Number one son today took it upon himself to fall out of a plane in aid of charity. I don’t have any pictures, but I’m assured that the chap he was strapped to will vouch for this. If you want to make a contribution to his good cause, then head over here and give him some cash.
For some reason I’ve been getting a lot more span recently. The university filter is usually pretty good, bur over the last few weeks I’ve seen an increase in people wanting me to help move money out of shady countries and I have had lots of attacks on bank accounts I’ve not got.
I’ve been pondering the best way to deal with this and I did start to wonder if the best thing to do would be to reply to every spam message that I get, but give invalid information each time. If everybody in the world did this then the spammers (who rely on getting responses from just the few folks daft enough to respond) would have a denial of service attack of their own to deal with...
Actually this is a very bad idea though, in that the best approach really is to not do anything, since it is best if they don’t know whether or not your account is active and if you make yourself visible it marks you as someone worth chasing.
Just noticed (to my abject horror) that my Sunday games was posted on Monday, and my Monday reminders were posted on Tuesday. I’ve fixed it with a bit of temporal adjustment.
Programmers have a thing about consistency, (it is one of the better ways to make things work and manageable) but perhaps I’m taking it a bit too far. One of my favourite quotations is from Ralph Waldo Emerson – “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”
I remind myself of this whenever I make temporal adjustments and back-date blog posts just to keep my record of one post per day intact. I’ve only “missed” one day in around five or six years (as I remember). But then again, I’ve always had the philosophy that I blog for my own amusement, if anyone else likes it that’s just icing on the cake…
Spent some of today playing games with no computer involved at all. Great stuff. Although I managed to destroy my car just before the final corner. Oh well.
Flowers for sale in Pike Place Market. From slightly warmer times.
Got back today. Actually managed to sleep on the plane. When we got back the cloud reached almost all the way to the ground. By gum it was raining. Splashed home just in time for fish and chips. And sleep.
I’d convinced myself that there was no point in going to Seattle. I’ve been before, it is a half hour bus ride and I had work to do. Then I saw the weather outside, and I went anyway. Monorail – Space Needle – Pike Place Market – wonderful.
This is the tower reflected in the building nearby. Amazing stuff.
Another view from the top of the needle.
I took a bunch of pictures that will no doubt appear on these pages over the years. Then it was time to board the return bus and head back to pick up my luggage and catch the flight home. I’ve been using this rather cunning (I think) trick of getting up around 3:00 am while I’m out here to try and trick the body into not adjusting to the Seattle time zone. In a couple of days I’ll find out if it works…
It’s been a great trip. Very intense, but very rewarding. Great questions and interaction with the audience. Thanks folks.
If you’ve got your results and you’re coming to Hull to study then welcome. The campus was looking lovely in the early morning sunshine so I took a few pictures on the walk to my office. There are a few more on my Flickr pages.
This is our front door. Please don’t pull on the blue rope. We are on the third floor of the Robert Blackburn building. See you an a few weeks.
One of the great things that the university does is Knowledge Transfer Partnerships. These are set up to do two things. Get students into good jobs and spread expertise into business. We are presently setting one up and I’m one of the academics at Hull University who is involved with managing the work. It is a very interesting project in a nice part of the world (not Hull actually) with good pay. If you are a recent graduate who wants to get started in the business you could do a lot worse than apply. Even though you might end up in meetings with me….
There are lots of KTPs out there. The one I’m talking about is here. You can find lots more, including some others from the university here.
Spent some of today looking at kitchens and tiles. Great fun. No, really. Very useful to have a phone with a good camera. Whenever we saw something we wanted to remember we just took a picture. No messing around writing down names and numbers, just a quick click and there you are. These pictures are then dutifully uploaded by the phone to SkyDrive where they will probably stay for ever…
Outside M Shed they have this rather nice boat
M Shed is a really good industrial museum in Bristol. You should go. It’s free and the whole setup tells the tale of commerce and trade in Bristol through the ages. The cafe is nice too, and they have a rooftop terrace with some really nice views that will find their way onto these pages once I’ve tidied them up a bit.
Inside they have some very interesting exhibits with roots in the area, including this Raleigh moped.
Packing again for a trip away. Put the clothes in a tiny bag. Put the mains leads, power supplies, cables, gadgets ect. in a slightly larger bag.
Alfred and I, conveniently name tagged for your convenience. No idea who the bloke in the background is though…
One of the really nice things about going to the Imagine Cup was that I got to meet up with some friends I’d never met. One of them was Alfred Thompson. I’ve known Alfred since the days of “the Spoke”, an early network community where we used to via for visits to our respective pages. This was way back in 2003, when the idea of community sites and stuff was just taking off. I was very proud of the fact that I’d had more visitors to my page, right up to the point where Alfred overtook me and headed off into the distance.
Alfred works hard to promote Computer Science as a “good thing” and it was nice to finally meet up and swap some stories.
Got home today after an overnight flight which managed to steal five hours of my birthday. Oh well. Nice to be back though. Hull is looking good in the sunshine.
These are some of the tickets, brochures and badges that we have used over the last couple of weeks. Some great memories here.
And now we have to fly back.
This one’s for you, Dr Brayshaw….
We went to the MIT Museum today. One of the highlights of the trip. They take all the things they’ve done and put them on display. Great idea, and some really interesting stuff.
Robot close-up. I know what a few of these chips actually do..
They had this robots idea wall. I had to add an idea of my own. I’ll be back next year to see how they’ve got on.
Boston has a really nice zoo, located a way out of town – the journey itself was a bit of an adventure, particularly as we missed the stop to get off the bus.
They have some butterflies.
..at least one peacock..
..and a gorilla.
At the moment things are very, very hot. We had to keep ducking back into the gift shop to cool down.
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.
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.
