Today we had a university Open Day. I like giving talks at these, and despite my condition (which you really, really don’t want to know about) I went along to do my bit.I took a picture of the audience at the start. We were in the vertigo inducing Physics lecture theatre.
Thanks very much to those who turned up, I hope you enjoyed the visit.
Every cloud might have a silver lining, but that is not the colour I’m seeing at the moment.
I’m really not liking this.
I’m not going to like this.
Went to a steam fair today. I love the smell of steam engines, and there were a lot there, along with assorted classic cars, tractors, models and all sorts.
The weather was kind to us and a good time was had by all.
Many years ago I used to work with Klaus. This was when robots were wildly fashionable. You wouldn’t think that things like engineering research have fashions, but they do. Klaus was doing things like making robots weigh chocolate bars, figure out where they were and all sorts. Great fun.
That was a while back, and I met him today when he was buying a flash gun. As was I. I’ve not done any flash photography for a long time. The first flash gun I ever bought was a Sunpak DC3. This was solid state, made a fantastic whistling noise like the scary bit at the end of the Silence of the Lambs, and was very optimistically rated by the manufacturer. So much so that the first roll of, very expensive, colour slide film that I used it with just showed lots of pictures of eyes and teeth glinting in the darkness. I’ve not been that keen on flash photography ever since. But I’m told that the new flashguns can do very fangled things by talking to the camera and you can use them for fill in effects and all sorts. So I thought I’d get one.
Klaus was buying one for his business. He now works as a professional photographer and is really enjoying his work. You can find him at http://www.pixelcreations.co.uk/.
Paul Chapman left us today. He did is degree at Hull a while back, went off and did a lot of Seabed Visualisation (that is what is PhD is about), came back to Hull, taught a bunch of courses, did a lot of work on the Venus project and even found time to play some music. And jump out of planes. And build the world’s first paragliding simulator. And then buy his own motorised paraglider and fly it over the university taking pictures.
Paul is taking up a position at Glasgow. They are very lucky to have him, and we are very sorry to lose him.
I’ve not been to a rock concert for ages. I’ve never been to one where the headline act is 64 years old. But today I found myself in Nottingham Arena, surrounded by lots of people of a certain age, waiting for Neil Young to come and play his guitar at us.
By gum he was good though. I’ve not been a huge fan of his in the past, but I can see I’ve been missing out. I knew quite a few of the songs because they are standards, and they were all delivered with a gusto and energy that belied both the age of the performer and the fact that he must have played them many times before. It must be particularly strange for him to sing songs he wrote ages ago about being 24, but he did it all very well.
I took a camera and was a bit worried about taking pictures, but I knew I was OK when the security folk started ducking so that they would not be in my line of sight.
The support act were very good too. I’m afraid I didn’t catch their name though.
Great night out. I enjoyed it so much I even bought a T shirt…
Tonight we went to see number one daughter play in the York Concert Orchestra. I went because I have an innate love of culture and music and also because she said they were playing the Muppets theme music. Which they did, very well. There is nothing quite like an orchestra going at it with a good head of steam and they sounded great. I took the big camera and took some snaps during the noisier bits.
I will give an enormous prize to the first person to tell me what tune they are playing…
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.
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.
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.
Lovely weather today, so we went for a walk around the marina in the middle of Hull. I took the big camera.
Jolly Boating Weather
No, it wasn’t a catamaran.
Last Friday of the semester. Spent most of the day either discussing examinations or marking them. Great fun.
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.
Subtle product placement?
A useful prize for a change?
Rock Band gets some hammer (that mysterious black blob at the left side of the picture is my camera case…)
Adam looks superior, as well he might…
They say that a butterfly flapping its wings over Mexico can cause a tiny turbulence that can build into a hurricane on the other side of the world.
I’ve no idea about this, but I do know that miss-typing the right answer for a single multiple choice question means that you have to go through and manually correct 140 quiz entries…
I can’t remember today. I’ve been marking.
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.
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.
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.
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.
