Went into work today (after getting up at what seemed to be the middle of the night and scraping ice off the car for the first time in a week) to find that the coffee room was closed and both coffee machines in our building were broken. And I had a big pile of marking to do.
Wah.
Buster clock by Sally Prangley. Use your deductive skills to work out what time the picture was taken….
Now that everyone has gone home we can spend some time putting our lives back together ready for the Bright Prospect of the New Year (tm). I even washed the cars, so at least they will be clean underneath the layer of dirty they will undoubtedly acquire tomorrow…
I heard a tune on the radio that I quite liked this morning, so I used the amazing Shazam program on Windows Phone to find out what it was, and then downloaded it onto the phone for free using my Zune Pass. I thought this was quite impressive.
How was I to know it was Kylie Minogue?
My first New Year resolution is not to make any jokes about monitors and pixels on January the first. Absolutely not.
We’ve played a bunch of silly games over the last few days, what with having company and all. One of my favourites was this one from Lego. It is very simple to understand, and you can be quite nasty to your fellow players which is great fun.
A happy New Year to all (both?) my readers.
We went up town today in search of bargains. To be honest, I didn’t find a lot that impressed. Although we did manage to fill the back of the car somehow..
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.
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.
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.
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.
Drove down to Christmas today. The weather (which has been threatening all sorts of nastiness) was actually quite kind. Although it was very cold.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Rob Miles is technology author and educator who spent many years as a lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Hull. He is also a Microsoft Developer Technologies MVP. He is into technology, teaching and photography. He is the author of the World Famous C# Yellow Book and almost as handsome as he thinks he is.
