A British Bank Holiday and great weather. Shurely shome mishtake?
But no. We went out to Dalby Forest, which was the busiest I’ve ever seen it. Mind you, the place being the size it is, there was plenty of room to spread out and have our picnic.
I even found a log with a built in cup holder.
We seem to be having some slightly nicer weather at the moment. So much so that the blossom has arrived. Which is nice.
These are the people who laughed at the “Polar Bear” joke. Thanks for that.
Today we had our last open day of this academic year. Pretty busy too. Thanks to all of you for coming along, particularly the intrepid bunch that came all the way from the Isle of White. Great fun was had. I love an excuse to get out some gadgets and show them off….
After a lot of trying, and frosts all over the place at the wrong time, we are finally starting to see signs of spring. The daffodils have actually been flowering.
Which is rather nice.
I went up town today to buy a copy of Lego City Undercover, which I had heard was due out on Friday. It is due out on Friday. Next Friday.
Oh well.
If you found something that you’d lost, but you had already mentally prepared yourself for buying a replacement, can you now spend that amount of money on some other gadget without any guilt problems?
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.
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.
