We had a bunch of folks come to see us today for an admissions open day. Thanks for braving the fog folks, hope you have a good journey back home.
I forgot to bring my “proper” camera in to work today to take the picture, and used my Lumia instead. The phone seems to have come out quite well in spite of this.
“Fog is how nature keeps the frame rate up”
The chap at the Sweet Shop told me that there are three different faces on the Percy Pig sweets I seem to bee addicted to at the moment. Sad, happy and surprised. He’s right.
Criterion games are the studio behind Burnout and Need for Speed Most Wanted. They came up to Hull to see our gaming graduates today. They brought Matthew with them, one of our graduates from last year, who now works for them. They gave a talk about game development and then spent some time looking at what the students had made.
While I was in Seattle I went to the Daiso store. I bought a little timer that I can use for, well, timing things.
I also bought it for the instructions. Particularly the one at the top left hand corner of the picture. I think we can all learn something from that.
Today it was time to pack up and head home from Seattle. I was on the same flight to Amsterdam as loads of other MVP delegates. Most of whom were from Holland. And had seen my memorable Kinect session last year at Tech Days Geek Night. And were quite happy to remind me of it again. I’m doing some sessions at Tech Days this year too. Some with gadgets. Now might be a good time to be very afraid. Or at least test the demos a bit….
As a much travelled person I feel that now I can reveal a couple of my top travel tips.
Don’t wear brand new clothes to travel
I had this theory that my nice new deep indigo jeans would be both comfortable and stylish and send a message of quiet sophistication to the others at the summit. They sent a message alright, but not the one I wanted. I’d forgotten that some brand new clothes are apt to shed their colours on the wearer. When I washed my hands on the plane I noticed that my fingers had acquired a grimy tinge that was quite hard to remove. At each handshake with people I subsequently met I noticed that they were recoiling slightly as they discovered that I seemed to be suffering from what can only be described as “Blue Hand Disease”. Oh well.
Make sure you know what the switches in your hotel room do
My hotel room is splendid. Everything I need, comfortable bed and nice and quiet once I’d turned off the enormous fan heater in the corner. The bathroom is interesting though. It has two light switches. One makes a light come on. The other turns on a massively powerful heating lamp and also starts the bathroom extractor fan which makes a most impressive roar. When you are wandering around in a jet-lagged stupor at three in the morning it is best that you know which is which. Otherwise you will flick a switch and then immediately think you are in the middle of an alien abduction, which is quite invigorating in its own way, but does make it hard to get back to sleep again.
I’ve taken to going for a walk at lunchtime. Usually up and down Newland Ave, which is near the university. I walk past Sugar Sugar Sweets, and today I went in and bought some. If you’ve never had Pink Percy Pig chocolate sweets you haven’t lived.
And on Wednesday they do "three for the price of two”. Ace.
First audience of 2013 – hope you enjoyed it
We had our first department open day of the season today. Great fun. We were talking at lunch about my latest Windows Phone project, soon to be in Marketplace. The great thing about Windows Phone is that I can describe an idea at 12:30 and have it running in the phone at 1:00 pm (even if it is a rather silly idea). I think it is fair to say that the audience were mildly impressed by the gameplay, I’ll let you know when it is available in the Marketplace.
Now lets all give a round of applause the University Room Booking System….
I've been racking my brains as to why you would have a need for such a message. And I think I've found it.
Suppose that you were only allowed to book a particular number of rooms each year. And each time you cancelled a room booking it was taken off your tally for the year. One neat trick would be to cancel the bookings that you have made in the past to reduce your tally and become able to book more rooms than other folks who weren't quite as cunning as you....
If anyone has any better ideas I'd love to hear them.
Had a great time at the Graduation on Friday. I’d not done one for a while, and I’d forgotten just how much fun they can be. After that it was a mad hurry to get ready for Global GameJam Hull. In fact, you probably won’t hear much from me for a while as we will be busy making games and having fun.
Here are the folks on the platform.
Some of the folks at the briefing. Sorry if I missed you off the shot.
The university is soon going to be starting the round of Applicant Open Days for this year. Perhaps you’ve been invited. As part of the preparation we had a meeting today about what we are going to be doing on campus to make sure everyone has a good time and learns a lot. And I was asked to say a few words about what we do in our department (but not to tell any jokes). I told a joke anyway, as you do, and learned a few things that we can add to our open day experience, which was nice.
To be honest, I don’t use my phone much to talk to people. But when I do, I expect it to work. Last week it didn’t. And text messages didn’t get through either. Most annoying and embarrassing. I’ve had this problem before on the university campus, with a number of different phones. I thought it was just me until I spoke to James, who is also with EE (Everything Everywhere, a result of the merger of Orange and T-Mobile).
The good news is I think I’ve solved it. Delving into the mobile network settings on the handset I found that the Network selection option was set to “Automatic”. This means (I think) that the phone will search through available mobile networks and find one it is able to use. I wondered what would happen if I changed this to manually force the phone to select my network. So I brought up the menu to pick the network and found a couple of EE networks in the list. I tried each one in turn and, sure enough, one of them rejected calls and bounced text messages, while the other seems to work fine. So I’ve left the phone set to that version of EE.
I’m not sure if there is any downside here, my theory is that Orange and T-Mobile have “merged” their networks by simply giving them both the same name and one of them doesn’t work properly. This might mean I’m only using one network, rather than both of them, but I haven’t lost a call (that I know of) or failed to send a text message since I made the switch, which is definitely an improvement.
Ha. As soon as you blog about fixing something it breaks again. Still got problems with this. In fact, after discussion at coffee, lots of people with different devices on different networks have been suffering from problems recently. Perhaps it is the "upgrading" to 4G that we are hearing so much about....
Nice to see the rev counter above zero…
I did something terrible to my Cube on Tuesday. At the time I never thought, but you never do, do you? I started it up to go to work, and then changed my mind about using the car and turned it off again within a minute or two. Which you should never, ever, do to an engine. Ever.
Of course, I paid for this mistake today. The Cube has a button start, which means that rather than turn a fuddy duddy old key, with the Cube I just press a button and the engine starts. I’ve often wondered what would happen if the engine didn’t start. Today I found out. It spins for around 15 seconds and then stops. So you press the button again and the same thing happens. Stupid me. I knew instantly what was wrong, but I was less sure how to fix it. The car was flooded. This means that the engine was full of petrol and not much air. So no combustion and no working engine.
To understand the problem you have to know what happens when a car engine is first started. To get things going it is best to put in lots, and I mean lots, of petrol. Older cars had a thing called “the choke” that did just that, blocking off the air supply and squirting extra fuel in. You had to pull the choke when the engine was cold otherwise it wouldn’t start. Once the engine had fired up you’d then push the choke back in as the engine got warmer and warmer. Of course modern cars don’t have any of this choke nonsense, they have a clever engine management system that pumps in lots of petrol when the engine is cold and then reduces this as it warms up. On Tuesday morning the engine was still in the middle of doing this when I turned it off, leaving the cylinders full of petrol. Wind forward to this morning and the engine wakes up, pumps in whole bunch more petrol hey presto, flooded. Wah.
In an old car the only thing you could do was close the choke and progressively floor the accelerator while the engine turned over to force lots of air into the engine and hopefully clear out the petrol. In a new car you don’t have this level of control because your pedal is just connected to the engine management system. Fortunately the makers of the Cube have thought of this, and they let you do the same kind of thing to fix it. So I eventually got the car going and drove to work. And all at six degrees below zero. And its been fine since because I haven’t been stupid since.
So, if you start a car in this weather, let it run for at least five minutes before you turn it off again. And if you flood it, i.e. it turns over but nothing is happening, then try pushing the accelerator down gradually as you turn the engine over.
I’ve been blogging now for over ten years. I’m still not sure why. The best explanation I can come up with is that I’m happier blogging than not. And having done it for so long it would seem silly to stop.
At one time I thought that writing a blog would make my life more interesting, in that I’d start doing interesting things just so I can blog about them. It hasn’t quite worked out that way, but blogging has provided a place where I can jot down things that happen so that I can go back and read them later. It has also vastly improved my writing style and speed, so that I can dash off an article like this in around 15 minutes (I’m timing myself). If you are thinking about starting blogging, here are a few tips from someone with a lot of experience, if nothing else.
Pay for your services: I get my hosting from Squarespace, store my pictures on Flickr and host my domain names at Free Parking. There are lots of free services out there, but I really like the way that if I have a problem I can talk to someone with a financial stake in making me happy again.
Get a domain name: I was lucky enough to be able to get the use of robmiles.com. You might find that your name has gone though. Not a problem. I’m a big fan of running words together to make domain names. For a while I had theresalotofitabout.com but I couldn’t figure out what to do with it. Make a name that fits you and then register it. Your blog host will provide a way you can link that domain name to your site (Squarespace make this very easy) so that you don’t have an identity which is tied to any particular service provider.
Blog regularly: You don’t have to blog every day. Only an idiot would try to do that. Just make sure you have a regular heartbeat of a blog every now and then. If you start off blogging every day and then stop for a week it can feel like you have to do seven posts before you can put down that thought you just had. This makes a mountain between you and your next blog post that gets bigger every day. Just blog when you feel like it.
Blog for yourself: If you start blogging thinking that you are going to make a huge name for yourself and will get thousands of worldwide follows then think again. Unless you are very lucky, or very rude, you won’t get much attention. Your mum will read your blog, but there is no guarantee that anyone else will. I started blogging because I enjoyed the challenge, and because I wanted to improve my writing skills. I also thought it would be vaguely useful to be able to point people at my blog if they wanted to find out about things I’ve done. I also use the blog as a way of jotting down things that I’ve discovered and don’t want to have to discover again.
Don’t blog everything: There’s a lot of stuff in my life I don’t blog about. Don’t feel that because you have to blog every day you have to asset strip your private life just to get a post together.
Find a group: At Hull we have hullcompsciblogs.com which acts as an aggregator for blog posts. Posts from lots of our students are brought together there and shared. I have a habit of going on there and finding out what people are up to. Since my blog is on there this also means I have a “ready made” audience for my posts.
Syndicate: When I started blogging I found that people who wanted to comment on a blog post would just put their comment on my blog directly. That doesn’t happen now. Instead people will comment on Twitter or on Facebook. Look at using If This Then That to alert people to your posts, and make sure that you watch the feeds to catch comments and reactions. I use Windows Live Writer to create my posts, that has a plugin that will automatically send a tweet each time I make a blog post.
Track your Traffic: One nice thing about Squarespace is that it gives you very good traffic analysis. I also use Google Analytics to see what is happening on my site. This can be quite depressing, but it does provide a way you can find out if your audience is growing (it should do) and which of your posts were the biggest hits with readers.
Enjoy your blogging: I managed to find a voice, a style and a workflow that works for me. Every now and then I have the “Oh crikey, I have to do a blog post now” moment, but these are fairly few and far between. If blogging becomes a chore or a pain then you should either stop and do something else, perhaps a project website or get involved with a forum. Or write poetry, or a novel. Whatever you do I’d strongly advice keeping writing though, it is a very useful skill to have.
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…
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.
My Grey picture has actually had more views than many of my other pictures on Flickr. Not sure what this says about my photography...
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.
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.
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.
Rob Miles is technology author and educator who spent many years as a lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Hull. He is also a Microsoft Developer Technologies MVP. He is into technology, teaching and photography. He is the author of the World Famous C# Yellow Book and almost as handsome as he thinks he is.
