I had this idea for when you go on holiday. You give the neighbours an empty cage with the line "Please look after our hamster, he's asleep at the moment and he's great fun. But he does tend to escape if you're not careful....."
We thought we were coming home to chill out in "Cool Britannia". How wrong we were. England is very hot and, allowing for the fact that nobody here has aircon, less comfortable than Florida. Special thanks must go to Manchester Airport for taking over an hour to serve up our luggage, and Airparks Gold, for only having one working bus ("Really funny story" said the man, "The gearbox broke on one, and the other burst a water pipe...") and taking an extra hour to get us to our car.
Today we had our final swim in the hotel pool before sitting in a metal tube for 8 hours. I much preferred the swimming.
Today I finished marking the exam scripts (bad) and starting taking a look at final year projects (good). I've seen some amazing ones. From a student using cellular automata to make ambient music all the way through to flying around the solar system and looking at the planets.
Wonderful stuff.
Today (in fact this week) I have been mostly marking. Got dragged in to invigilate a Japanese examination this morning. I was supposed to just be the reserve, but someone must have failed to turn up (what a surprise) and so it was off to stand over a whole bunch of students writing something their Japanese exam. Which I really couldn't understand at all. Normally I have a look at the exam and think about answering a few questions and putting the answer book in at the end and seeing what happens. With this paper I don't have a chance.
What surprised me was the number of Japanese students there.....
Yesterday was nice in Hull (particularly pleasing as it was horrible in the south of England). But today we seem to have got a real blast of cold air from somewhere. It really is quite brisk. And after spending a while yesterday watering all the plants in the garden (not that I put them there) I was a bit cross to wake up after a downpour and find the whole place freezing.
Oh well, at least I'm at work in the bad weather.
I've bought a new toy. It is a Panasonic HD camcorder that records direct to HDSD memory cards. And it is lovely. Quality is amazing, and because I got the less than newest model (i.e. one that is six months old) the price wasn't too painful either.
I went on to Amazon to price up some memory cards and also a reader (high density cards use an interface that my old card reader doesn't like.
I found this. It looks like a real bargain. Until you find that the price does not include shipping (which is rather high at 4 quid, and even more if it goes for the overnight option - which is what the item seems to default to). Closer inspection reveals that it is, of course, not sold by Amazon themselves, but by a "partner".
I've noticed this more and more on Amazon. I bought a CD from a partner which turned out to be a different disk. Weasel words in the description told me that rather than being the album I thought I was buying it was instead a "special edition" (i.e. knockoff copy) of one of the singles from it. I never got my money back there, and I'm not prepared to risk it on this memory card reader either.
I expect a certain amount of rough and tumble when I buy from ebay, that is part of its charm. But when I go to Amazon I'm looking for quality because I equate it with a shop. I think they are going to be careful if they are not going to be tarnished by the sharp practice of the people they let onto their site. I must admit if there was a "don't show me partner offers" setting for my Amazon account I'd use it right away.
These "lucky" people were at my XNA talk today.
..and here is the rest of the room
Another smashing audience, thank you for laughing in all the right places..
I'll put all the content up here tomorrow.
Then it was off to do book signing. The man who runs the bookshop had, perhaps somewhat optimistically, got 100 copies of my book in to sell.
I ended up selling 10, which was nice. Then I went around and took a look at what the students here are doing with XNA.
The answer is lots, and very well. I saw some Imagine Cup entries and some very impressive work. Well done folks. And now I'm zooming of to catch a plane home for fish and chips.....
Geek night was a blast.
I've always wanted to see my name in lights. This is the project of the team presenting before me, who showed what happens when you marry dance floor displays with Wii remotes. They could draw on it, play games and, as you can see above, write silly messages.
The audience. Sorry it is a bit blurred, but the house light were off at this point..
The talk was fantastic, even the 8 player button bash game went well, although the players on controller one did suffer a bit when someone reset the counter....
I'm doing it all again tomorrow. And a book signing.....
So today it is time for another chapter in my jetsetting life...
The view from the plane was nice.
They had this special machine for installing tall presenters..
The talk was on the .NET Micro Framework, which is something I really enjoy taking about. The audience were great, and put up with my jokes, which is nice. I got to know them so well that I told them about "My Awful Experience in Schipol Airport a Toilet" this morning.....
I always take the pictures at the start, while the audience is still smiling. And in the room....
Tomorrow is DevDays in Amsterdam. I'm just packing and charging gadgets for the trip. I'm giving three talks, including one at Geek Night. I made a spectacularly embarrassing video for the event where I pretended to confuse the name with Greek Night. Fortunately I can't seem to find it on the site.....
I was messing around with some software to see if I can use webcam as a video viewer of the screen of a Zune. It doesn't work. (I can't focus close enough). But you do get amazing pictures when you leave the webcam lying on the desk.
I've got the Mac just about how I want it. Everything works, I've got four versions of Visual Studio on it and most of the data that I need. Except for one thing.
The icon for iTunes is broken. It just displays the standard folder one, rather than the proper picture. I've rebuilt the icon cache and spent much too long (i.e. more than five minutes) trying to fix it.
Oh well, according to some religions anything perfect is an offence to God. So I guess that makes my machine as perfect is it could be.
If you ever seen the film Amélie you'll know how good it is. If you haven't, then I envy you, because you get to have the experience of seeing it the first time. One of the best films ever. Ever.
Anyhoo, it has a scene at the start where it describes how her father likes to pass the time by emptying out his toolbox, cleaning it and then putting everything back in the right place. It captures perfectly the idea of someone who likes to have one small part of his life completely under his control, and which he can make how he wants it. I think I'm a bit the same with my PC.
Today, for a number of reasons, I wiped my MacBook clean and restored everything from scratch. I've done a lot of work too, I've read all the final year project reports that I'm marking and I've also made a start on tidying my office. You can get a lot done when your computer is broken...
I've been meaning to re-install Vista for a while, there is a broken install of an old XNA version which is stopping it working with the Zune and it doesn't pick up my camera properly. It also has some software on it which I'd be happier without, and I wanted to re-partition the hard drive to give more space to Vista and less to OS X. Nothing wrong with the Mac operating system, it is just that Vista does all the things I need to do, and I know how to make it do them. I like using the Mac, and GarageBand is a program I'd love to spend more quality time with, but I don't think I need to give it as much disk space as I did.
So, after taking complete backups on four different disk drives I wiped the Vista partition and tried to use the Mac BootCamp program to create a larger one.
And there the fun started. The first time BootCamp didn't work, and told me that it couldn't move the partitions because some files were fixed. The second time it tried it crashed the machine, leaving the disk file structure a bit awry. I fixed that, tried it for a third time and had the same problem. So, I wiped OS X and did a complete install of that, so that I could then put Vista on afterwards.
Operating installation is nowhere near as fraught as it used to be, both OS X and Vista loaded themselves onto the machine with a minimum of fuss. There were occasional moments of high drama, updating the firmware in the Mac was a bit scary, as was the part where I found out Apple was updating one part of the system whilst Microsoft was twiddling with another at the same time, which could have gone badly, but all in all it was just a case of looking up from what I was reading and clicking OK every now and then.
By the end of the day I'm about back to where I stared operating system wise, now all I have to do is put the applications and my document files back into place.
Went to Asda today to do the shopping.
I could have bought a magazine for a fiver. Or one of these.... Guess which I got?
It is ace, you can steer it round the floor and rapid fire off 12 missiles. If only we had a cat...
I don't think it was the Wii fit. In fact I'm fairly sure that it wasn't. However, the bottom line is that at the moment my neck doesn't work properly. I'm moving a bit like a Cyberman, turning my whole body to face people rather than just rotating the head part. Looking slightly to the right is fine, looking more hurts like heck. It seems to be easing a bit, but I've been playing GTA 4 rather than exercising.
Just in case.
Good weather on an English Bank Holiday? Shurely shome misthtake. We went to Hornsea for the afternoon.
Baby geese
Hornsea mere looking good
Even the sea front looks good today. Although that water does look a bit brown...
I love stalls like these.
This is Hornsea Sunday (and Bank Holiday) market. Amazing place, with a water feature and a place you can buy old photos that might have you in it. I checked, but there were none of me.
Today saw us up at the crack of dawn and haring down the motorway to Milton Keynes to take part in another Collectormaina. Well, at least it is a trip out.
So, who is this chap?
..or this lass?
The "throng"
I don't think this is a family portrait as such....
Any nightclub owners out there?
A Lego shop opposite an Apple shop. Seems somehow appropriate.
The Milton Keynes Tree. And some concrete cows.
Downstairs I have a copy of GTA4. Nico has been out on a date, taken my cousin bowling and killed a few times ("But they were all bad people"). And today, in my so called leisure time, I've spent a few hours writing C#. And having at least as much fun as I did with the video game.
Perhaps it is a control thing. When I'm writing code I not only have complete knowledge of what I'm doing, but I also created the thing I'm working within. I don't know, I'll leave the finer points of character analysis to those who already think I'm a bit strange, and move on.
Anyhoo, the code is coming along nicely. I'm finishing off (or at least moving on a bit) a thing I started ages ago. It uses a Tablet PC to help you mark class work. You fill in a form with comments, grades and suggestions and the program stores all this (including ink) in an XML file. You can then use this to generate a custom web page or set of report images you can send to the students. I've got all the storage and editing story sorted and I'm just finishing off the reporting.
When I've got the system working I'll post it for anyone to play with.
In the meantime I'm having a bunch of fun making it.
Got a code in the node. I feel kind of bad because I've spent the last couple of days in the labs looking at student work and presumably breathing germs on everyone who has shown me their software. Oh well. According to a study (always the prelude to some enormous whopper or other) young folk today fall prey to all kinds of nasties because they aren't exposed to enough things to challenge their immune system as they grow up. So now I see my sneezing as a kind of social service.
Anyhoo, I really enjoyed the marking. The general standard was excellent. Students could either make a bank application or a game, and the split was around 50:50 over the cohort. I saw some "production quality" banks, with excellent code and some highly playable games.
Good work folks, and I hope I haven't made you too ill.
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.
