Simon Says “Broken Sword”

Today Simon came to see me and told me to write a blog post about Revolution Software and their new project. Revolution has a long and distinguished history, some of which involves Hull, although they are now based just down the road in York. One of my many claims to fame is that a future member of the Revolution staff was with me in my brand new Vauxhall Astra when I crashed it. Things could have been really bad for that company (and me I suppose) if I’d managed to get six inches further out of the junction before that van hit us…..

Anyoo, motor mishaps aside, Revolution has produced some excellent “point and click” adventures in its time, including such seminal titles as “Lure of the Temptress”, “Beneath a Steel Sky” and of course the “Broken Sword” series. The rise of tablet devices has given their products a new lease of life, with a whole generation of new gamers who have the perfect platform for exploring their beautifully drawn environments and taut plotlines.

Revolution are presently seeking funding for their game and you can get a piece of the action by backing their Kickstarter project to raise the cash to produce the game. For a game of this quality the target funding seems quite modest, and they are well on the way to raising it. Simon says that if you don’t get involved he will be very disappointed and wear a frown for the rest of the week.

Hooked on Table Tennis

I used to be quite good at Table Tennis. Today I found that I’m not as good as I used to be. But it is still great fun. I’m going to take some bats and balls to work and see if I can track down a table. Anyone out there on the Hull campus fancy a game?

London Fun and Games

This is my first attempt at taking a panoramic picture of the lovely new Kings Cross station. I’m sure there will be more in the future.

This morning we woke up late after all the excitement . In fact, we were so excited last night that we didn’t notice that the car taking is back to the hotel delivered us at the wrong place. For a while we sat in the bar having drinks and charging them to a room that didn’t exist. After we had been ever so politely reminded of this issue we grabbed a taxi back to “the other hotel called the Hilton that is in Kensington” for bed.

Today was spent having a great lunch and shopping for presents appropriate for a Pearl wedding anniversary. My suggestion, a Pearl handled revolver and one bullet, was not well received (and potentially dangerous) and so earrings and a watch with a vaguely pearlescent case were purchased instead. Oh, and the earrings were not for me.

Olympic Closing Ceremony–Wish You Were Here

I wasn’t at the Olympic Closing Ceremony. Wish I had been. I normally hate these kinds of things, seeing them as overblown feasts of self congratulation.

This one was different. It was great. Even the music was amazing. All of it. And when they started with the intro to “Wish you were here”, and then, at the end when the guy on the tight rope shook hands (see 70’s Pink Floyd album cover reference above), well, words fail me.

I’m pretty sure that there will be someone on Radio 4 tomorrow moaning about the way that the whole thing showed “nothing about what being British really means”. (actually I’m very sure, I’m writing this on Monday morning and I’ve just heard it).

What daft thing to say. To me the whole Olympics thing has been about Britain saying “Actually you know, we are pretty good at lots of things. Including putting on a darned good show.” Well done Team GB. At every level.

Uggh Boots

Qn: When is an Ugg boot not an Ugg boot?
Ans: An Ugg boot is never an Ugg boot.

If this is confusing, welcome to the club. When we went to Australia one of the items on the agenda was the purchase of a pair of Ugg boots. Note that this was not my agenda.

Anyhoo, we found lots of shops selling “Genuine Australian Ugg boots”. So we bought a pair in Sydney. And they broke in Melbourne. So we took them to what we thought was the local Ugg shop. And we discovered that there is no such thing as “Genuine Australian Ugg Boots”.

We thought Ugg was like Nike, i.e. a particular manufacturer of shoes. Turns out that Ugg is a lot more like “sheepskin”. In other words, anyone who makes footwear out of bits of sheep can call them Ugg. The people in the shops aren’t exactly forthcoming with this information, which means that when you think you have bought a branded, supported product, you haven’t.

The only good news is that a search on the phone for Ugg Boot Repairs found someone just down the road who should be able to fix things.

Students’ Union of the Year

I saw this on the way into the department today. Well done folks.

Networks of Evil

One thing that struck me while we were away is how things conspire to make your mobile phone useless when you go abroad. Just when you are in a place where you could make the best use of portable data access you find that it is prohibitively expensive, if it is available at all. Using voice is out of the question. I can’t think of anyone I’d be happy to pay 85p a minute to talk to, or receive a call from at 70p. So I made no calls on the phone while we were away. Then one night the network made my phone call itself. Which was very confusing for me, as well as costing me 1.55 a minute..

Then there is network connectivity. Charging 8 pounds a megabyte for data access from the phone makes it unusable on the internet. Are there people who can afford to do anything with data at this price? I don’t think so, because I didn’t run across anyone wearing a solid gold hat and looking up things on their phone. From a technical point of view it can’t be any more expensive to provide me with network access than it is to connect the local folks sat next to me on the tram. This is just plain and simple profiteering. Ugh.

So we go back to the hotel. They are happy to provide me with “unlimited” access to the interwebs for just 29 dollars a day. That is around twenty times the cost of my home connection. But wait, it gets better. Once I’ve transferred 100MBytes (i.e. read a few emails, uploaded some pictures and visited a few image heavy web sites) I can either pay extra per megabyte or get shunted onto a capped data connection that is actually slower than my dialup modem used to be. Double ugh. It’s almost as if they have concocted a tariff that makes it impossible for someone to, say, watch a movie from Netflix in their room. Or actually achieve anything.

My experience has been that the more posh the hotel, the more appalling the network charges. The Howard Johnston motel I stayed at had free WiFi. Once I found myself in a very pricey hotel in Las Vegas (I wasn’t paying fortunately) where a network connection wasn’t expensive, it just wasn’t there at all.

In the end we became the worst kind of WiFi leaches, looking for places that happened to provide working WiFi for free. It is always sobering to read all these reports of how connected devices are going to be the way, the truth and the future, and then find yourself in a place where the network either doesn’t work, or is so expensive as to be useless.

Birthday

Today is my birthday. I’ve had quite a few of them actually. In fact, so many that I can remember using most of the things in this exhibit from the Powerhouse Museum.

Many thanks to those who sent birthday wishes. Had a great day, although thanks to the jetlag it ended at 7:30pm….

Water Welcome Home

So, what would you like after 30 hours of travel? Would that be a cup of tea, or perhaps a nice lie down? How about a flooded kitchen? Thought not. Neither did I. All seemed well when we staggered back into the house. Although the kitchen floor did seem a bit shiny……

You can see the culprit above, the plastic fitting behind the washing machine had failed and released quite a lot of water into our brand new kitchen. So rather than any of the above, we were instead engaged in mopping up and making good, along with wondering if the place would ever get back to how we left it.

Oh well. Worse things happen at sea. For one thing, there is a lot more water there….

Microsoft MVP for another year

I got an email last night telling me that I’m an MVP (Microsoft Most Valuable Professional) for another year. Which is rather nice.

Fixed IP Addresses in Hull

Now, here’s a little known fact that I only found out about a while back. If you are in Hull using Kingston Communications (or KC as they are more trendily known) for your broadband (like you have a choice) and you are stumping up for their “Pro” account, you can have a fixed IP address as part of the package.

This is really useful if you want to run services at home but don’t want to have to fiddle about with dynamic DNS services and stuff like that. I went online and asked them about it and I was fixed up with fixed in no time at all.

Drill Power

I bought this today to replace my old rechargeable drill, which started to make a funny smell whenever I tried to use it. Who knows what damage I can do with this new one?

Incidentally, I’m a bit confused as to why they call it a “funny” smell. It didn’t strike me as particularly amusing. The only funny smell I can think of is laughing gas. Ho ho.

Hi Toby

Every time I log in to Facebook it seems to have a new feature which I have to engage with. The latest is “Close Friends”. Last time used the web site I was invited to pick people to occupy this cherished category. Unfortunately I seem to have pressed one button too many, and selected a chap called Toby Russell, who is one of our first year students and a thoroughly excellent fellow, but not actually a best friend as such. For the last weekend I’ve been getting updates just from Toby on my phone. I’m a bit worried that he might think I’m doing some kind of stalking, so I’ve removed him from that list now. Sorry about that Toby.

Rob Goes to London

It looks as if Her Majesty’s stock is dropping a bit….

Having a couple of days in London. I like the place, but wouldn’t want to live there. Had lunch at The Diner. Always have lunch at the Diner. I insist. And nobody seems to mind. If you want some of the best burgers in London, you should pop along.

Then went off in search of camera stuff and bits and bobs. Paid homage in the Apple store (I always go in there wearing a Microsoft jacket to see if it will burst into flames). The new Macbook Pro looks very nice. But at the moment I’m loving my Samsung Slate 7 (on which more later) and so I’ll stick with that for now.

I’m breaking in a new camera at the moment, so I took a whole bunch of pictures.

Bright Shades

Patriotic Bike.

I’m thinking “Not Helpful”

Indeed.

..and we’re back

One of my favourite sayings is “What doesn’t kill you makes a darned good blog post”.

This is not always true.

I can’t say that the last couple of weeks have been fun, but they have been a lot better than they might have been, thanks to the kindness and thoughtfulness of folks around me. Thanks folks. In amongst the bad stuff there have been quite a few good things happening, of which more later. For now, I’ve got some serious marking to catch up on.

How to sell on eBay

Ebay is probably seen as old hat these days, but if, like me, you have a gadget habit to pay for and limited funds, then one way to get some cash is to sell some of the gadgets that you have around the place. I’ve been doing a lot of this lately. Here are my tips for successful sales:

• Give the auction plenty of time to run, and let it end at a time when folks are sure to be around and take part in a “bidding frenzy”. I quite like Sunday evening for this.
• Use Buy It Now. I had a lot problems with people making “kamikaze bids” at the last moment to try and snipe the auction. The problem is that if two people are using this “cunning” trick the result is an enormous bid that they is promptly rescinded, leaving you stuck with no sale. The good news is that you do get to hear some great excuses from people about why they did the bid, and how the cat must have pressed the keys, etc, etc, but the bad news is that you have to run the auction over again. For some reason, Buy It Now sales, where you set a price you will instantly sell it for, stop these folk. If you set a price around 10 pounds or so less than the last one sold for then you will at least get the market rate or near enough. You can use Completed Listings on a search to find out how much this was. This can be depressing, but remember the thing you are selling is only worth what people are willing to pay. If charge what you think it is worth you will just lose your listing fees. And sometimes people get so carried away bidding that you actually get paid more than the Buy It Now price, which is rather nice.
• Have it packed and ready to post before you put it up for sale. As far as I’m concerned, the gadget is gone as soon as the listing goes live. Purchasers expect to get their item as soon as they have paid for it, and so you must have it down at the Post Office the following day and away on Next Day delivery.
• Do some research on postage prices. I’ve got stung once or twice where the thing I was selling turned out to be a lot more expensive to post than I expected. As a guide, a small mobile phone will cost around 7 pounds for next day, insured, delivery. A laptop will cost around 25 pounds to send. Of course you should always use tracked, signed for, delivery.
• Use PayPal. And nothing else. Nuff said.
• Be nice. When you’ve posted the item, send the tracking number in an email so that they can watch the progress of their parcel. And you can use the tracking number to make sure that it has been collected at the far end.
• If you are buying a gadget that you might fall out of love with one day (it does happen) then keep the box and all the bits so that you can send out a complete package if you do sell it. This helps with both the price and the speed of the sale. And don’t lose the driver disks.

Last Chance for Free Food

If you want to come to the Finalists BBQ and get some free meat (vegetarian options will be available too) then you need to get your tickets from the departmental office before the end of tomorrow (Wednesday 23rd). The BBQ is open to all 3rd and 4th year students (1st and 2nd year students don’t need to worry as we’ll be doing something similar next year and the year after).  It is on Monday 28 May in Sanctuary from 2.30 pm to 5.30 pm.

If you prefer free pizza (or want to have both) the Microsoft Windows 8 developer camp will end with free food too. It’s on Wednesday June 6th and you can sign up here:

http://hullwindows8.eventbrite.com/

Scary Phone Calls

Had a very scary phone conversation today. And made a fool of myself too. It started with a letter on the mat when I got home. “Please ring the Barclaycard fraud hotline” it said in letters that weren’t particularly large and didn’t sound that friendly either. It was signed by someone whose name I forget. But when I rang the number, that person answered. The man himself.

This totally threw me. Barclaycard is a big company. I really didn’t expect to get straight through to the person who wrote the letter. And only yesterday I’d had a phone call from someone at “Windows Support” anxious to tell me about a virus that he knew was on my computer (although he didn’t know my name – asking only to speak to “The person who lives at your address”). Anyway, the chap from Barclaycard started asking me security questions and I started thinking about a scam model where you send someone a letter with a phone number on, get them to ring the number and then ask them for some security questions. And so I asked “How do I know you’re from Barclaycard?”. This threw him. After a while (during which he must have thought some interesting things about me) we decided that I should ring the number printed on the card and talk to them instead. I thanked him and rang off.

I called back on what I now thought would be a proper number and it was all above board. A company I had bought something from a while back had suffered a security breach and my card was therefore “under suspicion”. I get a new card soon, with a different number.

It struck me afterwards that what I did was almost sensible. If the bank is going to spend effort making sure I’m who I say I am, then I should probably put some effort into making sure it really is the bank I’m talking. Although next time I’ll just check the website first.

Going the Distance

This came up on the car this morning. I had to stop and take a picture, as I’d come over all “IBM PC”.