worth getting just for the frantic Japanese music and the look of the thing. I picked it up for ten quid last weekend. You should too (except for the last weekend bit - which would require a time machine).

Stuck in a loop

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My little Samsung Q1 PC has not been a well machine for a while. Fresh from its Java update over the weekend it has taken to sulking shortly after being powered up. Investigations revealed that a certain svchost process was taking the computer away without being asked. Being the subtle soul I am, I discovered that if I just kill the process the machine comes back, but this is hardly an elegant long term solution. So today I did some digging.

Turns out that Windows Update has a dark side which can cause it to lock your machine up. I took a while to find out what to do to get back into the driving seat, but if you have an XP system which has mysteriously slowed right down you might find it useful to take a look here.

360 Magazine and Rob

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How much fame can a man take? Some time back Jon Gordon from 360 magazine came up to Hull to take a look at what we are doing with XNA. Jon recorded a chat with me, spoke to some students and then went back to headquarters to prepare the article. Today I received an advance copy of the magazine, issue 23, it should be in the shops at the end of this week.

And there I am, with the whole interview laid out along with quotes from students and everything. Great stuff.

What with this, and my picture in Vista magazine, I think I might see about getting an agent.....

Bring on Happy Hour

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Imagine you are going on a journey. You get the car out, and then nip back into the house to fetch your luggage. When you get back outside you find that your car has driven itself off to the garage to sort out a problem with one of the wheel trims and it will be there for the next couple of hours.

I don't think that many drivers would put up with this. But computer users get it all the time.

This morning I needed to use a computer that I hadn't turned on for a while. For some reason I thought this was not going to cause me problems. How wrong I was. When the machine woke up it decided to upgrade its Java installation.

Now, I don't use Java very much, I only added the runtimes so that I could run some programs that I needed to take a look at. Java is a nice enough language, it is just not one that I use any more. I certainly don't need an update. Particularly one which takes the thick end of half an hour, and which seems to lock up the machine while the update completes.

Nothing strikes fear into my heart more than the phrase "New updates are ready to install". This usually means that I have to fire up my other computer so I can get some work done whilst checking on the updating machine for buttons that I need to press. You can't just go off and have a coffee, oh no, because as soon as you turn away from the machine it pops up a spurious dialogue box which you have to click on to start the download of the download downloader or somesuch rubbish.

We really need to get a handle on this kind of thing, the tail has started wagging the dog I reckon. I know you can get the machine to do updates at midnight, but this means leaving the machine on overnight, which I'm not always keen to do and is probably not a very efficient thing to do from an environmental point of view.I get really cross when I fire up my machine and all kinds of dross gets to run before I can see my email.

I think there should be a kind of "happy hour" on a machine when it first wakes up. Rather than starting up all the updates, sidebars, screen savers, sync centers, search indexers, de-fragmenters, bluetooth managers and god knows what else, for the first hour of use a machine should just concentrate on running the programs that I start. Once things have settled down, and I'm sitting there wondering what key to press, then the operating system can start gradually introducing the things that can be left to catch up later. Should be easy enough to add and it would make lots of people happier. Including me.

Increase your word power

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I upgraded the memory in my Media Centre today. It has been running well, but I'd managed to convince myself that it was short of memory. And I was anxious to make the most of the "ten pounds off every purchase over thirty quid" offer still running at ebuyer.com. The memory arrived today, so it was off with the lid to begin the "two minute job" which was actually plugging in the chips. And I saw what Sony had done. And I said a naughty word.

The memory sockets were right where I could see them, really easy to get at, which was good. However the catches at one side of the sockets were completely fouled up against the graphics card. There was no way to add the memory without taking part of the machine to bits. I'm a great fan of good design. Unfortunately this means that I hate badly designed stuff.  Hence the naughty word.

Anyhoo, I took all the cables and bits and pieces out and got hold of the card. It moved up a quarter of an inch and then stuck. I gave another gentle tug and noticed that other parts of the system board were bending in a generally non-good way. Turns out that, not content with making a mess of the positioning of the memory and graphics card, the designers had also placed some components together which have meshed together in some stupid way, so the card would not come out.  So I said another naughty word and had tea.

Incidentally, have you ever noticed how it us usually time to eat just at the point where a tricky job becomes critical? You're just about to fire up the program for the first time/start the engine/wire up the lightning conductor and throw the circuit breaker etc when the oven timer goes ping and you have to walk away and eat. There was a time when this used to infuriate me, but now I take it in good grace, walk away from the job and then go back with a fresh mind and a full stomach. In this case it was probably a good thing, because on return I managed to slide the card sideways and "twang" the memory in without any further ado.

Then it was time to test the system, put the lid on, and see what happens next. Shaun the sheep looks just the same, of course, but on the whole I'm happier.

Noise Canceled

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When I was in the 'states I got myself a pair of cheap noise canceling headphones. I wasn't expecting them to be up to much, but it turns out that they are quite effective. You turn them on and they do nothing for a few seconds and then there is a kind of un-thump and the sounds outside you vanish. It is a bit like having a wet flannel suddenly wrapped around your head.

I've been wondering what would happen if I played the same music into some speakers and the headphones, sat next to the speaker, and then turned the noise canceling on.......

Posh Tipping

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Is it just this area, or is the local council tip now the "place to be seen". Last time I went down there I was relieved that I had a slightly newer car, as previously I'd felt a bit out of place in Ye Olde Scenic, surrounded as I was by shiny 4x4s and Mercedes. I had to go again today, and it was just the same, maybe worse. One pair even rolled up in a brand new BMW open top sports car. And the girl sweeping up the leaves was wearing bright green eyeshadow. Very strange.

I kept waiting for the music to start up, at which point everyone would rip off their overalls to reveal spangled costumes and then go into some appalling song and dance routine like that garage bit in "Grease". Fortunately this didn't happen. (or perhaps it did just minutes after I left)

There are two theories that I can advance that fit my observations:

  1. People now enjoy themselves on bank holidays by making up a big bag of rubbish, getting in their bestest car and then heading down to the dumps.
  2. There is a lot more money in gardening than I had previously suspected.

Shaun the Sheep Rocks

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My Media Centre PC is now settling down nicely. I've stopped using the cable that crashes it and, guess what, it doesn't crash any more. I've just ordered another gig of RAM for it which should give it a bit more room to move around in.

A tip, you can get 10 quid off any order more than 30 quid at Ebuyer at the moment if you sign up to the Google ordering thingy. I've used it twice now, I'll take money from anyone...

Anyhoo, I told the Media PC to get all the showings of Shaun the Sheep 'cos I think it is ace. It is aimed at kids, so it goes down a treat with me. Just simple farmyard antics with the character from the Wallace and Gromit "Close Shave". My present fave is the one with the bees. Catch it if you can.