Boston Museum of Fine Arts is huge. All the attendants were suits. Very posh and with art to match. I could happily have spent the entire week here, the art is fantastic.
This glass is by Chihuly. Get to see it if you can.
This is our third day on the water. Today it is a boat trip around the harbour.
This is how you get to the Aquarium stop. The final stop for this train is “Wonderland. I’d love to go there.
This is the USS Constitution, or “Old Ironsides” as she is known. Apparently in the seventies she went around in a wheelchair solving murders..
Boston harbour looking really nice.
After the whale watching we went off to Harvard to look at their museum.
This is “Harvard Yard”. Like Hull University campus, but not quite as nice looking.
These flowers are made of glass. Amazing.
If you go to Boston you really should go whale watching. They don’t guarantee that you will see a whale, but they will give you another trip if you don’t. You sail out of Boston for an hour or so and then spend some time searching for tell-tale spouts on the horizon. Then the boat accelerates like mad towards them, until the whales go back down again. This was great fun, and we were really lucky to see several whales while we were out there.
Watching for whales.
A humpback comes up for air.
…and then goes down again.
Boston Aquarium today. Very nice, but very hot. this is a dragon fish.
In the afternoon we went on a cruise on a “Liberty Clipper”, which was great.
Under sail
During the cruise we had a “Boston Tea Party Re-enactment” which was great fun. At the end we threw some tea in the river, and then had to get it back. We also fired the ship’s gun, along with a pistol..
Not a lot of narrative for the next few days, but a few choice pictures from our holidays. Today we went to Boston Science Museum.
They have this amazing clock in the lobby
They also have a really impressive lightning display, including sparks to music.
I’m not sure they should call it a Science Museum, in that science is not something that exists in the past, but it sure is a great place to visit.
Boston has a very nice waterfront.
We went for a wader round Boston today. Very nice. Went down to the waterfront and had a hot dog.
This is what the waterfront looks like when it gets a bit darker.
In the evening we went to see an open air movie, “Megamind”, which was a good piece of CGI with a nice plot and a happy ending.
Movie Crowd.
Science Museum tomorrow…
After the excitement of the Imagine Cup we are today heading of for a few days in Boston. Heard nice things about the place, so it should be fun.
Stretching a bus with a Panoramic Camera in Hull. Going to try this in NYC
I’m packing for New York at the moment. I’m taking a bunch of cameras, computers and loads of power supplies. Mustn't forget the adapter plug too.
The scene, a boardroom in Tokyo. The chairman surveys the ranks of executives ranged down each side of the long walnut desk and speaks.
Chairman: “So, we have nearly concluded the business for today. We have decided to build a new factory in Osaka to make a new electric sports car, agreed to an investment of 3 Trillion Yen in battery technology, and to sponsor the 2012 Olympics. Just one vital item remains for discussion.”
An expectant hush fills the room.
Chairman: “Can Rob have a replacement radio for his Nissan Cube?”
First Executive: “Sounds fair enough to me. After all, it is not his fault that it broke, and the car is under warranty”
Second Executive: “I agree. I’ve always enjoyed reading his blog”
Chairman (picking up a quill pen and signing a scroll): “Then it shall be so.”
Actually, I’m not convinced that this is how it turned out, but I’m jolly pleased that Nissan did agree to a replacement. Driving home without Radio 4 has been a bit lonely, although I have figured out that I can use the TuneIn Radio on the Windows Phone via Bluetooth to get reasonable coverage.
Special shout out to Trenton Nissan in Hull who negotiated with Nissan on my behalf and did the job very quickly and efficiently. They gave me a courtesy car while they diagnosed the problem and insisted on washing mine before they gave it back to me. And the hadn’t even sold me the Cube, they were providing warranty support on behalf of another dealer.
Cottingham Church was open too
Today is Cottingham Day. I normally miss this because I’m out of the country at the Imagine Cup World Finals, but this year they are a week later and so I’ve had a chance to take a look. On Cottingham Day they close the main street and set up stalls and stuff for folk to take a look around. They also have some classic cars parked up, so it was out with the big camera and off for a look.
Cottingham churchyard
I used to have a Mini, but not as nice as this one…
Cool Rover
Proper motoring
The whole thing was great and had a super atmosphere. If you are around next year, well worth a trip.
Just got the email from Microsoft telling me that I’ve been reappointed as a Windows Phone MVP for another year. Very pleased. It seems that rumours of the death of the Windows Phone MVP programme are somewhat exaggerated. Or something.
I’ve been an MVP since 2003. I’m never quite sure what I’ve done to deserve it, but I hope that as long as I keep doing stuff, they’ll look kindly on me each year.
Think I might have overdone the perspective correction on this picture….
The burglar alarm went off at 5:00 am this morning. And I don’t mean went off in a “I’ve seen a burglar” kind of way. I mean went off in a “bottle of milk” kind of way. It started emitting clicks and beeps that indicated that all was not well inside. Since I knew that opening the box would probably set it off properly we just endured the unhappy beeps for a few hours.
When I took a look I discovered that the system seemed to have forgotten all its settings and was having difficultly remembering new ones. I think one of the memory chips has gone a bit soft. Since I hate being without intruder detection it was therefore time to fit another.
Turns out that I happened to have a replacement device lying around. I bought it a while back when I needed to find out about burglar alarms for a .NET Micro Framework project I was involved with. It has been sitting, unfitted, in the bedroom because the old alarm was working fine. Until now.
So it was out with the new kit and off I went. The new device actually has an alarm in the keyboard unit. I didn’t know this until I set the thing off by mistake. The resulting 100db of noise made me levitate from my chair around 2 feet and I spent 30 seconds or so trying to find out in the manual how to turn the darned thing off and cover my ears at the same time.
Anyhoo, I’ve configured and tested everything and it seems to work fine. I’ve had to say goodbye to the old one, which is a bit sad, it had served us well for a very long time.
Ian came over today. He is the kind of chap who will turn up and help you carry a sofa upstairs. Which is just as well, as far as I’m concerned.
Anyhoo, we got to talking and he told me that earlier that day the mirror in his lounge had fallen off the wall, all by itself. This happened at pretty much the same time that a noticeboard fell off the wall in our house. Scary.
Not sure how it happened, but Ikea managed to both lose my password and then ban me for entering the wrong one. Not impressed. I guess I’ll just have to buy my compressed sawdust from somewhere else.
These folks were a great audience.
Went over to St. Bede’s school to do a talk today. I did one last year and it was great fun. This time I was showing off a .NET Micro Framework. We did some simple robot control and then I managed to get the Kinect sensor working with the robot. I’ve not had a lot of time to play with the SDK, but I did manage to get the robot to move forward when I put my right hand on my head. The Kinect SDK is really easy to use.
An M&M (previously know as a Treet if you are very old) is a small, candy covered chocolate sweet. Like a Smartie only smaller. In London they have a huge building completely devoted to this confection. We went around it yesterday. Scary.
I think I just saw the one at the back move….
This is the M&M Mix Lab. I think they have a machine that can put all the purple ones in one box. The girl on the right is saying to herself “For this I went to drama school…..”
If you are in London and want to see how far you can take the marketing of a single kind of confectionary, then you should go and take a look.
Actually you really, and I mean REALLY, don’t want to meet the Woman in Black. We first saw the play around 20 years ago and today we took the kids to see it. Just as scary as last time. If you want to find out how a play with only two actors can scare you to death then get yourself down to London and see it live. Well worth the trip.
You’re Fired
I like The Apprentice. As entertainment it works well. As a lesson for any kind of life it is however a disaster. This was brought home to me last night when “LordAllan” fired someone because he had never known an engineer who could succeed in business.
Ugh. I think what “LordAllan” means is that engineers have more difficultly telling porkies than folks in other branches of business, particularly marketing. Telling whoppers about a financial product is a lot easier than lying about whether or not a bridge is strong enough. And in the marketing game you can blame “market forces” when the shares tank and everybody loses their money. Where as in engineering it is a bit tricky to blame gravity when everything collapses and a train plummets to the bottom of the ravine. Engineers are expected to do their sums and get it right, whereas other folks can get away with telling the version of the truth that will get the deal. Ho hum.
Having thought a bit more about this post I've decided that it is not the case that you have to be good at telling lies to succeed in business. Just that "LordAlan" thinks that you do.
And I'm sure that none of these comments are in any way influenced by the fact that I once bought an Amstrad amplifier and all the knobs dropped off...
In Newcastle today to do some external examining. It seems strange to have just finished marking our student work and then go off and look at a whole bunch of exam scripts and reports, but actually it is very interesting to see how other institutions deal with all the same things that we see in Hull. It is nice to go somewhere and just talk shop for a while too. And there was a really good sky over the city which I could see from my hotel window.
The exam board is tomorrow morning. Last year I used my iPad to assemble my thoughts for the meeting. This brought home to me that the iPad is great for consuming content but can be a bit of a pain when you try to create with it. This time I’ve brought along a tiny Windows 7 notebook with a twisty screen, it is a Packard Bell (actually Acer) Easynote Butterfly Touch. I got it a while back. It doesn’t have massive performance, although things picked up a bit when I upped the memory to 4G and it will quite happily run Visual Studio 2010 and the Windows Phone emulator which is quite fun with the multi-touch screen. However, the best thing about this shiny device (which I don’t think you can get any more I’m afraid) is that the battery life really is good for 9 or so hours. In fact, if you turn the brightness down you can get close to the lifespan of an iPad. I’m really looking forward to trying to get Windows 8 running on it…
Anyhoo, it has behaved itself very well up to now. I’ve been using it to type in the reports. Tomorrow I’m going to flip it into tablet mode and use it to read the notes in the meeting.
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.
