Full House
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We have got a bunch of folks over for the New Year, and a mini-reprise of Christmas. That meant even more presents to unwrap, which was rather nice.
Fit to Write
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Feeling a bit better today. I managed to spend a chunk of time going through the chapters for the next book. According to Amazon it will be available at the end of next month. Scary.
Christmas Bug
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From this….
… to this in one festive season. Well done number one son.
Along with my presents it seems I’ve also acquired a “Christmas Bug”. This pretty much laid me out today, so that I was reduced to lying in the back of the car and watching the frozen scenery go by as we rumbled home.
Big Pile of Presents
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I got a huge pile of presents today. I don’t actually remember being that good over the last year, but I’ll take the presents if they are put in front of me….
I hope you all got plenty of presents too.
Driving to Christmas
/Drove down to Christmas today. The weather (which has been threatening all sorts of nastiness) was actually quite kind. Although it was very cold.
PS3 Disk Upgrade
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I’m having some quality time off work this week. And by quality I mean messing around with technical things. Today I upgraded the hard disk in the PS3. I’ve had this console since the day of release, when 60G was quite a large amount of storage (as opposed to about enough to put in a phone). Anyhoo, the upgrade process looked easy enough. Buy a new disk, back up the old one, drop in the new one and do a quick restore.
And that’s how it turned out. The only real problem was finding a FAT formatted disk for the PS3 backup (the program in the PS3 is a bit fussy about this). However, having set up a disk appropriately everything went well. The only tricky thing apart from that was getting the bracket off the old drive. It had been fitted with screws that seemed to have been tightened by Superman’s stronger brother. And of course I’d hidden the only screwdriver that stood a chance of not destroying the heads of the screws. But with a bit of care and a Swiss Army pen knife (apparently Swiss Navy ones are much harder to come by) we prevailed.
If you fancy giving yourself a bit more space for media and stuff on your PS3 I strongly recommend going for the upgrade.
Christmas Party
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We had our Christmas party today at work. Good food, good company and no photographs, because I was having such a good time I forgot to take any.
Animal Husbandry
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
I’ll have another one tomorrow for the next stage.
University Closed
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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
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The weather today is so cold it seems to be making my mouse move slowly.
Winter Prep
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This should keep us going for a while.
Cold
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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
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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.
