Campus Open Day (again)

 

We had our second autumn open day today. The weather started a bit grey, but it soon brightened up a bit and by the time I left the campus the place was looking very shiny. Two great audiences, thanks to everyone for coming to see us. I mentioned some links in my talk. Here they are if you didn’t get to note them down at the time.

Hull CompSci blog: http://hullcompsciblogs.com/

C# Yellow Book download: http://www.csharpcourse.com/

Departmental Website: http://www2.hull.ac.uk/science/computer_science.aspx

Where Would You Think: http://www.wherewouldyouthink.com/

My blog: /

No Gas

At least we have electricity

Came home tonight to no gas. Which in my case (gas central heating) means cold house. A water leak had somehow got into the gas supply and as a result it had shut down.  They are having to dig up the road to find out where the problem is and we’ve turned on the PS3 and are watching Fringe to try and warm up.

Fringe is absolutely top notch telly. Where else do you get lines of dialogue like “So why do you think shape shifting soldiers from a parallel universe are stealing frozen heads?”. Why indeed?

Update on 2012-10-14 08:14 by Rob

We got our gas back at 8:00 on Friday.

Hull College Come to See Us

Please note that this is not all of Hull College, just the ones that came to see us.

I did one of my “well planned” sessions today. Well planned right up to the point that I found that it wasn’t where I thought it was (Two Lecture Theatre A’s on the same campus? Who’d have thought?) and that the place where it really was has a video project that doesn’t work with my lovely tablet.

Fortunately Martin was there to save my bacon and do his bit before I did my bit, so I had time to go get the less lovely, but actually working, laptop. And I got some laughs, which is always nice. Especially if they are in the places I’m expecting…..

Rob at the Round Table

 

You can’t say I’m not versatile. A couple of weeks ago it was Cottingham Women’s Institute, tonight it was the local Round Table who had invited me to speak. So, in my smart suit (but not quite as smart as the folks above) I turned up at the Hallmark Hotel to try my hand at after dinner speaking. Or in my case, after apple crumble speaking as I didn’t get there in time to eat the whole meal….

I’ve not done this kind of thing before (I hope this didn’t show too much). I’d carefully prepared some notes that I thought might go down OK, but thanks to SkyDrive not synchronising them properly (can you see a pattern forming here?) I’d not had as much time to work on them as I was planning too.

Anyhoo, thanks to a great audience, who even managed to laugh at quite a few of the the jokes, I made it through around 20 minutes of “not quite as well prepared as it might have been” mayhem. Thanks for inviting me folks. And the apple crumble, to say nothing of the entertainment that followed my talk, was splendid.

Postgrad Welcome Party

These folks won the quiz.

Tonight it was time for the Postgraduate welcome party. We did pretty much the same thing, with Rock Band, Wii Sports and of course the massive car racing track. We also nearly had exactly the same quiz questions, thanks to SkyDrive not updating the files correctly. Anyhoo, fun was had; once I’d shot back to my office and emailed the Powerpoint deck through to myself….

These folks came second. In spite of because of Simon being on the team.

These were in third. An still look pretty pleased.

I'm not convinced that these folks actually did the questions. Perhaps we need bigger prizes…

Captain Scarlet at the Movie Buff’s Fair

After the Open Day yesterday I went into town (which was an adventure in itself) and dropped in at the Movie Buff’s Collectors Fair that they were having in the Prospect Centre. Lots of people dressed as Storm Troopers and other Star Wars characters were in attendance. I wonder if they ever have a situation where two Darth Vaders show up at the same time. Surely that would cause great disturbance in the force, among other things…

Anyhoo, they also had lots of stalls selling “collectables”. Including this pair, in very good condition, although they were minus their guns (which I plan to have a go at printing). Just as a pop quiz, which of the two do you think is the baddie? And no, they are not holding hands.

Saturday Open Day

Today we had our first University Saturday Open Day of the Semester. We had it on a Saturday, what are the chances eh? Anyhoo, we had good turnout, and I did two talks which seemed to go OK (at least from my point of view). Thanks for being a good audience folks.

 

I took the pictures at the very start, apologies to those who arrived after the snaps. There was an hour gap between the two talks, so I went out with the big camera and took some pictures that I could play around with later. I’m very into the “Painterly 2” tone map from Photomatix at the moment…

This the library looking cool.

Marketing in the flowerbeds..

This is “The Great White Way” that runs down the campus.

Thanks to everyone who came along, hope you found the experience worth the journey. For those of you that fancy coming to see us in the future, we’ll be doing exactly the same thing (even down to the jokes) on Saturday the 13th of October. Drop me a line if you fancy coming along and I’ll ensure you get a “Red Carpet Welcome” which might even involve a small piece of red carpet.

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.