Bogey Wonderland

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I've seem to have caught this kind of cold thing which is not very pleasant. I've not got a runny nose as such, but for some reason bogey production seems to have gone into overdrive. That, or I've been subjected to some ancient gypsy curse and the bogey man is coming every night with a hod (or whatever he carries them in) full of bogeys and emptying them into my head.

It's funny because I don't remember offending any ancient gypsies recently. It has done wonders for tissue sales in our area though.

I want to be a Dragon

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I've decided what to be should I ever be allowed my time again on this earth. I want to be a dragon on "Dragon's Den".

Until recently I wanted to be a banker, in that no matter how stupid, greedy or idiotic I was my business was "too big to fail" and therefore my job (and large bonuses) would be secure for ever. But it didn't really give the opportunities for creative nastiness and acclaim that being a dragon on Dragon's Den seems to offer.

If you've not seen the program the format is that hapless entrepreneurs are given a chance to pitch their ideas in front of a bunch of rich people (the dragons) who can either enjoy themselves by mercilessly insulting everything in sight or enjoy themselves by backing the idea with some of their (to them) small change and walking away with a substantial profit if things work out.

I used to quite like the program, in that it seemed to me that it did provide a way that genuinely innovative people could get backing for ideas that otherwise might not see the light of day. But that was before it became big television. One of the laws of physics is that you can't measure something without affecting it in some way. TV shows are like that. Once they become popular they become an end in themselves and their original starting point becomes lost in the mist of ratings.

Nowadays the dragons have figured out that anything on the program has the benefit of a five minute prime time advertisement and is therefore worth backing on that basis. Furthermore, the pitchers have also figured out that appearing on the program (regardless of whether or not you actually make anything worthy) gives you a change to get on TV. Last week the only two ideas that got backing were a fairly indifferent rock band and a company which will provide you with a person dressed as a tree for a large fee. And these days only one of the dragons actually seems to be involved in making anything. The others are involved in things like "retail", "services" and "investment".

This week a fashion designer took full advantage of the platform to promote her (to me) sub-Primark dresses and of course one of the dragons jumped in to back her because even if only a few percent of viewers go for the outfits they are on to a winner. And the "as seen on TV Dragon's Den" label will go a long way. And of course they all  had a bit of fun raining on the parades of other's hopes and dreams and competing with themselves for the most offensive bon-mots that they could heap on the hapless punters.

I quite like the idea of being rich, appearing on TV as some kind of demi-god and being given the chance to be as offensive as I like in front of the cameras. So sign me up.

Power Mad

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Well, I've gone from no power to two power, thanks to the combined magic of Applecare support and ebay. When my notebook PSU failed on Monday it occurred to me that I didn't want to be in this position again (number one son might not be around to save my bacon next time) and so after I rang in the fault I went onto the ebay and chased down a spare. And it arrived today. Along with the one from Apple.

Of course the next thing to break will be the Macbook itself.....

I hate it when everything works

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When everything seems to just work it usually means that the universe is just toying with you, and lining you up for some kind of unpleasantness. My iPhone 3G is still lovely, but a bit less lovely now that I have discovered that I can't get my university Exchange account to work over the O2 3G network.  I'm kind of impressed that that the system can actually manage to tell the difference between the two different network connections, but this is not a good kind of impressed since it means my main reason for having the thing is now not there. As I write this the phone is in the middle of a complete reset (when they say "It may take a couple of hours" they seem to be right on the money) as a prelude to seeing if I can make it work by re-activating it. This is bound to be the thing they would tell me to do if I rang up, so I'm getting my retaliation in early.

And the power supply for the Macbook has just gone "pop" and eaten a couple of fuses, which means half an hour on the phone to the Apple support guy (who was actually very helpful) and the prospect of a replacement one in the post at some time in the future. In the meantime I hope I get this typed and sent before the battery gives out. And of course I need the laptop to re-enable the phone.....

I've gone from everything apparently working at 09:00 am this morning to lots of things broken at 3:00 pm. Wah.

Mending Headphones with McDonald's Straws

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I got some Ultimate Ears headphones a while back. They sound wonderful. However, they have a little problem which has been causing me grief recently. They use an "in ear" design, with a tight fitting plug which goes inside your ear so that all the sound comes your way. Nothing wrong with that, until the plug bit starts to come off and stay in your ear when you try to remove the phones. I think this is caused by the rubber stretching slightly and becoming slack on the fitting. Whatever causes it, I don't like it as it then leaves me picking bits out of my ear canal, which doesn't look very cool.

Anyhoo, I've fixed the problem by the use of some drinking straws from McDonalds. I've put them around the outside of the rubber sleeve that goes over the headphone bit. This stops the sleeve from stretching quite so far, and makes it fit really tightly. I don't think it is the kind of thing you can get the Nobel prize for, but it works for me.

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Earpiece with straw power

Oh, and while we are in a McDonalds mood, don't the drink lids look a lot like faces?

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Scary face or coffee cup cover? You decide.

Home, with Added Jetlag

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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.

Marking Hell

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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.....

Freezing to Death

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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.

Is Amazon Getting Less Useful?

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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.

Sign of the Times

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These "lucky" people were at my XNA talk today.

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..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.

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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.

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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.....

A Night for the Geeks

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Geek night was a blast.

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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.

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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.....

Micro Framework at DevDays 2008

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So today it is time for another chapter in my jetsetting life...

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The view from the plane was nice.

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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.....

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I always take the pictures at the start, while the audience is still smiling. And in the room....

Nearly Perfect

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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.

Clean Machine

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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.