Another night out

Went out for a meal tonight. Good food down at Fudge.

Xmas Bash

Another Xmas Bash today. Pizza, pop, sweeties, Lego Rock Band, Buzz Quiz, Band Hero and Wii stuff.

You set up all these attractions and all people want to do is the word search…

Mind you, there were some good prizes…

…some very intensive Team Fortress 2 sessions..

.. with some Lego Rock Band..

..and sweeties.

Thanks to everyone who came. It was a real blast. There are some more pictures on Flick, click on any image to find your way to my account. If you have any pictures of your own tag them HullXmasBash2009.

Project Working

We had some of our project presentations today. For the last few weeks teams of students have been working for a fussy and uncommunicative customer (me) making a rather complicated solution.

I didn’t get to see all the presentations, but it was very nice to see people standing up and describing their designs, along with how they had worked together to produce working solutions.  Well done folks.

Lofty Ambitions

This is not where I bought the chipboard.

Most of our loft now has chipboard on the floor. I should have done this years ago before I, ahem, put my foot through the ceiling. (Dave next door came round and helped me sort it out – he was a bit late getting over to our house because it too him 20 minutes to stop laughing.) 

London Trip

Went to London today and one of my favourite places ever, the Science Museum.

Always a bit scary when you find stuff you used to use in a museum.

These too (scarily enough)

But not one of these….

Where it all started, with Mr Babbage..

Indeed.

Fame at Last

If you go to the North America TechEd site you are presently faced with the deeply scary picture above.

Blimey.

Marking Minesweeper

Spent pretty much all of today playing MineSweeper. Around 23 times. All of the first year get 15 minutes each to show off their programs and so Mike, Simon and myself were looking at how well they had done implementing this classic game.

It never ceases to amaze me how different people find their own way to write a program to solve the same problem. Some worse than mine, some better than mine. And just about all of them working.

In fact, some of them should make an appearance on Xbox Live at some point. They really were that good.

Christmas Bash Tickets on Sale Today

The Christmas Bash tickets went on sale today. Nearly put a picture of one here, which from a security point of view might have been a bit of a faux pas.

Instead, here is a picture of the packing material that my Chumby arrived in. I’m not allowed to play with it until December 25th, which should make it a proper “Gadget Christmas”.

Minesweeper Fun and Games

The first year course is busy working on the Minesweeper programming problem that is the second piece of assessed coursework. This is proving to be a nice problem to solve, with a good mix of simple behaviours to play the game itself, and some more complex parts for those who want to get their teeth into something more challenging.

The marking starts on Thursday, I’m looking forward to seeing what folks have come up with.

Blast from the Past

No new picture for today.  I took this a few years ago. It occurred to me that I have all these nice pictures lying around that haven’t been used before (I think). Anyway, worth a repeat I reckon.

Spent today putting floor panels up in the loft. And going to the tip.

Christmas Bash 2009

Seeing as how it is Christmas soon, we are having another bash. You can find out more at www.robmiles.com/Events (like it says on the poster)

Icy Morn

Very cold this morning. Lots of ice on the car.

Monday 5:15 Club Final Meeting

Today was the last meeting of the “Programming 1 Monday Evening 5:15 Club” for this semester. Quite a good turn out. I thought I’d take a picture to celebrate.

There is another shot on my Flickr pages.

Philosophy

I wasn’t quite expecting a philosophical statement about the ultimate futility of life from my SatNav and car stereo. Particularly not at 8:38 on a Monday morning……

Remote Power

I’ve always liked the idea of remote controlling devices. I particularly like the idea of making stuff work without having to reach around to plugs and sockets. Today I went to Maplin and got some of these. They are not that expensive and they work really well. If you want to turn things off properly and remove the “curse of standby” I reckon they are worth a look.

Decision Dice

Ages ago I got given a set of dice that are supposed to tell you what to do at the office.  if you are unsure of how to  behave you just cast the dice and follow the instructions.

It’s nice to see they still work.

Hull Comp Sci. Team Fortress 2

The bi-weekly Wednesday afternoon “sports” sessions are now going very well. Hull ComSoc seems to be on to a winner (even when the server starts to wobble right in the middle of a game – cue laptops and nervousness…..)

So Much for the Second Year

I was doing a lecture on our Software Engineering course today. We were talking about UML (Unified Modeling Language) and how to map language specific features (for example C# properties) onto UML diagrams (if you want to find out more about this you can go here for some useful ideas).

Anyhoo, I thought it would be a good idea to show an example of a property in action so I wrote some C# on the board:

Rob.Age = 21;

The idea was to start an instructive discussion about the difference between fields and properties in C# objects. I asked the class to consider the statement and comment on it. A hand at the back shot up. “What do you think the statement means?” I asked. The reply came straight back “That you’re a liar”.

Thanks for that.

Cottingham Lights 2009

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…

Lego Letters

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.