There goes another chunk of my life. Because the Adobe updater kicked in during a print this means that it broke the print operation and locked the file in the spool queue of the printer, which meant that I had to uninstall the printer, reboot and then reinstall it again.
Now, who do I send that bill to?
As I get older, I realise that time is becoming more precious to me. The number of hours left to me is not so huge that I can just squander them on wasted effort. Or have them taken from me.
Adobe Reader has just stolen half an hour of my time. All I wanted to do was read a document and then print it. Without being asked it went on line, found some updates, downloaded 30 MBytes of stuff, spent fifteen minutes installing this, rebooted my machine and then spent another five minutes rattling the disk drive.
Net loss to me, half an hour of my time.
Now, the Adobe reader is a program that lets me read documents. That's all. It does not control a heart-lung machine, fly a plane or operate a nuclear reactor. What can be so wrong with it that it requires 30 MBytes (more space than the original Windows 95 installer) to sort out? I know that the program is free, and so I probably can't complain. But this kind of behaviour means that I would be unlikely to pay for it anyway.
And now I've wasted another ten minutes moaning about the 30 minutes I lost. Bah.
I think I'm turning into some kind of media person. Or something. If you get hold of a copy of this month's Windows Vista magazine you will find a picture of me and my photo frame. The frame, an Imate Momento, is actually proving very useful. It uses WIFI to link to the shared photographs and displays them without any faffing about with memory cards and the like.
Confetti
Went to a wedding today. We went to the service and then the reception and then came home. Everything was great, even the weather. Number one wife was going out to the evening party, whilst I stayed at home and nursed the jetlag. Before she went out again I thought I'd print off a few of the photos I'd taken. Bad plan. The process went like this.
Travel is nice, but being home is better. Even with jetlag that makes you fall asleep in the middle of a sent
I spent a big chunk of today telling folks all about the .NET Micro Framework. We had a stand near the Visual Studio booths, so I had the pleasant duty of telling lots of people who had C# and Visual Studio 2005 experience they are now fully qualified embedded developers too. Embedded development is the fiddly business of putting code onto tiny processors.
One example application we have is a C# controlled massage char (which proved very popular as the day wore on) but we also have Micro Framework controlled RSS display sign and also a Z-Wave network interface device that was developed in weeks rather than months thanks to the fact that the company was able to use C#, VS 2005 and all the powerful emulation and debugging support that comes with it.
Once folks cottoned onto the idea they were well keen. Quite a few had experienced the horrors of writing embedded code and really relished the thought of controlling hardware with software again. Particularly as there are no new skills to learn (I'm starting to sound a bit like a salesman now, but what the hey, I like the stuff).
Then it was back to the hotel. I had a quick shower, lay down on the bed for a minute and then woke up four hours later. I love jetlag....
Another satisfied customer
What it is all about
One of my favourite ever jokes was on an old Monty Python record. As I remember it went "And now for a massage from the Swedish prime minister". Followed the sound of heavy slapping. Wonderful stuff.
We haven't got the Swedish prime minister available, but we are giving out free massages at our stand in the TLC Blue area at TechEd 2007. We have a couple of .NET Micro Framework controlled massage chairs which are just the thing to ease away the strains of the day. And you can find out all about how you could be an embedded developer but just not know it yet....
I wandered out to register at the conference. I mutter about my air-con in the room (I call it "Old Faithful" now) but I'm darned glad that it is there, because when you leave the hotel it is like stepping inside a hair dryer. This is not a cooling breeze, it is the output from a blast furnace.
Branded Lamp Post
My hotel
This probably symbolizes something
Why we are here
Guess what it is, and win a prize
My universe for the next few days....
Apparently it is going to be even hotter for the rest of the week. Oh goody.
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.
For more links to good presentation content and some very funny videos you can go here.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Indeed it is, but we got one anyway
York station looking good.
I've just about finished marking now. All the first year exam papers have been passed on to Mike (I'll bet he was pleased to see them) and now I can get on with the rest of my life.
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.
I've found a way to survive marking. It goes like this.
Seems to work a treat.
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).
Back to work today. And more marking.
A journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single step...
I've been marking today. All of it. I started with a big pile of scripts and now I have the same pile, but with numbers scrawled on them. I also have an empty red pen. And I'm not half way through yet.
..and a free picture of the top of a boat.
I was talking to someone today who reckoned that I might have a fault on my blog server. "You know" he said, "There are no updates for ages then a whole bunch appear. Either there is a problem with your hosting or you just wait a while and then put up a load of posts all at once."
Indeed.
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.
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.....
Rob Miles is technology author and educator who spent many years as a lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Hull. He is also a Microsoft Developer Technologies MVP. He is into technology, teaching and photography. He is the author of the World Famous C# Yellow Book and almost as handsome as he thinks he is.
