so - what is it?
Bought a “B Grade” radio today. Turned out that the ‘B’ stood for “Broken” in this case. Fortunately they had another one in stock to swap it with, for which the B seems to stand for “basically the same thing but a lot cheaper”.
I’m now a Lego VIP. Perhaps the oldest one that they have. I’ve got a plastic card with a picture of a little Lego man on it and they send me frequent emails about bargain deals in plastic bricks.
Anyhoo, these are the first two day’s worth from the Lego Advent Calendar. Hope there is a Lego Death Star behind the door for the 24th….
Christophe dropped into my first year lecture today to promote the upcoming Videobash at the university. It’s a co-production between ComSoc and the university film society. Movies, video games, fancy dress. Looks like fun. I think they still have some tickets left. You can buy them next week on the 7th, 8th and 9th in the union.
On a related note, you can get the Final Fantasy movie – The Spirits Within on Blu-ray for 6.49 on Amazon, which has got to be a bargain.
Somehow reed.co.uk seem to think I want another job. They keep sending me emails about jobs that “match” me. Today it is an “Assistant Manager in Cardiff”. Frankly I’m not convinced.
Today I bought something on the internet and paid extra so just to avoid having to register on yet another shopping site. I found a site selling the item for a tiny bit less but they wanted me to register and set up a username and password (and would presumably bombard me with emails and “offers” ever afterwards). I wish sites wouldn’t do this. Some places have an “order without setting up an account” button and I much prefer this. When I’m shopping on the internet I’m after the goods, not a relationship.
Been buying pans today. At one point I was checking them for heft and wieldability. I think that’s what comes of watching Tangled.
If you are stuck for a nice place to have a coffee in the middle of Hull I can recommend McCoys. They are just opposite Princes Quay and they do a mean teacake. And they have a really nice roaring fire.
Got a nasty cold. Or perhaps a nasty cold has got me. I hate it when I have a list of things to do and then find it hard to do any of them. The only upside is that apparently I have an even more deep and resonant voice.
But I don’t reckon it is worth it.
There is a new play on at the Gulbenkian Centre on the university campus this week. They’ve made the lobby look really red in honour of this. The play is called “Our Little Secret”. I’ve no idea what the play is about, but if you want to go along and find out you can book tickets on 01482 466607.
I think I might have a problem. (actually, I think I might have lots of problems, but I’m not particularly keen to blog about any of those).
Anyhoo, I was taking back some Lego to the toy store because we needed some different prizes for Three Thing Game and I succumbed to the rather nice little truck design. I then spent a happy hour watching Naff Telly (so naff I’ve forgotten the program) and building the vehicle. It is now amongst the other Lego toys collecting dust on a shelf. And Lego keep sending me catalogues, and I keep buying things, and making them.
I wonder if there is an organisation for Lego Addicts. If there is, I hope it is much more than a 12 step program for recovery. I’d hope for at least 150 steps and a nice instruction manual to work through. With pictures.
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.
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.
