Did the Scarborough degree ceremony today. Lovely. The weather was a bit brisk, but it never actually rained. I took the bigish camera and the wide angle lens. And had some fun taking photographs.
Fun on the beach
Grass
Graduand's Lunch
Funfair
View from the stage...
..and from the back.
There are a bunch more on my Flickr site.
I took the medium sized camera with the wide angle lens down to City Hall to try and take a picture of the congregation. It sort of came out OK, but I had to turn the speed up to get any kind of picture, and that makes some of the detail a bit noisy. Nevertheless, I'm not too unhappy with the results...
Can you find yourself on here?
...or here?
Degree ceremonies today. Gosh it was hot. And humid. And they'd closed the windows of City Hall. So we all broiled gently. The best bit was the speech by Dr John Sentamu, the present Archbishop of York. He was awarded a richly deserved honorary degree in the second ceremony. In the context of having greatness thrust upon himself, he told a really good story, which I will now steal.
A great king had a beautiful daughter. He was very concerned that only the most worthy man should be allowed to marry her. So he built a large pool outside his palace and filled it full of alligators. Then he let it be known that he would grant his daughter's hand in marriage to the first man to swim across the pool. Many people gathered at the waters edge, but all were scared when they saw what happened when some meat was tossed into the pool and the hungry alligators attacked. Then, suddenly a young man was in the pool, swimming his utmost as the alligators chased after him. With a mighty heave the young man pulled himself out of the water and lay gasping at the feet of the king.
"You have done well" said the king. "You have shown great courage and may now marry my daughter".
"I am most grateful" replied the man "But although your daughter is very beautiful I would prefer you to grant me another wish"
"Very well" said the king, surprised at this "What can I do for you instead?"
The man looked at him and said "I would like you to bring me the man who pushed me in the water, so I can put my hands around his neck..."
Since our microwave blew a fuse on Tuesday I've been morosely pricing up replacements. No fun. Today I thought I'd get some more fuses to replace the ones that blew. I picked up a pack in Wilkinsons and noticed something. They were red. Same colour as the one I put in the microwave plug. And they were rated at three amps. Now, for those unfamiliar with the ways of electricity, three amps will run a TV, a lamp and maybe even a mixer. But not a microwave when it tries to cook. I'd replaced the fuse in the microwave with one which will run the clock but will give up the ghost as soon as we actually try to heat something up.
I popped in a 13 amp version (coloured brown) and everything works fine. I guess this makes me an idiot. But a happy one just right now.
I was supposed to be getting on with some writing today. Unfortunately this meant watching some progress bars for long periods of time while I made some software work, but I did manage to get my room tidied up a bit, which is always nice. I'm hoping that my subconscious has been beavering away on my behalf.....
Went to Reading today to give a talk about the .NET Micro Framework for an Embedded Development day. I've often found that a bunch of academics make around the toughest audience you can get, but these folks were great - even though they showed a marked lack of appreciation for my jokes.....
My demos mostly worked and the tiny tablet behaved herself impeccably. And the trip back on Hull Trains was as smooth as smooth. And I watched "Love and Death", one of the best films ever, on the Smartphone. Wonderful.
I'd taken the camera, but I got the best pictures when I got off the train at Hull after the journey back.
Great to be back
Neat Sky
While I was going through Reading on the bus I saw a sign at Reading Baths that said "Learn to swim here". I thought about going in and asking "What if I want to swim somewhere else?".
But I didn't.
For those at the academic event, I'll have the slides and demos here tomorrow.
The Doncaster folks do excellent work, with students delivering taught projects which are saving their employers literally thousands of pounds. It is amazing how a little bit of the right knowledge applied in the right way can make a huge difference.
According to the radio this morning you are more likely to be involved in an accident if your car is coloured silver or black.
That is, the most popular color and the one that is hardest to see in the dark.
Do these people get paid extra money if their conclusions are extra obvious?
So I got these "Alcatraz Rules and Regulations" playing cards. Each of the 54 cards contains a "Rule from America's Most Notorious Prison". I was hoping for something along the lines of "Transgressors who spit in public shall be hanged by the giblets from the North Tower until sorrye" kind of thing. So, what did I get:
Six of Spades : "You are required to work at whatever you are told to do"
Nine of Hearts: "At the wake up bell in the morning you must get out of bed and put on your clothes"
Queen of Diamonds: "You are not allowed to have money of any kind in your possession while in this institution"
Actually, it sounds remarkably like my life.....
The university had an Open Day today. I shot back from town and then turned up suited and booted to do the talk. Thanks for being a good audience people.
Could have used a slightly wider angle lens.....
We will get C# books out to everyone as soon as we get another batch printed up. And we will be doing the draw for the PSP on Monday.
Anyone who was there but didn't get their name and address to us, all you have to do is send me an email with the name of the fish the Dutch audience didn't know, and we'll send you a book and enter you in the draw.
I've just found out that the university will be hosting classes for local schools which have been flooded. A local primary school, and a secondary one, will be sending teachers and kids over to make use of the Wilberforce building for lessons. I think this is an excellent idea, maybe the kids will get a taste for university life and come back in a few years as students.
They've got the Tomb Raider film on BBC 3 at the moment. It has got my favourite line of all time in it, spoken by the hyper intelligent Lara:
"It's from my Father. He must have written it before he died..."
When I got out of the shower this morning I found that I was being watched by a bird. Well, with a body like mine I suppose I should expect this to happen every now and then.
Actually, it was not quite like that. The bird was sitting on the bathroom window sill
I don't think she saw much
When I left for work the bird was still there.
I think that particular part of the house has the attraction of the updraft from the boiler flue, which is probably a good way to warm up (it was slightly chilly first thing).
Bonus flower pic
I love it when people you admire turn out to be good folks. I've mentioned "The Pitchers" comic strip before. This is a wonderful take on Hollywoodland from the point of view of a couple of aspiring script writers by a pair of talented artists called Berger and Wyse (they also did the title sequence from the BBC TV show "Hustle" - which should have won an award). With a bit of luck they might one day they do a book of the Pitcher strips. I'd buy it on day one.
Anyhoo, last week they mentioned a "Trip Hazard" character, a clear infringement of my intellectual property rights since I've been not writing new Trip Hazard P.I. episodes for ages. They did it again this week.
So I emailed them to tell them they would shortly be hearing from my lawyers. They shot straight back with this link which proves they had the name first, and told me that now I would be hearing from their lawyers. I hope they were joking. I was. Honest.
The Word
Got a parcel today. Not from the Post Office, they are on strike, but from DHL. In it were ten copies of my book. Amazing. I daren't read it, as I'm scared that the first thing I'll see will be a huge glaring mistake, but it is very nice to actually see printed pages wot I wrote. There is even a picture of me on the back.
You can get the book from Amazon in the UK here. And in the 'states from here.
My laptop tried to kill itself again today. It turned itself on in the bag. I got to it just as the batteries were giving out after spending around an hour trying to set fire to my house. The bag and the laptop were really hot. I'd like to think that it would actually notice when it was catching fire, and shut down or do something sensible, but I'm not convinced. Perhaps it makes a WIFI connection to the fire-brigade or something.
This means I'm going to have to update the BIOS for one which is a bit less melty. Wish me luck.
I've done the BIOS upgrade and it's definitely made a difference. The machine won't disconnect from the docking station now.....
My newspaper is presently doing a list of "1,000 Films to See Before You Die". I've got cunning plan which will enable me to live forever. I'm only going to watch 999 of them.
Of course this raises the prospect of an intriguing murder case:
"And so I put it to the jury that the defendant showed my client 'Barbette's Feast' with the sole intention of murder most foul...."
Actually, I'm taking no chances, I'm not going to watch many of them at all. And since it doesn't include Napoleon Dynamite I'm wondering if it is the kind of list that I should have anything to do with anyway.
The funny thing is (ho ho) that we had planned to take today and tomorrow as holiday. We were going to drive out somewhere nice and eat sandwiches whilst sitting on a piece of cloth on the ground. But mother nature had other plans.
It is pretty much impossible to drive out of Hull at the moment. And very hard to get back again. So we stayed at home and did some tidying up. I went through my wardrobe in search of space to hang all these free shirts I keep picking up at conferences. I'm always very surprised by the lack of taste that I've shown in the past with respect to clothes. Things that seemed perfectly sensible at the time of purchase are now, with the benefit of my 20x20 fashion hindsight, quite beyond the pale. Still, at least the new stuff looks good on me........
It rained today. That is pretty much all it did. Rained. We heard the rain over our meetings, and the view out of the window into the car park was not encouraging. After lunch, meetings over, I decided to go home early. This turned out to be a good call. On the way to the car park the water was a good six inches deep, easily covering my shoes and forcing me to drive home with bare feet. And what a drive. Getting of the campus was not good, with the road out of the university looking more like a river. Many of the streets were impassible, but fortunately myself and number one wife got back home safely.
This is the worst I've ever seen. Many people in Hull have been flooded out. Buildings on the university campus have basements full of water. The folks across the road had what looked like a stream running down the side of their house. I've not taken any pictures, but you can see loads here.
Who would have thought it, eh?
Fancied a bar of chocolate this afternoon. But it was not to be.
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.
