Financial Crash

Last week I paid off the wrong credit card by mistake and I now have a positive amount of money on it. I’m going to sign up for a balance transfer and see if it brings down the entire banking system.

Marking Time

Been in the labs marking for the last three days. Today I did the last few presentations before I sit down and enter the whole lot into our system. Students have been making games or banking applications. I have seen some lovely stuff. It’s very hard work, I must have asked “..and what does this bit do?” loads of times. But great fun. Thanks to the first year for turning up on time and to Simon and Mike for sharing the work.

Fashion Victim

According to The Guardian children are now taking 3D glasses, popping the lenses out and wearing them in the playground as fashion accessories. As you can see from above, I’ve been ahead of this particular trend for years.

Christian Aid Humber Bridge Cross

Today we walked across the Humber Bridge for money. The money wasn’t for us, it was for the Christian Aid appeal that has organised these sponsored crossings for several years. We’ve done the walk many times. The first time, with very young kids and a pushchair we managed to cross the bridge four times. Since then the weather has been nowhere near as good, but today it was bright and just a bit blustery so we managed to get over the bridge and back again.  Of course I took the big camera and the wide lens.

That windmill used to be used to grind chalk.

Obligatory tower shot.

Farewell Jake

I got some bad news over the weekend. Jake has passed away. He came to see us way back in 2005 and I grabbed a snap of him which has turned up in my XNA books and lots of talks and demos I’ve done. He was the nicest dog I’ve ever met.

Steaming Idiot

Bought a steam engine today. It was a reduced price bargain. And it has a generator. And lights. So buying it actually made perfect sense. Took it home, got it out of the box and then dropped it on the floor.

Idiot.

Fortunately not much harm was done, except that the “very important pin” that the piston pushes seems to have born the brunt of the landing and is now slightly bent. I’ve straightened it to the best of my ability and it seems to work OK. The whole thing makes a pleasing chugging noise as it runs, and the lights even come on. Great stuff. I’m now wondering if I could power a .NET Micro Framework device from it.

Free Java Books

Along with sticking new pictures on my walls, I’m also getting rid of a bunch of books that I have had for a while. If you are after any Java books feel free to drop round to my office and take a look.

TechDays 2010 Session Fun and Games

My desktop setup. A robot, a PC doing desktop sharing, another PC running a video call and a final Micro Framework device running a web server. And it all worked. Eventually.

Thanks to everyone in the audience, and Luis for setting everything up. I wasn’t in Lisbon, but thanks to cunning camera work and a nice fast network I got as close as I could. I could even see the audience on my screen (which probably freaked a few people out at the start).

We had the audience hitting web sites that caused my programs back in Hull to hit breakpoints (which must be the largest debugging session ever). And then I let the everyone out there send commands to Oscar the robot who, right on cue, tried to jump off the desk.

The audience were fantastic. As usual from Portugal. Thanks for taking the event in such good sprit folks.

To try and make everyone feel at home, and add some “TechDays 2010 Portugal” flavour I did up the office wall behind my chair…

Luis during the, slightly fraught, setup.

Some of the audience at the start of the talk.

Thanks folks. That was the best conference I’ve never been to….

I mentioned in the talk that I’m going to assemble some resources for Windows Phone and .NET Micro framework. I am, but I’ll put them up tomorrow. Off to bed now….

Ash Stranded

I had everything ready. My bags were packed and I’d heard on the TV last night that they were reopening all of the airports. Thing is, KLM hadn’t heard this.

And so I’m not going to Portugal. So, I’m going to have to bring a little bit of Portugal to my office tomorrow and beam my sessions at TechDays from Hull. Whatever else, it will be interesting.

Super Speedy

Got switched over to my new “Super Speedy” broadband today. This should have increased my browsing speed, it has definitely increased the rate at which money is taken from my bank account.

After some tests I find I have a speed up factor of around 6 or so, but this was coming from a very poor starting position. The next thing to do is try twiddling with the router and the cables to see if I can improve on this.

Blind Ambition

Hull city centre yesterday, looking pretty spry.

Spent some of today putting up blinds. The old “Stand on tiptoes holding a vacuum cleaner hose in one hand and an electric drill in the other whilst trying to make a hole in the inside of a window opening with neighbours outside watching and taking bets on whether I will end up in casualty or not” routine. I’d say “Great fun”, except that it probably wasn’t.

Ash Landed

I took this on the way back from my First Year Lecture. I heard someone say “He’ll be putting that on Flickr next”. Correct.

I’m supposed to be going out to give a session at Tech-Days in Portugal next week. You can find our more about it (in Portuguese of  course) here. That was before the volcano blew its stack. At the moment things are a bit “not up in the air” but we will have to see. I’ve got all the slides and demos ready and the robot is set to travel. I really hope that the cloud clears and I can make it over to Lisbon, I suppose we can’t really argue with mother nature at this level.

Dalby Forest Friday

Final day of the holiday today. I’ve been very good, and done hardly any proper work. I’ve even done some gardening, which is most unlike me.  Today we went off to Dalby Forest in North Yorkshire. One of the best places in the universe.

One day I’d like to stay here for a while.

We especially like the Bridestone walk. These are massive rock formations along the side of the valley.

Some of the paths can be quite steep, but always look good.

Wacom Bamboo Fun and Games

I didn’t actually buy much yesterday at the Gadget Show. Just a pair of enormous headphones from Sure that sound amazing (I daren’t tell number one wife how much I paid for them but they were heavily discounted) and a Bamboo Fun graphics tablet. They had them at 20% show discount and although they didn’t have any left to sell I was able to order one for home delivery the following day. I was thinking “Yeah, right.” as I gave my details, but the company were as good as their word and the tablet arrived today.

The thing about the Bamboo fun that had me most interested was that it supports multi-touch input as well as pen based control. It turns out that multi-touch is indeed supported, but not in a proper Windows 7 way. The Windows 7 touch API is designed for screen only use, there is no support for multi-touch tablet input in the operating system. Instead the tablet driver produces cursor and keyboard commands that allow you to do things like pinch zoom in compatible programs.  This means there is unfortunately no way you can use it for things like the Windows Phone emulator, where multi-touch input would be very nice. I’m not that bothered though, the device comes with a very good software bundle including a free copy of Photoshop Elements 7 and it is a nice tablet with a responsive pen which will make image editing easier.

Gadget Show 2010

Went to the Gadget Show today in Birmingham. They released a whole bunch of extra tickets and so number one son and I thought that it might be worth a visit. So off we went. Got there with out a hitch and got in nice and early. I took the tiny camera to snatch some pictures.

There was a lot of 3D out there, with funny glasses all over the place. We tried the Sony one and there was definitely a 3D effect, which of course you can’t see above.

It’s all very well setting up a monster system like this, but why let a five year old drive it?

As a connoisseur of convoluted clocks, this one looked very interesting, but I daren’t ask the price.

They were showing off Split Second in the gaming area. This is being developed by Black Rock, a developer which is part of Disney Studios and is based in Brighton (and numbers a few Hull graduates amongst its employees). The game looks absolutely awesome,  it is a racing game with an amazing interactive environment you can use in the game play. Think Burnout with bigger explosions. Then add some even bigger explosions. That one’s going on my shopping list.

This game isn’t on my list. Why would anyone pay 24.99 for a Forklift truck simulator? I spent a few weeks one summer driving one and they can be quite  fun (especially doing drifts with a tonne of frozen peas on the front) but even so…

BTW number one son is playing Just Cause 2 and it looks really good.

Scarborough Fair

Went to Scarborough today. They have a CSI Pinball table at one of the amusement arcades there. Great fun, with some very good sound samples from the show. When I am rich I’ll get a table of my own.  I took the big camera with the fat lens and the weather was very kind to us.

This panorama was taken from walls of Scarborough Castle, which must have looked very impressive until the Civil War in 1645, which doesn’t sound very civil at all, and resulted in the flattening of one of the towers.

Castle and sky.

This is the Master Gunner’s House. Now serves a very nice cup of tea..

Easter Monday

Did a whole bunch of not much today. Lovely.

Back in Hull

Travelled back to Hull today. Not by train unfortunately.

Train Trip

When on a proper train trip today. Unfortunately they wouldn’t let me drive.

.. although some parts look quite hard work.

Good Friday Foolishness

I’ve no idea what this tower is. But I could see it from my hotel room at DevDays and it looked nice against the sky.

Thought of a really good April Fool’s day joke today. Doh! Must put it in my diary for next year.

Today marks the start of a week away from work. Sort of. Let’s see how long I can go without touching a keyboard..