Well, more of an evening really. It was a Seed works outing and David was kind enough to invite me along too. We went to the Taman Ria Tropicana which was a bit hard for me to find (although Darren managed it easily enough) but the food was excellent. Really good. On the way out I took a picture of the place across the road. David wondered why.
That’s why.
Next weekend we are off to Hacked. I’ve managed to get hold of a couple of tickets so myself and number one son will be taking our places with lots of other developers who want to make something silly/awesome/fun. I’ll be taking my lovely Lumia 920 along and targeting the Windows Phone platform, along with a bunch of gadgets and other things that we can use if mood takes us.
I’m really looking forward to this. The plan is to try and last through Saturday night. But I’ve booked a room in a nearby hotel just in case…..
This is one thing I found very useful while I was in St. Petersburg. The clever bit started when I downloaded all the maps for this part of the world before I left the UK. This meant that I had full navigation support without needing any form of networking connection. The map application lets me pin locations and also routes onto the start screen. The left hand screenshot shows the hotel pinned to the upper left and a route to the Errata gallery on the right. At any point in my travels I just had to hit that shortcut and I’d get a route to my destination. On the right you can see the route, along with my present position. If it looks like I;m going the long way round it’s because I’m on a bus. The whole thing worked splendidly and got me where I wanted to be.
Today was that rarest of coincidences. We were in the country, the weather was great, and it was “Cottingham Day” in the village. They had all kinds of stuff going on, including some vintage cars that were parked all around the village. This is a close up of one of them. I so wanted a car like this when I was a bit younger. A “non-price” to anyone who tells me what kind of car it is, and for bonus kudos, the car it was based on.
I took a whole bunch of other pictures which I’m sure will appear on these pages over time. It was a great day
Well, that could have gone a lot better.
My plan was to move my blog over from Squarespace 5 to Squarespace 6. I liked the new styles, I’d found a new layout I liked and all seemed OK. I’d checked that my content would move with the blog. I’ve even built the new site. You can see it here if you are interested. So I flipped the switch on my name server to point to the new blog.
And the fun started. Bits of the layout weren’t right. My content didn’t seem to be where it should be. And I started to miss the features in Squarespace 5.
So I’ve flipped the switch back again, and here we are. Back where we started. I’m going to have another go later, once I’ve done some proper testing. In the meantime, sorry about any interruptions to the service. I’m going to make very sure that everything is in the right place before I flick that switch again.
I’ve been a Microsoft MVP for over ten years now. And now I’m going to be an MVP for another year. Which is lovely.
To be honest the day didn’t get off to the best of starts. I was crammed into a photo booth in Cottingham Post Office taking a picture of myself for a Russian Visa. Turns out that photo booths, like lots of other things in my life, weren’t really designed for someone of my stature. So I was trying desperately to get all of my head into the right part of the picture, repeatedly re-taking the picture and failing to get all of my apparently enormous face into the frame.
After numerous retries the system gave up on me and printed the tenth or so attempt. Fortunately it looks OK, and so my passport, along with lots of accompanying documentation, is now on the way to London and visafication.
The reason I’m after a visa is that I’m helping with the judging of the Imagine Cup World Finals the week after next. They’ve got some amazing judges, including the chap who invented Tetris, and they’ve got Matt Smith, of Dr. Who fame, hosting the awards presentation.
I’m really looking forward to going along and taking part. Visa permitting. With a bit of luck the visa should be sorted on Monday and I can start choosing which gadgets to take…
Once I’d posted my visa application I shot straight into the university for an Open Day.
I did two talks, this is the first audience.
This is outside the library, we had our American Football Team, along with the rowers to show the kinds of things we get up to.
This is the second sitting for my Open Day talk. Another great audience.
During the talks I mentioned the “Yellow Book” that we use to teach C#. You can download a PDF of the book from here. There are also some other free documents there too. All in all a great day, hope that everyone who made the trip found it worth their while.
After a couple of days of solid work I’ve managed to write all my resit coursework and exams. So, if you are unlucky enough to have to come back for a resit later this summer, at least you’ll have something to do now.
One thing abut the internets that I really don’t like is the culture of “everything is free”. There is an expectation that if you want something, be it web hosting, email or a way of sharing with your friends a picture what you had for dinner then it seems like you can you can get it all for nothing.
There are a few things about this that I don’t like. Firstly, folks need to realise that lots of services are built on the back of this free stuff that may ultimately come back to haunt you. Secondly, companies that acquire market share by giving stuff away may not be around for the long haul. Finally, and this is the kicker for me, if something goes wrong you are completely stuck, as nobody has a financial motivation to make you happy.
I pay a small sum each month to Squarespace who in return host this wonderful blog. On Sunday I had what I thought was a problem, so I emailed support. They responded within the hour and as a result I found that it was actually something I was doing, not their fault. They’ve just sent me a feedback form I can use to rate the quality of their service. Great stuff. And almost certainly not what would have happened if their service was free.
While I was away last week I was stupid enough to try and log in to Facebook from my phone to respond to a message. Facebook saw that I had left Hull for a little while and went into a high security mode, locking my account. Thanks for that.
To recover things I had to go through and identify pictures of folks that I know, which is always a problem for me as I’ve got a terrible memory for faces. Not that it would have made much difference in the picture above.
There is nothing quite like being in an exam board with jet lag. Take it from me.
Today we had to head home, which meant experiencing “The Miracle of Flight”. For me this means spending a few hours crammed behind a bloke who insisted on reclining his seat, even though I had mentioned to him hat my legs don’t have a joint in them that would make this possible. As we got on the plane one of the more alert stewardesses made the observation that “This plane wasn’t built for someone as tall as you”. Indeed. But then complaining about the seating arrangements when you are flying back from somewhere as nice as New Orleans seems a bit churlish.
A local chap reckons that the best times to visit the city are spring and autumn, when the heat is a bit less intense. That may be true. But I’d be happy to go back there next week if I got the chance. Great place.
I don’t know much about tomatoes. Mostly red, different sizes, used in bolognaise and on pizza, some discussion over whether or not they are a fruit. Oh, and in New Orleans they have a festival for them. It was a bit warm, but you could always cool down with a Bloody Mary drink. We took a wander through the French Market and I took a whole bunch of photographs.
Including this one. We have to head home tomorrow, which is rather sad as I’m just about getting the hang of “The Big Easy”.
I’ve never been to an oyster festival before. And I’ve never had oysters from the BBQ before. Both were great.
We had a sort of plan to go to the seaside today. Then we figured that lots of other folks would have that plan too. And so we went for a walk around the waterfont at Hull. We went past the deep and round the old town, had a fantastic Beef and Stilton sandwich at McCoy’s and then staggered home to play some silly Table Tennis in the garden.
Went to Leeds today and bought some trousers. And took this photo of one of the arcades.
We had our Finalists BBQ today. This is pretty much the last free food that students get out of us (except perhaps for the sandwiches at the Degree Ceremony reception in July). Plenty of folks turned up to avail themselves of the various forms of cooked meat (which were all delicious) and talk about old times.
There are some more pictures on Flickr, you can find them here.
Thanks to Warren for paying for it all.
We’ve been to Thwaite Gardens Open Day a few years in a row. We had the best weather a couple of years ago, last year was a bit iffy and we weren’t too hopeful about this year. But in the end it was nice and bright, and the sun even made a guest appearance. The Friends of Thwaite Gardens spend all year making the place look lovely and then we come along, take photographs and have tea and scones.
Thwaite Student Hall. If you live here you get all this loveliness thrown in.
You wouldn’t believe this was right in the middle of suburbia.
Some plant or other (gardening was never my strong point).
We bought some plants for our garden, and we’ll be back next year. If you live in the area you really should go along.
We did the annual Humber Brides cross for Christian Aid today. We’ve been doing this since we had to push the kids around in little chairs, which was quite time ago. The weather was mostly kind to us, apart from the horizontal rain and the cold winds, but we did manage to get there and back, which was nice.
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.
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.
