Sticking Plugs on Saturday Night

There’s an old saying “Nothing like a sticking washbasin plug to improve a Saturday Night”.

It doesn’t get said very much though. And I don’t think it is true. Our sinks have these new fangled plugs. Rather than a plug they have a “push-down, push-up” design. Unfortunately, one of ours decided to get stuck down tonight. So, rather than watch the bounteous entertainment that is Saturday night TV (irony alert) I was instead dismantling waste pipes and wondering just what was that icky slime that my hands were now covered with.

The good news is that by judicious use of the hammer (i.e. not hitting it that  hard) I managed to free off the offending item and it now works fine. The bad news is that while I was doing this I inflicted a tiny scratch (which only I can see) on the fitting which is going to bug me for a while. A home tip, if you have one of these kinds of plugs, it is best to push them up and down a few times each week, otherwise they’ll do what mine did…

Back to Work

An actual picture of the view outside my window first thing this morning.

How does the weather know when it is time to go back to work? It’s not that I don’t like my job, and it does get me out of the house, but today the weather seemed determined to make the process of getting up and out of the house as unpleasant as possible.

Or perhaps it is just that I got up an hour earlier than I’ve been doing for the last week or so.

Anyhoo, nice to be back at work really, and thanks to the folks at Brno University of Technology whose card has been languishing in my post at the office since well before Christmas.

Update on 2013-01-03 09:29 by Rob

My Grey picture has actually had more views than many of my other pictures on Flickr. Not sure what this says about my photography...

Bright New Year in Hull

Today was another of those strange occasions where it actually gets lighter in the house when you open the curtains. So we went for a walk around Hull Marina, which is looking very spry in the New Year sunshine.

This is a slightly processed image of the inside of the lock gates.

This is Princess Quay looking good.

..and this is where we had lunch.

Here’s hoping for another 364 days of sunshine in 2013.

Gloom is all about Fun

Another game we spent some time playing over the holidays was Gloom. This is a card game where you make bad things happen to bad people and get points for it. You take control of a thoroughly disreputable bunch and inflict pain, torment and ultimately death on them for fun and profit. You can also make nice things happen to your opponents, should you feel that way disposed.

The winner is the one who manages to make the most unhappy bunch of corpses in the cemetery. It probably doesn’t sound very nice, but it is great fun to play. Then after this we all got together to wish each other a Happy New Year.

And a very Happy New Year to all my readers.

Hornsea Mere

Today started off in a very strange manner. There was no water falling from the sky, and a strange golden disk had appeared above us shining brightly from a great height. It turned out that there was also a fifty mile an hour horizontal freezing wind, but we didn’t notice that until we arrived in Hornsea and tried to open the car doors.

Hornsea Mere is one of my favourite places to visit. There is a cafe which serves tea and buns. I wasn’t expecting that to be open though, but I did entertain hopes that we could at least get in and take a walk around.

It was open. I’ve never seen the water so high. All the jetties for the boats were completely submerged and the wind was whipping the water into quite a serious swell. There were lots of birds there who seemed pleased to see us particularly when they found we’d brought some bread to dish out. They were completely fearless. They were not just happy to take the food from your hand, they’d try to take your hand as well.

Afterwards we took a walk along the sea front, and lost some pennies in an arcade.

The beach was very quiet, although there were a few hardy souls taking to the sand.

The Perils of Simple Jobs

One of my many theories about life is that sometimes the universe must have its fun whenever you try to achieve something. I was reminded of this when I tried to fix a broken bulb in the electric fire which was causing a rather lopsided fake fireplace display. Since I reckoned this was an easy win, I thought I’d sort it out. At this point I can imagine the universe pulling up its chair (if it sits on anything), getting out the popcorn and opening a beer. Rob is starting on a job around the house. Always good for a laugh.

I should have known I was in for trouble when I discovered that we actually had some spare bulbs of the right type, but nevertheless I ploughed on and took the fire to pieces. The broken bulb was easy to find, and even easier to remove. But that was mainly because the light fitting fell to bits. The penny pinchers who made my fire had saved a few pence by not using metal bulb sockets, instead using cheaper plastic ones. These work fine for the warranty period, but not that much beyond it. There must have been a meeting somewhere where they decided that they could save around 20 pence per unit by making them prone to fall apart like this.

So, at 4:55 in the afternoon I’ve got a sudden need for light fittings. So it is out into the rain to the only shop around that stands a chance of selling them. Which of course closed around two minutes before I got there. Wah.

The following morning, after an evening staring at an empty fireplace, I manage to make it to my favourite hardware store, Toolstation, where I pick up a bunch of light sockets for 43 pence each (an amazing price when you consider how much they are in other DIY stores).

So, problem solved, right? I’ve even bought a spare set of sockets which I’ll put in the back of the fire in case this ever happens again. All I have to do is take out the broken parts and refit the replacements. Except that, of course, the new sockets have a different connection arrangement that means the wires are now too short. So now I have to spend ages trying to feed in extra cable because the penny pinching people who made my fire (see above) had used just enough to fit and nothing more. I wonder if that was decided at a different meeting or the same one?

Anyhoo, after approximately ten times the effort I thought it would take, I now have a fully illuminated fire. And the universe has had a good laugh.

You get what you pay for

Some years ago we were helping dad move house. Having loaded up we headed onto the road. As we rounded our first corner we heard a horrible sliding noise from the contents of the van followed by an enormous crash. Tim, who was riding shotgun next to me, said “Ah well. You get the help you pay for”. Of course none of us were professional house movers, we were just helping dad out. And it turned out that the enormous crash was caused by a box of cutlery, so no harm was done. But the remark has stuck with me.

I was reminded of it when the terms and conditions for Instragram were changed recently, and people suddenly found that things they thought they owned (i.e. the pictures they had taken) were now ripe for exploitation by the company that was storing them. Instagram decided that they could use any of the pictures held on their servers for profit and advertising. There has been something of a backlash against this, and as a result some back tracking on the part of the company, but I think it has opened up a useful debate. Perhaps, as a result of it, paying for things will come back into fashion.

I’ve always been deeply suspicious of free services. For a start they can vanish or change at any moment, taking with them stuff that might be important to you. And of course, as the saying goes, if you are not paying for the service, you are the product. Facebook sells its ability to target you with custom ads. Google surrounds your Gmail inbox with links to “related services”. And if you ever search for anything (for example my quest for an oven) you will find yourself haunted by matching adverts in every web page you visit for a while.

If something is important to me I’ll pay for it. I put my pictures on Flickr and have done for ages. It costs me around 24 dollars a year to do this, but I can now complain to the site if they ever get lost, and Flickr don’t have to sell my photographs to stay in business.

Maybe in the long term the price of service provision will drop to the point where companies will be able to provide the service for a small fee, rather than have to hawk around personal data for profit. Flickr are obviously keen to cash in on this, and have just launched an offer of three months free hosting to try and tempt people away from “free” sites.

Farewell Gerry Anderson

Very sad to hear today of the death of Gerry Anderson, creator of Thunderbirds. I was lucky enough to have Supercar, Fireball XL5, Stingray, Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet as the background to my childhood and I thought they were all wonderful. But I really loved Thunderbirds most of all. It had the longest episodes, the best stories and the biggest gadgets. We used to watch it in black and white on the telly that took ages to warm up. I vividly remember getting a copy of the TV 21 kids magazine and finding out that Thunderbird 2 was green.

Gerry Anderson managed to create a future that we all wanted to live in. So what if there was a gigantic lemon squeezer on the hanger of Thunderbird 1, people moved a bit strangely, and there were never more than about five of them in a room, that was what a whole generation of kids (including me) wanted to grow up into. If you want to find out more about this wonderful world you can start at the Haynes manual for the programme and go on from there.

I’m going to put on a choice episode, perhaps “Path of Destruction” and drink a toast to one of the most visionary TV producers there has ever been.

Christmas Fun

Had a great Christmas. Hope you did too.

Got a nice big Lego kit. Something tells me I should be a bit too old for things like Lego. But I ignore it.

Got great socks too. Coming soon to a First Year lecture near you….

Cottingham church at 5:00 on Christmas Day

Thanks Santa.

I think you should know that number one son now has no hair on his right hand after lighting this…..

Christmas Wrapping

I took this picture with my Lumia 920, fiddled with it a bit and then posted it onto Flickr, all from the phone. Not bad eh?

I spent a reasonable sized chunk of today wrapping presents. I’m rubbish at this. Firebox used to have this “crap-wrap” service where they’d wrap something badly for you, to save you working at being awful. I could give them tips. My Auntie Julie once spent a while working in a store in York wrapping presents for customers. She got really good at it. You could always spot her presents because of the neat edges and perfect corners.

I notice that some wrapping paper you can buy has a grid printed on the back so that you can cut things squarely. Of course the stuff I got didn’t have that. However, after spending the morning sticking tape to myself and cutting things the wrong size I have learnt one thing from the whole experience:

“Always start wrapping the biggest thing first. Then, when it turns out that you have cut the paper too small for it, you can use the resulting piece to wrap the next one down in size”.

Head Tracking and Helicopters

Hand tampered hat with tracking LEDS

Number one son is here over Christmas, which is great. He’s brought his “proper PC” with a hairy graphics card and a helicopter game which is great fun to watch him play. Particularly the bit where he spends five minutes doing pre-flight checks, starting the engines, aligning the controls, lifting off and then instantly crashing sideways into the tarmac.

He’s been experimenting with head tracking, where you put a camera on the monitor which tracks three leds that are attached to the headgear of your choice (in our case a Visual Studio baseball cap). It works very well. Particularly the bit where you put a piece of exposed film in front of the camera to filter out the visible light and only allow the infra-red leds to show through.  (Thanks to Simon for the LEDs by the way).

After a bit of careful configuration we now have a system which allows the player to look around the cockpit of the helicopter. It’s not completely real of course, since when you move your head the view itself stays in the same place, but it is good enough to be useful apparently. Great fun.

New Doorbell

I don’t have any pictures of doorbells, but I do have a picture of a teapot.

It seems that, where doorbells are concerned when you have replaced all the batteries and it still doesn’t work properly it is time to buy a new one. The old one has served us well. The switch in the bell push broke and so I unsoldered it and swapped it for the configuration switch to eke another three years of life out of it. I was particularly proud of this soldering job because I did it without actually using any solder. At the time I could find my soldering iron but not the solder to go with it. Then I went through a patch where I had loads of solder, but the iron had vanished. Now I’ve got both readily to hand, but I don’t need either of them just right now.

Anyhoo, I got the new one from Homebase. It wasn’t particularly expensive but it has a whole ton of different melodies and the sounds lack the square wave sound of the previous one. We’ve found a suitably tacky sound to reward visitors with and so, if anyone comes to see us there is now a slightly higher chance of the door being answered.

Yahtzee Bowling

Simon does not look in any way scary in this picture.

We had our christmas party today, which was great fun. Afterwards some of us extended the fun even further, and went and did some bowling. It turned out that I was actually playing the “Yahtzee” form of the game, where you have to get one of every score, and plenty of zeros. Oh well…

Not Shopping

Spent some time walking around Bristol today. Rather nice to be able to do it so easily.

Great things begin with C

I was thinking today how many great things begin with the letter C. Particularly food type things. Like Cheese, Chocolate, Chicken, Crisps, Cola, Cake. And of course Christmas.

Christmas Bash Wordsearch Bonus

This could be you…

I’ve got a second Nerf Gun for the person that the highest number of the 54 “Departmental Christmas” words in the Wordsearch below:

D G S Z T G R Y S U I R O T S I P E I L A C R F X W C E X Z
M G U F T T E S P M O T N A I R B C L K V E G Y O S H V T Z
B I P T U Y D B P X G R A X S I M N M O D L I E B M R H D H
W D E C K N O S N I B O R R E T E P M N E A R R X I I O J W
D A R S L L E B K R A M J K U I L S A O N E X G H K S O I B
S O L A Z N E N F I U I N K T S D X N N T O A D X E T V A J
E Q A B V E I K C M N E R R A D E A I U A L J I Y B M Y P M
L Z B M A R T I N W A L K E R L R S P B G N W V A I A Q W I
I D A V I D G L O V E R V V A D P M U A E X I A S E S I A C
M W O R D S E A R C H M P E O A O E N I K L N D E L A K R R
B T M U U R W S E M I A N B P C Y D L R S S D C K B M R R O
O T I I A Y I Q W J J A O A X W R G B H I V O F O Y A V E S
R H K L Q D Q H V S J T D C A O O T F W D C W F O D N J N O
K J E O R Z C D M A T O I K I R U R G H D X S A R K D O V F
C O B A B J Y W M A P W R D D V Y Q U X R G T T B B A H I T
O G R T I S W M C O D A X O T F U J I Z A T E Z M U M N A N
C N A N N O E I U C H A N D R A K A M B H A M P A T I R N O
N A Y A G N B L G S T H G I R W N E L E H Y Y R H R L A T S
A I S H W Y O F L L D A R R Y L D A V I S Q J P A E L Y N I
H J H D A S P E R Y Y E D Y X U D B N F I K N L R R S N Z P
W G A C N A N L E N L Q A C S H P F I N J S W R G H O E E P
E N W U G E E E P N S G V Z V Z O B G U C A E F B O N R C A
R I S B L K H C P M T M I H D J P D G G Z T M G R Y F W E L
D P H E X Z M N O O A G D F C L E K V G S V T E G Z B I T C
N U H U Y D O B H R R P P X G L Y E R G N O M I S O R A X O
A S I M L Z N M N R B O A H I D H W D R O C K E T W O C K J
M O J W A L D A A E U S R J K U I L S X H O I B O A A G Z N
E N F M I U I N O L C K K Y T I S R E V I N U L L U H R L T
S D A O A X V A J L K J E Q J A N S P R I N G E R B V A D E
L J Y Y P Z B G A Q S V R S P A C E C H E E S E B A T T L E

Send me a picture of your solution and you can puck up the prize from my office if you are the the best one. Pictures must be sent in before the end of today (Thursday).

Simon Grey is not allowed to take part.

Update on 2012-12-14 09:32 by Rob

.and we have two winners. Josh Naylor and Josh Moon have both won after sterling efforts (even finding some great words that I didn't put in...)

They can come and get their winnings from me this morning (Friday).

Christmas Bash 2012

We had a great Christmas Bash today. A nice select turnout and plenty of fun was had.

We had a whole bunch of expensive hardware and a Wordsearch. Guess what everyone spent their time doing.

… and guess who won.

A lot of fun was had with Simon’s newly acquired toy…

What a room full of Computer Scientists do if you shout “Strike a Pose”

..and we even had Rocksmith as well. You can find all the pictures I took here.

Christmas Bash 2012 is Coming

We will be having our Christmas Bash on Wednesday 12th of December in the department. There will be hastily set up video games, food ordered at the last minute, and staff arriving just in time to be beaten at Team Fortress and whatever other gaming goodies that we can find, including a Wii U or two if we can get them to work. There will also be a last minute wordsearch with a prize that we will only just have had time to buy. In fact, this event is so "thrown together" that we've had to use the artwork from a couple of years ago.

But it will be fun for all that. Tickets are available from the departmental office. The fun starts at 4:30 pm in the Design Lab. And yes, we will be setting up the famous “Pink Christmas trees” once we’ve found them in the office stores.

Cottingham Lights

Cottingham has really good Christmas Lights. So tonight I took the big camera out for a walk and tried to capture them. Next time I’ll take the tripod too.

This is the middle of the village

And this is Santa.

Watching Progress Bars

I’ve bought a replacement disk for the SSD that has failed. I’ve got a Samsung one instead of the OCZ one that I used to have. It went into the desktop at around lunchtime and by mid afternoon I had Windows 8 back and running fine. Now I’ve been re-installing all the software and trying to remember just what I used to have on the machine.

And don’t tell me I should have made a backup – I had done, but Windows 8 refuses to recognise it. I made the stupid mistake of thinking that the Windows 7 backup tools that are present in Windows 8 could be used to restore a backup into Windows 8. What I probably should have done (although I’ve no way of knowing this) is install Windows 7 and then restore the Windows 8 backup from that.