Lofty Ambitions

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I’m tidying up our loft at the moment. This turns out to be hard work. For the last fifteen years I’ve been putting things up there “In case I might need them some day”. This includes cardboard boxes, spare lengths of carpet, old curtains, floppy disk boxes and 10 year old computer magazines. Lots and lots of them. For the last month I’ve been making numerous trips to the tip each weekend. The chaps there now address me by my first name and I think I’m getting an invite to their next staff party. Although they seem curiously uninterested in what I’m throwing out.

I made another trip to the tip today and I now have half of the half of half of the loft clear. Of course, as soon as it is clear I’ll fill it up again, but this has got to count as progress in some way or other.

If it’s Thursday it must be Doncaster

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After a journey north yesterday, today I headed south to Doncaster College . We were having the exam board for the Integrated Technology degree that is taught at Doncaster and validated by Hull.

We saw some very good work. At tip. If you live in Doncaster and want to do one of the best Integrated Technology degrees in the country, you have a wonderful place just on your doorstep. And you can do them part time, some of the best students were actually doing degree level project work as part of their jobs.

Ho for Northumbria

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I’m now officially an External Examiner. I’ve even been to an exam board meeting and said stuff. An external examiner does just what it says on the tin (although we don’t actually arrive in a tin). We go into other institutions and make sure that what they are doing is OK. We look at coursework and exams, check the marking and make sure that the students are being treated correctly. At Hull we have several external examiners, one for each of our courses, and I’ve watched them in action, and worked with them over the years.

Northumbria University invited me to be the external on their Games courses and I went over there today to take part in their exam board. I decided to drive over there, and hired a car for the trip. The car that turned up was a lot posher than I expected, a huge VW Passat. It even had electrically heated seats. I found this out when I turned them on by mistake, that was a genuinely scary experience.

The drive up to Newcastle was very smooth though. I reckon that whatever else you say about the human race, we have got very good at making cars. This might turn out to be our undoing of course, but it did make the journey very comfortable.

The exam meeting was fine. I never thought I’d say that, but it turns out that other people’s exam board meetings are much more interesting than your own. It is always nice to see a room full of professionals working hard to make sure that they do right by the students, and that is exactly what I saw. Well done folks, and I’m looking forward to seeing you all again.

Then it was into the shiny car and back home.

Summer Bash

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Time for another bash. We had a good turnout, even though it was the last but one day of the session and lots of folks had headed home for free food and drink.

We had our first Unreal Tournament Bot programming event at a bash, which was fun although next time I’ll hopefully have a bot that does something more than stand in the corner.

I took the big camera, and got some happy snaps. There are more on Flkickr, tagged with 2009Hullsummerbash.

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Subtle product placement?

 

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A useful prize for a change?

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Rock Band gets some hammer (that mysterious black blob at the left side of the picture is my camera case…)

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Adam looks superior, as well he might…

Rubbish Tip Etiquette

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Made another trip to the tip today. I’m clearing out the loft so that I can put some different junk up there. I’m also adding some flooring, so that I won’t put my foot through the ceiling again. I now know the fundamental principle of installing loft floor panels:

Do not screw the first panel down tightly because then you can’t get any of the others to fit into it.

It has actually been great fun. Even the trips to the tip have been interesting. I’ve been worried that recently the  kind of people you meet at the tip has been declining. Last time I even saw a car there that was the same age as mine. However, this time things were back to normal. Folks were arriving in brand new Audis and Saab convertibles to drop off their stuff. I was sitting in the queue pondering on the etiquette of the tip. Cars look very similar these days, and I wondered what would happen if you accidently went back to the wrong car and started emptying it by mistake. Would the owner get cross  because you are messing with their rubbish?

I finally came to the conclusion that it is OK to empty somebody else’s car, as long as you don’t put the stuff into yours.

Broken Bot Server

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The plan was to add Unreal Bot programming to our Summer Bash. This is a great way to use your C# smarts to control a player in an Unreal Tournament game and try your hand at writing game playing AI.

Unfortunately, fate had heard me thinking this, and so the server promptly broke. It is an aging Dell machine that sits in the corner of my office quietly chuntering to itself. I took it’s lid off, blew out the dust, re-seated the RAM and it still didn’t work. So I had a word with Adam, who came up with a pair of probably compatible memory SIMMs that I put in and it seems to work now, which is nice. It has twice as much memory as it used to have, and so it fair whizzes along now.

I then spent an entire lunch hour writing a Bot that gets itself stuck in corners.

Towards a Healthier Me

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I’ve been trying to use Wii Fit to get myself slightly fitter. I can now use it upstairs, out of sight of everyone, and means I tend to use it more than I did before. It was rather disheartening to get on the machine and have it tell me I hadn’t visited for 300 or so days, but at least my weight had only changed by 4 pounds in that time.

Although it hadn’t gone down.

Anyhoo, I’m now trying to establish a routine which involves a quick 15 minutes or so each day, and I’m getting quite good at the step game. I want to complete the entire thing on perfect, just to see what the program does if you do that.

True Story

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Whilst scanning the receipt for my MacBook (which I needed to do to validate the purchase date and get the broken battery replaced) the battery in my MacBook Pro failed.

Point the Camera at the Screen

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I’m getting ready for my DevDays session later this week. I’m demonstrating some .NET Micro Framework devices that are a bit small, and so I thought I’d use a webcam to show close-ups of the toys. I was testing it just now and of course I pointed it at the screen.

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Cool eh?

If you are going to DevDays then feel free to come along. The Geek Night should be great fun.

Windows 7 is Speeding Me Up

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Aside from a few niggles with Nero, I must admit that Windows 7 is speeding me up. Moving around windows and getting things done is faster with the new system, and the generally quicker performance (apart from strange delays at certain times, for example importing Raw images into Photoshop) is much appreciated.

In fact, I like it so much that I’m not going to put Vista back on my machine.