Animal Husbandry

I got to feed the pigs today. We keep chucking hay in for them to use as bedding and they keep eating it, which reflects something of a lack of forward planning on their part. Good thing they are hardy.

The water in their bottle freezes solid every night. Pig management tip: Keep duplicate water bottles in the kitchen so that you can just swap them for the solid ones each day, rather than spending 10 minutes holding the frozen ones under the hot tap and making yourself late for work.

Hammering and Sawing

Why is it that the thing you buy to replace the thing that broke is a quarter of an inch bigger all the way round? When the thing in question is a door lock this results in a bunch of hammering, chiselling and swearing.

Not necessarily in that order.

Anyhoo, the front door now both closes and opens (as opposed to only doing one of those things easily). We actually convinced one unfortunate guest that we had automatically locked him out. Kind of like a “Reverse Hotel California”.

Christmas Bash 2010

The Christmas Bash is becoming a tradition. From modest beginnings a couple of years ago we now have a well established setup which this year included Team Fortress, Track Mania, Kinect, PS Move and Band Hero. Along with the ever popular word search. In fact I was aghast to see a bunch of students ignoring their gaming terminals and instead searching through the grid for such words as “Battleships”, “Theatre” and of course “wordsearch”.

The gathering actually established a new record for bashes. From 22 pizzas to nothing in around 6 minutes. Amazing.

There are more pictures on Flickr. If you have any of your own please tag them hullxmasbash2010.

Busy Marking

If you have been trying to find me over the last couple of days you would have been out of luck. I’ve been in the First Year labs marking student programs. Actually great fun (but also very hard work). Saw some stuff that could easily go to market, which was very nice.

Just half a day of marking left and then we can get on with the Christmas Bash.

Cheese Clipart

You wouldn’t believe how much pictures cost for games. I can get a picture of a piece of cheese for a pound I can use in a web page. If I want to put it into a game I’m going to have to spend an awful lot more than that. More than the price of a piece of cheese…..

So today I was in the conservatory photographing cheese for use in my next cheese based XNA game project.  And next I’m going to eat it all.

Cheese Lander has Landed

Anyone with a “Cheese Lander” shaped hole in their lives now has somewhere to turn. For the princely sum of 79 British Pence (that’s a couple of normal Mar Bars or one and a bit of the really large ones) you can now own a copy of “The Best Cheese Landing Game in the World”. That I know of. In Hull. Written by me.

Anyhoo, if you want to be able to whip out your Windows Phone at a party and say “Anyone here fancy landing some cheese?” you can find it on Windows Phone Marketplace here.

New 08101 Tutorial Podcast

I took the camera out when I went to buy some milk first thing. Glad that I did.

Even more snow on the church

Can you use your powers of detection to discover where I’ve hidden the two crows in this picture?

Oh, and there is a new Battleships tutorial available. You can find it here.

08101 Battleships Tutorial Podcast

Another day of stuck at home. Not that I’ve spent all my time here. I also managed to find time to walk through a snowstorm and then queue for 45 minutes in the Post Office. What joy.

Anyhoo, since it is looking unlikely that I’ll be able to make my tutorial tomorrow I’ve recorded another podcast for those on the 08101 module who are just getting started with the coding.

http://cid-a4ce6a659fd80c02.office.live.com/self.aspx/University%20Videos/08101%20Battleships%20Tutorial%201.wmv

I’ll have another one tomorrow for the next stage.

University Closed

Hull city centre. One of the many places I can’t get to today.

The university is closed today. Never known this before in all my years working at the place. We’ve closed early on occasion so that people can get home before the worst of the weather, but even in the floods a few years back the Hull campus stayed open.

But today it is shut. I was all togged up for a brisk walk in the snow to the office but the message came on the radio that there was no point.

My 12:15 lecture (which was going to be all about the magic of creating control behaviours in software) is now postponed and will now take place next week.

Weather permitting.

Cold Weather Blues

The weather today is so cold it seems to be making my mouse move slowly.

Winter Prep

This should keep us going for a while.

Cold

Hull Marina in the snow

It is not supposed to be this cold this early. Whilst snow is initially impressive it doesn’t half make doing things difficult.

Christmas Bash 2010

Christmas comes but once a year. As does the Christmas Bash. The poster pretty much says it all I guess. Tickets will be going on sale next Tuesday at 2:00 pm in the Departmental Office.

Will be fun. Oh yes.

Preston Foster Rides Again

Last night we went out and stood in the rain while they turned the Cottingham Lights on then we went for a walk and I took some photographs. I’ll have some more later when I figure out how to use the new lens properly.

Tonight we went out for a beer for the first time in ages. We have not had a meeting of the “Preston Foster Appreciation Society” (long story) for quite a while.  Apparently they had heard we were coming, because the pub was shut. But that didn’t stop us. Where we live you are never more than a stone’s throw from a pub. Although the police turn up and tell you off if you start doing that. We not only managed to have a quorate meeting of the society, but Nick managed to work out which “reserve pub” we had switched to and join us as well.

Super Sleuth

Achieved one of my minor ambitions today. Got to see “The Mousetrap”. This is the longest running show in the world, and likely to stay that way looking at the size of the audience today. It is a good, honest, country house murder mystery that manages to be both completely of its time and also timeless. It is well worth seeing. And I’m not just saying that because I managed to guess “whodunnit”.

Tile Blindness

These look nice…

Spent some of this morning looking a tiles. I’ve discovered that I can only look at tiles for a certain amount of time before they start to all look the same. Especially if they are all white. The really good news here is that this time I’m just going to choose them. Somebody else is going to stick them on the wall….

Idiot Rob and his broadcast receipts

I’ve got lots more like these…

Today I finally got around to claiming money for some work that I did ages ago. (Actually, the results of the work have just been published here) . As part of the claims process Microsoft, not unreasonably, likes to see receipts of all the things I bought, including food and bits and bobs. So, I did what I usually do, which is make up a zip archive of all the relevant paperwork and put it on SkyDrive for Microsoft to read. This is not particularly confidential, so I just made a folder, dropped the file into it, emailed the link and thought nothing more of it.

Turns out this was really stupid. I forgot that lots of things out there are watching what I do and then sharing that information with lots of other people, including folks on  Facebook. I got a message last night that the file was visible and that Facebook had told all my friends about it.  I changed the protection so nobody could see it any more, but of course there are by now thousands of copies of the file out there on the web, and probably even a video on YouTube.

There’s nothing in the file that anyone couldn’t find out about me by doing a simple search of my name (apart from some aspects of my eating habits I guess) but I guess this is a salutary lesson to anyone who uses the cloud on a regular basis that if you want to keep thinks private, you should mark them private. Security through obscurity was never really an option, and with this kind of “auto publicity” it is now even less of one.

Update on 2010-10-29 15:39 by Rob

Turns out that this is easy to fix:

1. Go to your Windows Live Messenger Social page so that you can see the item you didn't want to put there.
2. Click the "gears" icon in the top right of the offending item to open the "Options" menu.
3. Select "More Options" from the menu.
4. On the page that appears next, clear the tickbox in "Updates about shared documents on SkyDrive"
5. Click Save.

No more updates about saved files.

Stay at Home Rob

I’ve spent the day working from home. I got a lot done, but I don’t really recommend  it much. There isn’t anyone to talk to. Not that I could have said much if there was. I’ve had this bad throat for a couple of weeks now, and my theory is that if talk a bit less it might get better. We shall see.

Broken Voice Blues

I felt fine first thing this morning. I even had enough energy to take some pictures as I walked from the car park to the university. But then I started talking. And realised I might have a problem. By the start of the first year lecture in the afternoon things were not great, and by the end of it I was really croaking. I think the combined strain of a cough and the Mad Development night have done for my voice.  At the moment I’m trying to run my life with hand signals, which is not going that well to be honest. But I have managed to get some ice-cream, which was lovely.

I think I’ll try to spend a day not talking tomorrow.

Need a bigger indoors

Bought one of these today half price. Supposed to be flyable indoors. If by flyable they mean “once across the room and then straight behind the radiator” it is.

I might bring it in to the Mad Game Development so we can try flying it around the department…