today it was the turn of the post grads to have their party. We had another, eerily similar quiz and more games. Great fun.
The winners
Second place
And finally third place.
We had all kinds of fun with the toys again, and everyone went away happy.
Book now for next year.....
I had all kinds of plans for today. I was going to record my lectures using Camtasia and post them on our intranet for an adoring public. Unfortunately fate had other plans.
Even after testing it still turns out that things can break. And then some. Vista shut down the tablet. Three times. Even though I was in the middle of a presentation. Of course, my plugging in the tablet power supply and neglecting to turn it on may have had something to do with this. My remote mouse failed to control Powerpoint, even though it worked with everything else. The presentation recordings were interrupted and out of sync. And to make matters even worse, they had my voice on them. Not good.
I'm going to try again, of course, but I think this serves as a lesson to us all that even if you try to do everything right, it can still all go wrong.
Today we had our first practical session. As part of the work I thought it might be a larf to ask the class to email me with the answer to a simple debugging question. This is the first ever lab for these folks, and so I thought not many would get in touch. I offered a prize of a Mars bar for the first correct answer.
Lots of people like Mars bars it seems. Loads of responses. I've just spent around an hour going through and sending "Right but too late" messages.
I'm wondering about getting our labs sponsored by Mars...
Qn: "What is the combined age of the "Chuckle Brothers"?
Ans: - you'd know if you'd been at our First Year party...
We had a quiz, and Guitar Hero, and a PS3, and Wii Tennis, and 8 player Halo 3, and free drinks and food, and, and, and.....
And it was good.
Many thanks to Warren for bankrolling the operation and Adam, Simon, Dan, Zoe, Sam, Helen, Joan and Amanda for helping make things go with a swing (and apologies if I've missed anyone out). I took a camera (some of our students have got some amazing cameras - we must sort out a Flickr group for pictures) and took some happy snaps.
Full Swing
What half the room does when you shout "smile"
What the other half does..
These folks came first in the Quiz
These came second
And these won the, er, "special" prize
Big riffs. Sam found this amazing disco sound system that we ran Guitar Hero through. And dig those groovy lights on the pillars...
On the left we have Wii Tenis and PS3 Motorstorm, in the middle we have Guitar Hero and on the right, for your pleasure, we have 8 player Halo 3.
It was a great night. Hopefully more (and perhaps less grainy) pictures will surface. I'll put them on Flickr if they do..
We've been expecting you....
After last night's queuing to get hold of a Legendary Halo 3 pack for number one son (sorted, and what huge box) I set up a 360 on our big plasma screen for a select gathering to have a play. It looks good. Very good. I've not played myself yet, and I had loads of work planned for this evening but......
As part of my drive towards greater sartorial elegance I was pleased to discover that "The Only Shop Where Rob Can Buy Clothes That Fit"(tm) was having a "three for two" deal on shirts at their new web site.
I was very proud of the way that I actually went Internet clothes shopping with a spring in my digital step, as it were, and ordered up three (including a rather racy one with red stripes).
I told number one wife about my cleverness at teatime.
"I hope they are not all cotton" she said. "If they are, they'll be swines to iron, and I'll make you do it".
Hmm. Oh well. They arrive in a couple of days. Here's hoping for a bit of polyester goodness..
In keeping with the much anticipated launch of Halo 3 real soon, tonight I saw a house with "Master Chief" windows.
This is an original, completely unretouched picture. And I've got the RAW file from the camera to prove it. Spooky eh?
Oh, and I've just discovered that Microsoft have decided not to release a version of the game where the Master Chief joins the navy. It was going to be called "Halo Sailor".
I was in Waterstones yesterday buying a couple of books. When I paid for them the person at the till asked me if I had a Waterstones "Loyalty Card". I said no and paid up. As I left the shop I began to worry about this.
Was it disloyal not to get a loyalty card? When you get one, do you have to swear an oath? If you get one of the cards and then buy a book from Amazon, do they mind? Can you get stripped of your card for such transgressions? Do they have loyalty police?
I think I had a near escape there...
I really like this time of year. I like it when the nights get that bit longer and there is a bit of a chill in the air. I've been wondering about why I like September so much, and I reckon that I've figured it out.
The students come back on Monday, including a whole new bunch of First Years. It means I'll be knee deep in lectures, labs and tutorials. Great stuff.
If you are reading this and coming to Hull for the first time as an undergraduate it will be nice to see you, and make sure that you come along to the welcome do on Thursday evening . We are going to have big screen Wii Tennis and Guitar Hero, along with a PS3 and other bits and bobs, free food, beer tokens and a silly quiz with impossible questions. And a prize (which I really must sort out).
If you have any real stinkers of questions you'd like to inflict on hapless first years and masters students, feel free to send them through and I'll give you a namecheck if I actually use your question.....
Well, I got my parcel, and it contained just what I wanted, another gadget. I'll let you know what I think of it when I've got around to playing with it properly.
Oh, and I've had this idea for a film. It is about a young man who is injured in a freak bowling accident which leaves him with one leg shorter than the other. Fortunately, the pretty young assistant at the bowling alley finds his leaning gait rather attractive, and in the interval between the accident and him getting pioneering surgery to level off his walk they fall in love and get married. I'm going to call the film "While you were sloping".
Thank you. And good night.
Some time ago I mentioned WebGuide. This is a wonderful tool for Windows Media Centre that lets you share your media all round the house, and indeed the world.
It seems that somebody in Redmond reads my blog (Hi, Bill!) because Microsoft have recently hired Doug Berret, the man who wrote the program, and will be making it part of future versions of Media Centre. This is great news, except for the fact that I bought mine (for the princely sum of ten pounds).
Then again, I did earn some money writing about it for Windows Vista magazine, so I guess we are about square on this.
My media PC is well past half way to paying for itself at the moment. Earlier this year we realised that the only bit of Sky+ that we actually used was the "record all EastEnders episodes" facility for number one wife. So we dumped it and got a Media Center PC which does the same thing and also lets me make DVDs of Shaun the Sheep, at a saving of 36 pounds a month.
When I was 11 my parents bought me a new bike. This was a big thing to me. We went into Halfords in Lincoln to order it. It was a BSA Bermuda in red and blue and it had white wall tyres and a Sturmey-Archer three speed. It cost all of eighteen pounds. (I sold it some years later, also for 18 pounds and bought a Solarvox stereo amplifier,but that is another story). Anyhoo, I got so excited that I made myself ill waiting for it to turn up. When the great day came I got up from my self inflicted sickbed and rode it around outside in my pyjamas.
I've always been like this with stuff arriving. Today I was all excited about a delivery that the UPS website had confidently announced would occur today. I worked from home specially to receive this magical package. Well, the delivery occurred today all right. But not at my house. Imagine my surprise and delight when the tracking website informed me that an attempt had been made to deliver the parcel to my home, where I was sitting waiting, and that apparently I wasn't in. I checked the mirror to make sure it was me, looked outside at the house number to make sure I was in the right place, and then rang UPS.
They have this clever voice response thing where you read our your tracking number and it tells you what you already know, without giving an obvious way to talk to a person. So I just said "chicken chicken chicken" instead of any numbers and after a while it put me through to a human who has hopefully sorted it out.
Although I'll believe it when I see it.
Today was a nice day. And we had a birthday to celebrate. So it was off to Hornsea Mere for a baked potato. And cheese.
It was very windy. But there were a few brave folk out in yachts
Then we went onto the front for donuts (forget your Crispy Cremes, these are the real deal - and six for a pound). And of course amusements....
Winning big at penny falls (you can actually see the pennies falling)
One of my ambitions, which looks like it might end up being thwarted by big city developers, is to visit Coney Island in New York. Hornsea is a bit like this I think with some amazing attractions. Including the "New Super Palmist".
The machine went up and down my hand and then printed out a very accurate assessment of my character....
I think that pretty much sums me up.
If you live in Hull you really should go to Hornsea.
For some time we've been having phone problems. It seems that calls weren't being recorded, messages weren't getting through etc etc. So today I bought some new technology to try and fix the problem. Rang the home number to test it.....
"What is the mass of Jupiter?"
Strange. Rang off and tried again.....
"What is the population of China?"
Checked the box. Turns out we had bought a question machine by mistake.
I love it when things just work. Yesterday I took the tiny tablet PC to a meeting where we spent a couple of hours discussing reports. I opened them all on the tiny tablet in Office 2007, added ink annotations and then when I got back to my office Groove just synchronised them back onto the main machine, where I updated the text, cleaned off all the ink and sent out the updated version in about ten minutes.
I did most of this without thinking, and it just worked. Of course I could have taken a notebook and pencil along instead and done pretty much the same I suppose, but it wouldn't have been half as much fun.....
We've just got the latest batch of C# books back. We get literally hundreds printed each year. One batch gets given to our new First Year students (the book is the basis of our programming course) and the rest we give out to people who come to see us on admissions days and anybody else who asks for one.
Each time we get them printed we change the colour of the cover. A couple of years ago it was green, last year it was yellow. Someone suggested that lilac would be a nice colour this year, and so that is what we went for. The books look a bit pink. I still think they are lilac, but opinions differ on this.
Actually, I'm not that good where colour is concerned. I bought a bright red watch that I didn't think was a bit girly (I have this thing about watches that I'm getting slightly worried about. Nothing expensive, but I must have around 20 or so now.) Whilst the assistant was taking my money she rather spoiled things by offering to enclose a special gift receipt in the box "In case she wants to take it back".
Somehow, after that, it just doesn't feel the same to wear it.
We ordered a new mattress on Saturday. The springs in the old one are starting to poke through the cover and it makes a noise like a bag of spanners being thrown downstairs when you roll over in the night.
It arrives tomorrow. We've gone for one with a "memory foam" layer. The first thing I'm going to do is ask it "Who won the Cup Final in 1976?".
If they ever need a way to boost my blood pressure all they have to do is give me some software to play with. We've been using the Navicore sat-nav in the Nokia 770 quite successfully for the last week. I like it because it is mostly correct, only crashes every now and then, can find most places and the lady's voice is wonderful. She just sounds so perky all the time, even when asking you to turn right across three lanes of busy traffic. And sometimes she says "Tada!" when you arrive at the destination. Anyhoo, I thought I'd install the upgrades, because there are supposed to be some even better voices there. And the new version might be able to locate Hereford.
The Navicore upgrade experience is kind of strange. You run a program which opens a browser window which does things up until the point where IE crashes and you lose the lot. Then you find the program doesn't work any more. So you do it all again and it tells you that the software is upgraded and ready to go. Which of course it isn't. Then you re-install from the DVD and try again. Third time you notice the message about re-installing the upgrade on the device once you've installed it (if you see what I mean). So you do the upgrade again, re-install it, and then find it still doesn't work. So you email customer support and put the original back on from the DVD. By now you are viewing everything through a red mist and figure that it is probably time to go off and do something else.....
And so I am back home. I love the way that as you get closer to Hull the roads get that bit quieter, and the traffic reports of jams around the rest of the country have less and less meaning. And now I have my nice fast broadband connection (rather than climbing a hill, holding the phone above my head and waiting for a single bar of signal to appear).
But the holiday was fun though. I bought a Ferrari for five pounds. It turned out to only have three wheels, but I have plans to stick the missing one back on. I saw some stunning art, had a conversation with a horse (although it was a bit one-sided) and met up with the oracle pig again. Who turns out to be called Esmerelda. I also read some exciting books, one even had pictures in. Of which more later.
Oh, and I took the camera.
What a pity that mobile tower isn't my carrier.....
Took number one daughter to London today, where she is going to continue her studies. We had a car which was pretty much full of stuff. Parking was a bit restricted, so I stopped the car on someone's garden path and we executed what can only be described as a "reverse burglary", where the contents of the car were transferred into the flat at record speed.
Then, after a trip to Tesco and an impromptu TV purchase it was back to Hull.
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.
