Lowells sign
Got to spend my birthday in Seattle today. Thanks for all the good wishes folks. Got a new Lego watch (and my own private jet as well).
We spent some time going around the city. Of course I took some photographs..
Ended the day out eating natchos in the Imax at Bellevue, watching “Inception”. Great film.
Bob sets up the webcam while we sort out the introductions.
Today we went over to the room where we are doing our mammoth Windows Phone 7 Jump Start. It starts Tuesday morning and you can sign up here if you like. I was expecting a room with a desk and a webcam. They were there alright, in a studio with two proper cameras, a backdrop and all the trappings of a professional broadcast.
Oh gosh.
Andy settling in.
We did some dry runs where we found out a couple of things:
However, I think we should be OK on the day.
If you want to take part in the fun, post to the course forum and download the materials you can go here:
http://borntolearn.mslearn.net/wp7/default.aspx
That way you can find the jokes before we say them....
Nice view from the plane
The lady at US Immigration looked at the stamps in my passport and said “You come here a lot, don’t you”. I suppose I do, wouldn’t have it any other way.
Anyhoo, we had a very smooth couple of flights thanks to Continental airlines (although the airline food version of a cheeseburger is something I only want to experience once in my life) and finally arrived in Bellevue in time for a walk around. During which I broke my shoes in half. Fortunately they had a huge mall just around the corner which had loads of shoe shops and so I was able to get something I’ve always wanted, a pair of Converse All Stars. Excellent.
Downtown Bellevue looking good.
Then Sharon arrived at the hotel with a Windows Phone each for Andy and me. Truly, the day could have got any perfecter.
Spent today feverishly writing Windows Phone 7 content and then driving down the motorway to Bristol to hook up with number one son ready for the flight out tomorrow.
I’m taking an entourage to Seattle with me, they are going to have fun going round and seeing the sites, and I’m going to have fun teaching.
Who? Me?
I got an email a couple of weeks ago asking if I would like to do some Windows Phone 7 training. Thinking that this might be a useful stepping stone to getting my hands on a device, and it might be fun to do I said why not? Actually, it was a bit more complicated than that
I fly out to Seattle on Saturday. I started off thinking that I would be doing this using Live Meeting in a little room in our house, it turns out that I will be using Live Meeting out of a studio in Bellevue, Washington State, USA.
At the moment I’m working on the content. We have 12 hours to fill…
Omar Sharif came to see us today and collect an honorary degree. He gave a superb speech, explaining his friendship with Hull born actor Tom Courtenay and his ups and downs as a long standing Hull City fan.
Great guy.
Did the warmup for two graduation day ceremonies today. One of them was for students from Computer Science. I took the tiny camera and it seems to have done a pretty good job in difficult circumstances. If you were there you should be able to find yourself in this picture or the other one on Flickr.
A couple of great audiences, thanks for that folks.
Just to prove we went there…
Took number one daughter to Flamingo Land today, as a birthday treat. It is a theme park near Malton in Yorkshire and it is great. Some big scary rides and a really nice zoo. If you’ve not been it is well worth the trip. Much closer than Alton Tours and just as much fun.
Some of the audience. There is another picture on my Flickr site.
Many thanks to everyone who came along yesterday to our open day. It was great fun and you were a lovely audience. I’m sorry I had to zoom of after my talk. I would have loved to stay around and chat, but I’ve been away for a week and I had to go home and sort a few things out. If you have any questions about the department please get in touch.
This afternoon I got an email informing me that my Microsoft MVP (Most Valuable Professional) status has been renewed for another year.
Thanks very much folks. I’m flattered that you think so much of me.
I’ve been carrying my iPad around now for a while and I really like it. The screen is nice, the programs are OK and the battery life is amazing. It is in the category of one of those things that you don’t have to consciously remember to charge, you know that it will have enough left in the battery most of the time, and when it gets below 15% or so you plug it in. Great stuff.
However, it is not without its drawbacks. This morning I was putting together a report in the iPad using its Pages word processor. All I wanted to do was take text out of a couple of emails and paste them into a document. The kind of thing I can do in a couple of seconds on my desktop. On the iPad this turned out to be a lot more tricky. I could use cut and paste to move the text but I had to keep switching applications, and finger powered cut and paste is no fun.
As I was laboriously stopping one application, starting another and prodding at the document to find the right place to paste it struck me that what I really want is an iPad running Windows 7. That would allow me to have multiple applications open at the same time in windows on the screen and move things between them, just as I would on my desktop. I really hope this comes about.
Just like the original Apple Mac sold people on personal computers the iPad has sold me on pure tablets. I just want one that is as useful as a PC now.
..how it should have turned out.
I found out today that Iain had a nasty accident when he was skydiving over the weekend. His main ‘chute failed to deploy properly and he was forced to resort to his reserve. This is a bit smaller than the usual one, and resulted in a heavy landing which broke his ankle (but fortunately nothing else). He is presently stuck in a hospital bed while being nailed back together.
I owe Iain a huge debt of gratitude. He was the one who persuaded me to do a jump some time back, thus conquering my long held fear of one piece boiler suits and being strapped to other people. I’m still a bit nervous about jumping out of planes though.
Anyway, get well soon Iain, we miss your witty and erudite comments in the tea room (actually, we used to miss them when you were there too, but that’s another story).
What do you do when your USB hub fails? The answer would seem to be “not a lot”. It broke when I was in a hurry to get a few things done before we went out. I got very cross with Apple, Microsoft, finally, myself, when I realised that the reason that my keyboard and mouse were dead wasn’t laptop or Windows 7 failure, but actually the “bargain” USB hub that I bought a couple of years ago.
There is probably a lesson in here for me, but I’m too daft to see what it is.
I think this is my favourite picture of the day.
Took the camera, and a bunch of lenses, down to the Little Weighton Steam Rally today. I went last year and really enjoyed myself taking pictures. So this year I did it again. By way of an experiment I put the telephone lens on the camera just to see what difference it makes to the results you get. Great fun. I could do close ups from a great distance and get some lovely out of focus effects like the one above.
The event is on tomorrow too, so if you like the smell of hot oil, burning coal and the sound of steam, you should go along there.
Gloves
Tractors in Line
Foden.
I’ve just got my new glasses for using the computer. And you know what? They are great. Text leaps from the screen, and everything is shiny sharp. Just like my old pair used to be a few years ago.
I’m really pleased I had my eyes tested and got some new glasses. Apparently my eyes haven’t changed a lot, but enough to make me need new ones to use the computer.
A piece of advice from someone who has been wearing specs since he was two. Get your eyes tested regularly, particularly if you do close up work. I left my recent test a little too long, which made for a lot more pain in computer use then I needed.
What use is 5ebe2294ecd0e0f08eab7690d2a6ee69?
Actually, quite a lot. Particularly if you have lost the password to your website and you need a value to put in the password table. Which is what I did last week.
We tell people never to write down passwords, but that still leaves us with the problem of what the server does to remember them. The server has to “write down” the password so that it can be compared with whatever the user types in to gain access to the site.
The problem is solved using a technique called “one way” encryption. This takes whatever you give it and converts it into gibberish. It is called one way because the idea is that it is very hard to take the gibberish and work out what it originally meant. Sort of like the notes that I take during meetings, but more useful.
When someone logs in the password that they type is passed through the same encryption process and compared with the gibberish in the password file. This means that anyone stealing the password file from your server ends up with a file full of gifbberish which they can’t easily convert into the actual passwords that were entered. This is why your sysadmin can’t tell you what your password is, because they don’t have that information. They can give you a new password though, because they can take some text and run it through the encryption before storing it against your username.
So, if I am stupid enough to forget a password I’m sort of stuck. Which is where 5ebe2294ecd0e0f08eab7690d2a6ee69 comes in. The one way encryption that is used most is called MD5. If you take the word “secret” and run it through MD5 you get the block of gibberish you see above. I put that into my database in the right place and, hay presto, I was able to log in with the password “secret”.
One of the nice things about getting up early to review the newspapers for the local radio station is that you do get to see the city looking rather nice.
I love the phrase “Big Size”.
A neat little package arrived today from Hong Kong. This contained an unbroken version of the bit of my helicopter I smashed a week or so ago. I thought it would take a minute or so to fit the replacement. Not so. We had to remove a little metal pin from a little plastic thing, and then put it back without any damage.
We got one out of two, but it the craft is now mostly mended. It doesn’t quite hang in the air like it used to, but that is because the stabiliser bar is now stiffer than it use to be and so I’ll have to loosen that bit. But it is a lot more mended than it was.
I so, so, soooo want one of these.
I got some new glasses last week. I came to the conclusion that it would be nice to be able to see things closer than two feet from me, something which my existing specs didn’t let me do very well. I’ve already been able to fix my robot dog using my new super vision skills. I was actually able to see the deposit on the battery terminals from a leaky Duracell that was stopping him (it) from powering up.
I’m now going round the house looking at things close up and marvelling at the details. The downside is that when I check the mirror I now look around 10 years older…
