The village (oh, alright – suburb) where we live has a tradition of rather nice light display each Christmas, and today was the day they lights are switched on. We went along, and I took the camera.
The village was quite busy.
I was very tempted to buy one of these…
While we were in Berlin we went into the gift shop attached to Legoland Berlin. One new Lego product is the Lego nameplate. It comes with a bunch of shapes and an alphabet design you can use to make letters:
If you want one of your own you can find it here.
I really like Live Mesh. This is a Microsoft file synchronisation thingy where selected folders on your machine are reflected onto the Live Mesh storage out in the cloud, and also onto other machines that run the Live Mesh add-in. It runs quietly in the background and doesn’t seem to intrude much on normal life (unless you are daft enough to make changes to files on two different machine before connecting them both to the network – at which point you will have to resolve a bunch of conflicts).
I’ve got all my courseware for the current year stored on Live Mesh. You get up to 5G of space on the server behind the system and this is plenty for a year’s worth of PowerPoint slides and Word documents.
The really good news for me is that I now no longer care which machine I’m using. As long as I allow it a few minutes to “catch up” with the latest versions (if I’ve not used that particular machine for a while) then I can use any device. The net result of this is that I no longer carry the same laptop to and from work.
I guess I could have used an external drive for this, but I’m always afraid of dropping/losing/having stolen the device which holds the only copy of my stuff. Live Mesh means my data is held on multiple machines, as well as on the central server.
However, my bag is now much lighter and easier to carry, and this means that I’m missing out on some exercise and will probably gain some weight as a result.
But I reckon it is worth it.
A first year student came to see me today with their solution to the Mine Sweeper problem. It was better than the one I wrote. And that’s why I love my job.
There is a connection between this picture and the traffic lights in Berlin.
I was doing a tutorial this morning and I had just run the program when all the power in the building went off. The students present were most impressed, they had never seen a program that could turn off all the lights.
Fortunately (or unfortunately) it turned out that it wasn’t my code. The power came back on after five minutes or so, and later on we got an email saying that owing to problems at the local sub-station we would have to shut down the university and leave early as “any delay could cause catastrophic problems”.
I had this vision of people standing around a pair of glowing wires and someone playing the Scotty role and saying things like “I dinnae think she’ll take much more captain..”
Unfortunately it meant postponing my 4:15 VB lecture. Sorry about that folks, we were going to learn all kinds of interesting things about file paths too….
I tried to get some pictures of the fireworks around our house tonight. Set the camera up, opened the shutter and got lots of pictures of a window frame.
Oh well, here’s a tea strainer instead.
I’m doing a session at TechEd 2009 in Berlin:
DEV08-IS Writing Games and Exploring the Microsoft Zune HD in XNA 3.1
Wed 11/11 | 17:30-18:45 | Interactive Theatre 2 - Orange
I got that information off the TechEd schedule builder. So it must be true.
As part of the preparation I delivered my first pass of the session this afternoon at Hull to a bunch of students and staff who were nice enough to turn up. Thanks for coming along folks. I’ll put the slides and sample code up on my blog after TechEd.
Last week I wanted to take the Tosh tablet home to do some work preparing it for TechEd. But it wouldn’t come off the docking station I keep in my office. The lever kept jamming when I tried to remove the machine.
I cursed this for a while, concocted a theory where something inside had got stuck and put the whole thing, laptop, docking station and all, into a carrier bag and took it all home for repair. I reasoned that I just had to pop the back off, release the offending catch by hand and then all would be well.
The back of the docking station is held on by twelve screws. I undid ten of them and noticed that the back would not come off. So I laboriously refitted all ten and, as I was tightening the last screw, I noticed the remaining two. So I took all the screws out and then discovered that to get the back off the docking station you have to also undo some fittings on the top of it. Which was presently stuck underneath the laptop, which was still securely fixed on.
So I cursed some more and had a cup of tea. As I was taking a sip I noticed a little lever on the side of the docking station that I hadn’t seen before. It had a little padlock drawn next to it. I moved the lever to the other setting, unlocking the tablet and allowing it to be easily removed.
Idiot.
I love Windows Media Center. I’ve used it for a couple of years, ever since I got rid of my Sky box.
A couple of weeks back the Freeview system was “upgraded”. I got loads of difficult to remove messages on the TV telling me that I would have to re-scan and find all the channels again. What the message didn’t say was that after the “upgrade” pretty much nothing would work any more. All my TV channels are broken apart from Five.
Now I quite like CSI and Flash Forward, but there are actually other things I fancy watching as well. But I can’t. Kind of ironic really. An upgrade to improve the reception of Five has broken everything else.
Of course all my other digital tellies work fine, it is only the Media PC that is broken. Initially put it down to the TV tuner cards I’m using as they are a bit old. So I tried playing around a bit. I managed to get the Sony PlayTV that I normally use with to the PS3 to talk to the computer and that duly found all the channels. But it would only show me channel Five. Wah.
This is very, very strange. If it wasn’t for the fact that it was happening I would say it was impossible. There is some muttering on the interwebs about changes to multiplexes and signal strengths, but nobody has reported the same problem I’ve got.
I call this kind of thing a “Reality Fault”, in that everything is working fine, it is just that reality around it is broken. Oh well. If I can find a cheap enough TV card I’ll put that in and rebuild everything I suppose.
Don’t you just love progress?
This morning the weather here was horrid. Wet and grey and just right for going out and not getting what you want from the shops.
So I did.
In the afternoon things picked up a bit.
Nice tree and sky.
We got a letter today. Someone had tried to deliver a package and failed because “our house is not on a road”. Well, I looked outside and the road was still there. True enough, a road near where we live is blocked at the moment while some new flood drains are installed, but we can still get in or out. And the letter managed to get here….
I rang the delivery company and told them that it is actually possible to get to where we live. I guess that as soon as they saw that the way the SatNav was pointing was blocked they must have given up.
Not sure I should mention this for two reasons:
Anyhoo, the Wispa Gold chocolate bar is back for a while. This is a really nice bar with caramel inside the chocolate and I seem to be eating one a day. At least.
Went to Hull Fair tonight. Some of the rides are deeply scary. The kind of things I’d pay good money not to have to go on.
I went up on the Big Wheel to get this shot.
I took the little camera and we had a good look around. Won a prize on the Hook a Duck and then headed off to Fudge for tea. Great stuff.
Hull University, like most others, reserves Wednesday afternoon for games. So does our department now. Hull Com. Soc. is using one of our labs for Team Fortress 2 sessions every other week. I went along with the camera.
The event was something of a success…
I would have liked to have had a go, but they had people queuing outside the door, waiting for their turn. Apparently there were also students taking part from off campus too, since we were using the Departmental Games Servers. The next one is in a couple of weeks, I’m going to try and get there early for some multi-player action.
Incidentally, if you are in Hull this weekend there is a FragFest organised for Saturday 17th at the Lawns. You can find out more at the Hull ComSoc web site.
We had another party tonight to welcome our Masters level students. Same format, different quiz questions and some different winners.
First prize
Second prize (they actually got a higher score, but since the team was all staff and contained Warren, Head of Department, it wasn’t allowed to win.
Third prize
We had a wooden spoon (or plastic microphone) prize for the team who made it into last place.
Then it was on to Rock Band, Wii Sports and dance mats for the rest of the evening.
Turns out to be surprisingly easy. Here is your simple 7 step guide:
Oh well. At least the lecture went well in the end.
Just before I drilled a hole in the ceiling to run a cable I did a quick sanity check to make sure that the room above was the one I though it was.
Turns out I was just about to drill a hole up into the bath…
Rob (on mobile phone in car, having waited 20 minutes to find a parking space):”So, you haven’t got any left in stock, despite me having specifically reserved one online before coming up town?”
SalesPerson:”No. Sorry about that. You can have the one that has been out in front of the shop if you like…”
Rob: “No thanks.” (sound of muttering and reverse gear being engaged…)
Spent the day in the First Year Programming Lab meeting up with our newest students.
What a great bunch.
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.
