My hands keep changing colour. They go from a healthy pink to a dingy grey. I was ready to put it down to old age (well, perhaps middle age) the first time I saw it. Then I realised what was happening. My new, nicely trendy, black jeans were dropping some of their colour onto my hands each time put my hands in my pockets.
The other snag with trendy black jeans is that you wash them once and they turn instantly into streaky grey ones. But hopefully they’ll keep my hands cleaner.
There is absolutely no reason why I need the above. But that doesn’t stop me wanting one.
View from the pointy end, which I’m reliably informed is called the “bow”.
We went to see HMS Iron Duke today. This is a warship that has “adopted” the city of Hull and drops by whenever it is passing, although perhaps it is a bit more complicated than that. Anyhoo, we went off to take a look round and grab some pictures. Thanks to the crew for letting a bunch of folks traipse around your decks.
I love this sign. I just worry that I don’t know what the alarm sounds like…
The Lord Mayor came to see the ship too. That’s his Jag.
I took my iPad to a meeting today. I do love the device to bits (although the battery life seems to have taken a bit of a hit since I upgraded it to the latest operating system) as it is a great way to consume content. Unfortunately I was reminded again of how hard it is to make good use of it to take notes. While some of those around me were confidently tapping text into their netbooks and laptops I was trying to persuade the shift key to do what I wanted and writing “auto-corrected” rubbish. If I had remembered to bring the Bluetooth keyboard to type text in things might have been easier, but as it was I ended up with a few lines of garbled text. Oh well.
Went to see Milton Jones at York last night. Very funny indeed. Nice to see a comedian that sees no need to be anything other than funny. Nothing nasty or rude, just out and out silly laughs. See him if you can.
This is a bit of cautionary tale I guess. I’ve been using Flickr for many years as a host for my pictures. I found the service so good that I’ve even been paying for it. Until now. Suddenly uploads are going like treacle, the web editing doesn’t work properly and other photo sharing sites are powering ahead with innovations that make Flickr look pretty long in the tooth. Snag is, I’ve got thousands of pictures up there, many of which are linked through to my blog – like the one above of Scarborough harbour.
So, do I stick with Flickr, and hope that their parent, Yahoo, decides that it is worth investing in, or do I jump ship to another company which might go the same way in five years? The cloud is a great place to put stuff, but I think we need to remember that not all clouds stay the same forever.
Went out tonight to an absolutely ace party. Good food, great company and folks I haven’t seen for years. Thanks to Julie and Tim for making it happen and to Dad for getting it to 80 years old so that we had an excuse to get together.
I’m presently taking apart a Kinect sensor to get some pictures for a Kinect book that I’m writing (keep posted for more details). One of the problems that you have when working on these things is the way that they have tiny screws that need to be put back into tiny, and hard to get to, places. So to solve this I used my old “Blu-Tac” screwdriver technique (other sticky fixer solutions are available).
You can use a tiny blob of “Blu-Tac” to stick the screw to the end of the screwdriver. Then it is as easy as pie to put the screw back in the hole. You can also use this technique if you don’t want the screw to fall into the device when you have removed it. And it also works when you take glasses to bits and don’t want to lose those really tiny screws.
Thanks dad.
Back to Hull today, and the weather seems to have reverted to UK normal as well.
I was taking a tutorial with the First Year this morning and I was talking about how difficult it is to make something that is easy to use. When you try to add a feature to make things “easier” for the user you often find that you have made your life as an engineer much more difficult. And then I thought of Steve Jobs, who passed away yesterday. He was legendary for giving his engineers hell. When they thought something was “good enough” he would refuse to accept it, repeatedly rejecting solutions that other companies would have shipped as “good enough”. He ended up with products that were truly delightful to use, and by starting with the person and making the technology fit, rather than vice-versa he moved things on into new places time and time again. And his engineers loved him for it, because he got them to make things that they never believed they could. We will not see his like again.
If you want to read about the way he drove Apple to make the Macintosh and get a feel for the way he worked in those early days, I can recommend West of Eden.
Why can you never find a mouse when you need one…
Flew out to Berlin today. The Nokia Windows Phone Training is moving on to yet another country. I wasn’t able to make the Madrid one on Friday, but I’m told it went well and that a good time was had by all. And here I am in Berlin. Lovely city. I’m wandering round remembering why I like it so much.
The hotel suite I’m in is the biggest one I’ve ever stayed in. It has a bigger living room than our house. I did actually get lost in it at one point. I’m only here for a couple of nights, back in Hull on Thursday, but I really could live in this place. Me and around ten of my friends…
Went up town today and bought some bathroom fittings. You wouldn’t believe how many different kinds of toilet roll holder there are.
Library looking good
Welcome to Hull for new students. And welcome back to everyone else. I love it when we start the semester with good weather. It really shows off the place, which is looking lovely at the moment. Each year I put up a bunch of tips for new students, so here goes again:
I’m here in Paris as part of the Nokia Windows Phone Jumpstart tour. Should be great fun. It starts tomorrow. Our hotel is just across the road from the tower in the picture, which is really nice. With a bit of luck we might find time tomorrow to go up it.
But I have learned one thing about travel, and that is “Don’t go abroad with a brand new, recently imaged” laptop and expect for stuff to keep working”. I tried to log in to Facebook and it said “Aha! Not seen this machine before and Rob seems to have changed country. I’ll lock him out”. Not a huge problem in the great scheme of things, but very irritating all the same.
I logged into the Facebook site to try and fix the problem and Facebook went “Aha! We are in France, I’ll give Rob the French version of the site and no obvious way to change this”. So now I’m being asked security questions in French about things I’ve never told it. The last five characters of my driving licence? As if? So I plump for a Facebook innovation, passwords by pictures. This was even more disastrous. I have quite a few friends, and many I have never actually met in person. So I don’t know what they look like.
Towards the end Facebook threw in the towel I reckon, and showed me some pictures of family members. That worked and I’m now back on line again. But my Flicker account steadfastly refuses to work. They’ve made it so secure it is unusable.
There should be a special place in hell reserved for camera manufacturers who use strange cables to connect to the computer. These are the wires that instantly hide themselves amongst all the other, normal ones, that look like the might fit, but won’t.
Taking artistic pictures while having tea…
True story. I was invited to speak at the Mobera mobile development conference in Brno in the Czech Republic. It was in the week that we normally have for holidays, but, seeing that it looked like it was in a nice place (never been to the Czech Republic before) I said yes and bought tickets for myself and Number One Wife. I was looking forward to speaking about Windows Phone development and then spending a few days looking around the city.
Then the conference was postponed. Oh well. Since we’d booked holidays and bought flights we thought we’d go anyway. Good move. The city (what we’ve seen of it) is very nice, the hotel (Hotel Europa) is super and great value, and we seem to be surrounded by great restaurants. I’m giving a talk to a user group on Tuesday night, so I even get to do some performing while I’m here.
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…
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.
