Undergraduate Welcome Party

It’s amazing what people do when you say “Act happy”.

Today we had the Welcome Party for the new undergraduate students. Great fun. I took the big camera and grab some snaps. As an experiment I’m taking the tiny camera to the one next week, to see what difference it makes to the pictures.

We had a new toy this time. a six car digital Scalectrix. We had a computer timing laps and running quick races to find the fastest drivers. Went rather well, although the cars took a bit of a pasting. By the end all but one were still running though. We had some blankets around the corner bits to hopefully reduce the damage.

Something bad in the process of happening…

This is photographic evidence of the first sub-three second lap…

These guys won the quiz.

These folks came second

And the Malteasers go to these folks

Thanks to Freeside for bringing their multi-player game along. Worked really well.

We are actually going to use the Scalectrix in the teaching this semester. We will be interfacing Gadgeteer devices to the data stream that it produces and trying to make some embedded code that reads the controllers and drives the cars. Should be fun.

Thanks to everyone for coming along, sorry about some of the questions in the quiz….

There are some more pictures on Flickr. Click through any image to find the Photostream.

Raspberry Pi Game Table Bits

The joystick and interface for the game table have turned up. Next stop is a trip to Ikea (yay) to buy the woodwork…

Three Thing Game Autumn 2012

Followers wanted….

Three Thing Game is coming. With new Bank of Thingland money, improved auction action and all round added wonderfulness, including the MonoGame team who will be coming along for the weekend and giving some sessions on porting XNA games to Windows 8. Thanks so much to Lee Stott from Microsoft for sorting that out.

You can find out more by reading this wonderful blog, going to www.threethinggame.com (which in a strange kind of way links you back to this blog) or by following the all new, highly shiny, ThreeThingGame on Twitter.

And stay tuned for some riveting hardware developments for the competition which might (or might not) actually include riveting.

Tempting Fate

Last night at my talk I mentioned viruses and nasty programs. I mentioned that I used the Windows Defender part of Microsoft Security Essentials. I also said that I hardly ever get problems with this kind of thing as the only programs I install come from boring places and I don’t go to strange web sites and click “OK”.

Of course, this morning Windows Defender popped up an alert. I’d been searching for some drivers for my Canon printer yesterday and inadvertently visited one of these nasty “driver archive” sites who try to sell you drivers that you can get for free from the manufacturer. And they had given me a little present, as you see above. Good news is that it was a doddle to remove. I left the machine doing a full scan when I went off to a meeting and all is well.

Rob at Cottingham WI

Just spent a very nice evening talking to the folks at Cottingham Women’s Institute about computers. Thanks for inviting me ladies.

Bright and Early

I was up bright and early today to review the papers for Radio Humberside. One of the nice things about being up town at 6:45am (and there has got to be at least one) is that you can take pictures of the town in the early morning sunshine.

The Inverse of Service

I’m never sure whether my hobby is photography or “Buying cameras, using them for a bit and then selling them for a loss on ebay”. Either way, while I do take a lot of photos I also do a bit of camera shopping. Today I was in a camera shop asking about a camera I was thinking of investing in. I never say buying, that sounds like I might actually lose money on the deal.

Anyhoo, we find the camera and one of the assistants appears and offers to show me the device in action. Which turns out to have a flat battery. “Typical” says the assistant, although typical of what I’m not sure. No, they don’t have any charged batteries lying around. No, they don’t have any other versions of the camera, just the one on display. No they won’t give a discount if they sell the display camera. The best they can offer is to charge the battery and I can drop back later to take a look.

I wouldn’t mind but this is the third time I have had this kind of experience. Shop 1 the camera battery was flat. Shop 2 the battery wasn’t flat but they didn’t have an SD card that I could use to store pictures that I’d taken to test the camera. And now I get this.These are just random shops I’ve walked into around the country. They were not all in the same chain either.

The camera I was looking at wasn’t cheap. And I was fairly serious about buying it. If I was selling in this position I’d make sure that every camera was fully charged first thing in the morning. I’d have a pocket full of the relevant batteries and SD cards that fitted. I’d even go as far as having a bunch of sample prints that I’d taken to show any potential customer what each camera could do. I’d have a sensible policy on selling display models, even a modest discount might have sealed the deal.

The one way that these kinds of shops can compete with online shopping is on service. It is rather upsetting to find that they are not really trying on this score either.

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.