From the TV listings in today's paper:
10:15 BBC 1 Medium Allison is upset to discover that her new friend Debra is to be the serial killer's next victim....
I suppose it completely ruins plans for her next dinner party.
We had our first University Open Day of the new session today. I did my bit, followed by John. We had a great audience, and, as usual, I took a picture...
Thanks for coming, I hope you found it worthwhile
I told my "Favourite Joke In All The World" again. I think I'm starting to wear it out....
The first couple of weeks of a session are always pretty exhausting. Getting to know a new group of students (who are all a great bunch by the way), bedding in new courses and writing new material does seem to take it out of me a bit. Not to mention trips to Grimsby with a robot dog and trying to finish chapter 7.
This evening I sat in the car wondering what this big round hoop of plastic was doing in front of me. Then I remembered that it was the steering wheel, and it was time to drive home.
Just had a great time at a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) careers fair in Grimsby. Somewhat exhausting, as I was presenting continuously from around 6:00 to 8:10 this evening, but great fun. Of course, Digby the robot dog stole the show as usual...
The audiences were all great and I took a few pictures of them.
Click on the pictures for a larger versions on Flickr.
I don't use spreadsheets very much, but every year we have to produce a demonstrators timetable, and Excel is how we do it. I've got a very clever spreadsheet that lets you enter things and automatically highlights cells for the demonstrators, counts their loading and all sorts. I'm quite proud of it.
It uses a named range, called Times, which has all the timeslots in it. This year we have added modules and moved things around, and now the named range does not reflect the part of the spreadsheet that I want it to.
And nothing in Excel 97 would seem to let me change this.
The help, like always, tells me in mind numbing detail how to do things which are either too simple for words or too complex for me to ever want to use. I have that sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach that there is a very easy way to do this (in fact I even remember doing it once many years ago) but I don't know what it is.
Very frustrating.
So, I turn to you, dear reader. You have already shown that you are highly intelligent just by the kind of blogs you read (i.e. this one). So prove this by letting me know how to do this "simple" thing. First answer that works wins a Mars Bar.
I really must be careful posting when I'm cross. I meant Office 2007 rather than 97. And I must thank Andy (and the enigmatic Me) for providing the answer, which turns out to be as simple as I suspected it might be.
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.....
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.
