Eye and other Tests

Two for one on Advent calendars. Which would you choose?

Went to the doctor this morning. Everything seems to be coming along fine, which is nice. Thought I’d double up and go for an eye test in the afternoon. Didn’t get the chance to use my optician gags:

Optician: “Tell me, have your eyes ever been checked?”
Me: “No, they’ve always been blue.”

or

Optician: “Can you see the eye chart on the wall over there?”
Me: “What wall?”

Anyhoo, my eyes seem to be around the same as they were last time, which means I am quite a bit up on the day, what with not having to buy any new glasses.

So Much for Solid State Disks

This is not good news. I fired up my computer (not to do any work, honest) and I saw this screen, among lots of other depressing ones. I think that my super fast SSD has broken itself.  The good news is that this provided a reason for another brisk walk (I’m very good at brisk walks at the moment) up to the Post Office to send the thing back to Expanys. The better news, I suppose, is that I can’t do anything much with my computer at the moment.

Christmas Lights

The Christmas lights are going up in Cottingham at the moment. They are being switched on tomorrow. If you get the chance, you should take a walk through the village after dark. I’ll try to take some pictures later.

Out and About

[Note: These posts are being made retrospectively. At the time I didn’t really feel like writing much, but I really want to get this stuff down just so I can remember it later.]

We went out today for a walk. Apparently walking is good for me. And cheese probably isn’t. Such is life. We went over to Manna in Cottingham, who do a really impressive hot chocolate, among other things.

Broken Hearted Rob

Well, that was fun. What I’ve had is referred to as an “elective percutaneous coronary intervention” The doctors used lots of these medical terms as they were working on me. I asked about this and they told me not to worry about what they were saying.

Unless one of them said “Oh shit”.

Anyhoo, it looks like it was a “find the problem”, “fix the problem” kind of procedure. One of the arteries in my heart was pretty much blocked apparently and the piece of stainless steel chicken wire that they inserted (actually a 2.75x32 Promus Element Plus drug eluting stent) seems to be working. I’ve now got a “non-tight feeling” in my chest which is actually rather strange. I’m back home now with a list of things that might go wrong in the 7 days and stuff not to do.

I’m going to be off work for a week or two, but hopefully when I get back I won’t be using the lift as much.

Water Good Joke

In the middle of the first year programming lecture this afternoon, for no reason that I can think of I said:

“Did you know that every year 2,000 road sweepers drown in Venice?”

Total silence.

I think it was the way I told it.

Smart Glass Fun and Games

I fired up my Windows 8 mobile and used it to talk to my Xbox this evening. I used the new Smart Glass application and was able to find and stream music very handily. I’m on the monthly pass thing which used to be called Zune, but now probably isn’t. This means that I can have “all I can eat” music and store the stuff on 4 devices. I can also stream content onto other devices things too, including the Xbox. The range of music has got nice and wide, I even managed to find all the albums by Brian Protheroe, a particular favourite of mine in the ‘70s. (search out the single “Pinball” if you want to hear some really good stuff).

Buying Hardware

Building the PiArcade table is turning out to be quite fun. It is also giving me an excuse to go out and buy some more tools. Yesterday we went down to ToolStation for some bits and bobs as James had mentioned that their prices are very good.

They are. Their stuff is a lot cheaper than places like B and Q (does anyone actually know what the B and the Q stand for?). The only real problem is that you can’t just wander down their aisles looking at stuff to buy, instead you have to dig out all the part numbers and then write them down. But if you are after some no frills hardware they are worth a look.

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.