Wonderful Adobe Reader

Does anyone know why Adobe Reader still does this? And why it takes so long? And why the document looks rubbish when it has finished? And why the message is wrong, even though it has been been wrong for the last few versions of the stupid program? (all of which have a stupidly laborious upgrade procedure)

There. I feel much better now…. Oh, hang on, the reader has just crashed..

Update on 2011-01-06 13:43 by Rob

And yes, I have spotted the irony of just having distributed a PDF version of the Windows Phone Blue Book.

Helpful instructions?

Why not just put the instructions on both sides?

No Coffee Blues

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.

Rewind and Reset

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…

Shazam and Zune Pass can damage your street cred.

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?

New Year Resolution

My first New Year resolution is not to make any jokes about monitors and pixels on January the first. Absolutely not.

New Years Eve Sheep Shearing

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.

Christmas Sales?

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..

Full House

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.