Busy Thursday

The Thursday of the first week of the year is always a very busy day for me. This year I thought I’d find a way of making it even busier. This is how it panned out.

6:15 Get up and dressed, out of the house by 6:35 and heading for Radio Humberside to do the newspaper reviews. Vastly speed up my departure by forgetting to take my lunch or clean my teeth.

7:00 Arrive at the studio and start reading through the papers and making notes.

7:40 Do my thing. Talk about Moore’s Law and The Silk Road which I found in the papers. Mention that I’m looking forward to meeting the new First Year this morning. (It’s true).

8:05 Back at the office. Work to finish off scanning and packing all the “Tags of Fun”.

8:39 Tags done. Head to the union shop to pick up the prizes for the Welcome Party Quiz. Also buy toothbrush and toothpaste. Make sure they are not on the prize receipts so I don’t end up fiddling my expenses. Need to remember not to give the toothbrush away as a prize. Might send the wrong message to the recipient.

9:00 Back at the office. Now need to sort out the software to make the system work. Just have to add the behaviour to read the tag and authorise the drink purchase. Plug in the tag reader and open up Visual Studio.

9:45 Software working, now need to put everything into the box. Discover that the holes that I had designed into the case are too large, and the bolts don’t grip them. Ah well, there is always duct tape.

9:50 Open new toothbrush prior to cleaning teeth. Find I have bought one with soft bristles by mistake. I usually use a hard one, to match the water in Hull. Also notice that the toothbrush is pink. Oh well.

19:51 Clean teeth using a beaker of water in my office while hiding down the side of the glass office door, so people walking down the corridor don’t see me foaming at the mouth and call for medical assistance.

10:06 Give a quick talk to new the First Years Certificate Level students. Talk about the importance of building a brand while you study. Strongly plug / (wooh). Also mention http://www.threethinggame.com/ and http://www.ratherusefulseminars.com/ (which seem to mysteriously link back to www.robmiles.com). David Parker suggests that I mention http://hullcompsciblogs.com/ too, as that brings together lots of Hull Computer Science blogs, and also contains a link to http://www.robmiles.com/

10:20 Back in the office. Finish of the Welcome Party Quiz questions. Feel slightly guilty about a couple of the questions, but leave them in anyway.

12:00 Start to distribute the “Tags Of Fun” to the supervisors. Everybody is pleased to have them, but slightly confused as to that they are for.

12:15 Go buy lunch. Egg and bacon sandwich. Works for me. Also strawberry flavoured milk.

12:25 Send out an email to all staff explaining how the “Tags Of Fun” work.

12:50 Get an email from Yiannis suggesting that there might be people at the party who won’t have tags.

12:55 Update software and program thirty “blank” tags.

13:30 Print answer sheets for the quiz. Then write some course bits and bobs.

14:30 Meet new supervisees. Great folks.

15:00 Start preparing for the Welcome Party.

16:15 Party Opens. We have Wii U, 10 seat Xbox 30 from Platform Expos, a guitar game with real guitars from Brian, multiplayer games from FreeSide and an Occulus Rift from Hive. And free drinks and sandwiches.

Multi-player action

Discussions

17:45 Do quiz. Seems OK.

18:30 Announce winners.

These folks came first, and are looking quite cool about it. Or it might just be general depression about the quality of their prize (I spent all the money on RFID tags…)

These folks came second (actually they got the same score as the other team,  but in this situation the team withe fewer members wins out)

These folk made third place. I told them to really work those Jaffa cakes (not a phrase you hear much in polite conversation).

19:30 Clear up and tear down. Very surprised (and pleased) to find that the bar staff really like the “Tagomatic”. Much easier than dealing with paper tickets that have to be handed out and checked. One says “Of course, we’d should expect you do make something like that. You are Computer Science after all.” Feel v. pleased about that.

19:55 Get in car to drive home. Start playing “The Long Way Home” from Breakfast in America. Loudly.

20:05 Roll into drive exactly as “Lord is it Mine” finishes. Spooky.

21:00 Write blog.

First Day of the First Week

The progress of the cold continues. My nose is now an even brighter red than is usual. I’ve always fancied being the kind of person who could light up a room when they entered it, but I don’t think this is quite what I meant.

The good news is that all our new students have arrived. It is great to see you. I’m looking forward to my first sessions with you on Thursday.

Falling Ill

I seem to be falling ill. It is a bit like someone is inflating a balloon full of concrete inside my head. Although of course I have no way of knowing how that really feels.

Sweet Fitness

First person to correctly guess what’s in the bag wins a bag of their own..

I’ve been told that a sensible amount of exercise is a brisk thirty minute walk each day. Turns out that Sugar Sugar Sweets is almost exactly fifteen minutes walk from my office. Result.

Thanks to SkyDrive Version History

Should you be stupid/unlucky enough to overwrite a file you have stored on SkyDrive you might like to know that you can bring back previous versions of your files by opening Version History. Open your folder in the browser via https://skydrive.live.com/ and right click the file name.

Select Version History from the menu that appears and then travel back in time to get the file that you want.  This saved my bacon tonight.

Some days need a health warning

Here’s a nice picture to cheer me up.

Some days are great. Some days just grate. Today was in the latter category. Nothing too much, just lots of things going wrong when they really shouldn’t. Like me managing to delete a file rather than copy it to a USB key. I didn’t know this was possible, what with the the recycle bin and all, but I managed to achieve this magical feat and flush a couple of hours of careful Powerpointing down the toilet. By the end of the day, as I pulled up at the traffic lights on the way home I realised that one more thing had gone wrong. My phone wasn’t in my pocket where it should be.

So it was time for a frantic U turn back to the office, where of course the phone wasn’t. At this point something nice did happen. I met up with a couple of early first years (we start next Monday) who were taking a look around the place so they know where things are before the madness of Fresher’s Week kicks in. I said hello and welcome, but I must have seemed a bit distracted as I was wondering where my lovely Lumia had got to.

Finally I found it, down the side of the car seat where it had dropped. And the really, really annoying thing is that of course if I’d thought to check the Bluetooth on the car (which was lit up on the dashboard as usual) then I’d never had any of the panic. It just goes to show that if you expect bad things to be happening, you can then go on to make them happen yourself.

Oh well.

Update on 2013-09-25 08:28 by Rob

And then this morning I put on the wrong jacket and then spent a frantic five minutes looking for the wallet that wasn't in the pocket. I hope this is not an ongoing thing....

Cottingham Food Festival

The weather today was splendid. Nice and warm. Lovely for just about everyone at the first Cottingham Food Festival. Except the unfortunate folks selling hand made chocolates in bright sunshine…

They did it properly, closed the streets and then filled the place with over thirty stalls selling all kinds of yummy stuff. And they had a big tent for the cookery demonstrations. And a bouncy castle. And hook a duck. And a slide. Which I am unfortunately far too old for.

Anyhoo, we had a wander round, bought some chocolates and cupcakes (the peanut butter ones were excellent) then staggered home. I hope they do it again next year.

When in doubt, vacuum the house

Creative Tool?

I’m in the middle of updating the Windows Phone Blue Book to Windows Phone 8. It is going quite well and should be out and about in a few weeks. I’ve reached the point where I have to dream up some ideas for lab exercises for some of the fancy new features in Windows Phone 8.

So I vacuumed the house.

This works very well for me, and I reckon it might work well for you. I find that if I sit down and think to myself “Right Rob, time for you to have some great ideas” then nothing much happens except that I get a headache and an urge to do something else. However, if I do a boring job like wash the car or push the vacuum around for a while the ideas seem to percolate through quite nicely.

After forty five minutes or so I had a cleaner house and a couple of lab ideas. And I even had this idea for a blog post too. Bonus.

Great to be Back

Actually, it is pretty great to be back in the department. In spite of what my calculator says.

We have shiny new students arriving in a couple of weeks and loads of things to plan and do. We also have new toys to play with and people to meet. I’m really looking forward to it all.

Heading for the Lakes

It’s been a while since I’ve travelled somewhere with the express purpose of doing nothing when I get there. Heading off to Imagine Cup, TechEd, Campus Europe or whatever is always great fun, but there is always that underlying concern that you might not have the right kind of VGA adapter for the Surface in your bag when you get there. And they might not laugh at the jokes.

Anyhoo, today we are setting off for a week in the Italian Lakes. Actually, not in the lakes, that would be silly, but in a carefully selected, economically priced establishment just on the shoreline. Of course, I’ve not completely released my grip on my iron work ethic, there will be blog posts and pictures.

But I’ll do them when I get back.

Hull Freedom Festival

Hull is one of the cities in the running for “City of Culture 2017”. On the showing of the Freedom Festival event we went to today I think it is there already.

It. Was. Awesome.

They had these fluttering flags all around the city centre.

And the museum up town had been suitably decorated.

I’m ashamed to admit that this was my first trip down to the festival. We are not normally around this time of year, but having seen some of the preparations and with a good (but not great) weather forecast we decided to go for it tonight.

I’m so glad we did. Everything was wonderful. You just walked around a corner and there was another great band, playing superb music. We bounced off various stages and I took some pictures.

This is Kirsty Almeida, with her brilliant band. Great jazz singing, amazing musicians.

I’m not sure who these guys are. But by gum they were good. And loud.

And this is acrobatics to a driving African beat.

Around the streets we had some donuts that were cooked before our eyes (and were yummy), went round an art show and visited the Museum of Club Culture who had a special David Bowie exhibition. Then we bought some strawberry sherbet bon-bons a pig shaped bag from the craft stall (not for me) took in a few more acts and headed home.

The festival is on for the rest of the weekend.

Get. Down. There.

Feminine Logic

Last week our washing machine broke. Yesterday I fitted the new one. Only problem is that the new machine is slightly larger and catches a cupboard door so that it won’t quite open as wide as it used to. This means that we can’t get the cleaning bucket out of the cupboard very easily. My proposed solution was to design and 3D print a new hinge that moved the door pivot point as it was opened so that it didn’t catch the washing machine and the door could open further. Number one wife suggested we put the bucket in another cupboard.

Powertache Game

Ever fancied playing a card game with the aim of finding the most powerful moustache? Well, if you do, thanks to number one daughter, I’ve got a copy. It is a bit like Geek Power, but based on facial hair. The pictures are great (where do they find these people?), along with the captions.

I can bring any system to its knees

Earlier this year I bought a new computer. And now I seem to have broken it. I appear to have a rare talent, I can over time reduce any computer to abject uselessness. I have behind me a trail of Dell, Novatech and even Apple machines which have slowed down to a snails pace and become much harder to use. Just because I’ve been using them for a while.

My lovely Sony Ultrabook is still mostly lovely, but the touch screen driver has acquired an irritating habit of suddenly tapping the touch screen rapidly and making the mouse unusable. I can get rid of that problem by using CTRL+ALT+DEL to bring up the lock screen but it is still irritating. I’m not sure if it is hardware or software to be honest, it seemed to start after I took the (apparently stupid) step of enabling the automatic download of updates and the machine turned itself on in my bag and tried to commit thermal suicide.

I can live with the occasional touch screen foibles though, what I’m finding much harder to deal with is the way that the “Anti Malware Service Executable” will suddenly and violently take my machine away from me by pushing the hard drive activity to 100%. This happens after a reboot and when I’m trying to get something done and is very annoying. The stupid process seems to have no way of working out that “Robert is actually using the machine now” and just wades in and breaks everything.

While it is amusingly ironic that a program designed to protect me against my machine becoming clogged and unusable is actually making my machine clogged and unusable, it is also darned annoying.

Verity Stob writes of cruft, which builds up and slows down a machine, and I’m probably suffering a bit from that. I think that when Windows 8.1 shows up I’ll do a complete re-install and see if that sorts things out.

Fun at C4DI

This is the view from the window at C4DI down in the Fruit Market part of Hull. This is definitely a region “on the grow”, what with Platform Expo and a bunch of other tech folks setting up shop around there. As you can see, it is a stone’s throw from The Deep, a fantastic looking building (although I don’t think they’d appreciate you throwing stones at it…)

Anyhoo, C4DI provide space for business to start, grow and flourish. For a monthly fee you can get access to a desk, power, a fast (and I mean really fast) network connection and ample coffee.

You are also surrounded by like minded folks, and so there is tremendous scope for mentoring and collaboration. Jon Moss, one of the folks behind the project, will be coming up to the university to talk about what they are doing as part of our Rather Useful Seminar series next semester. They have some amazing plans for the future.

Peter and I went down to C4DI to talk about taking part in session about 3D printing that we hope to set up in a month or so. While we there we sat in on a Skype call with Brendan Dawes, which was very illuminating. I know what I want to do when I grow up now….

My view of the call

Brendon takes stuff, fiddles with it to find out what it can do and then uses it to make interesting things. I sometimes build things “for no reason” or to see what they do, and I love the idea of being able to do that for real.  He has been doing some neat things with Electric Imp devices. I saw these a while back but the cloud based model that underpins them worried me a bit as I’ve bought a couple of devices (Chumby and Nabaztag rabbit) that turned into paperweights when their supporting companies went bust. However, if you think of them as a bit of fun you can have for less than the price of a video game, they start to get a lot more interesting.

I’m going to get one or two to play with when I get some free time. And I’ve paid for the new washing machine that I seem to need…

Driving Home

If you have a white van, you have to go to Ikea. I’m sure it’s in the handbook somewhere.

We drove the last leg of the journey today. Used my lovely Lumia 920 for navigation and it worked really well, except for one bit where the program threw a strop on the way out of Ikea. Probably because I inadvertently asked for a walking route down the M62.

Anyhoo, I used to think that I’d never buy a car without a SatNav built in, but the Here Drive application has totally won me over to phone based navigation. It was very, very good. We even amused ourselves by watching the speed limit display on the phone change at exactly the point where we went past the speed limit signs. And it makes warning noises when you exceed the limits. At one point I had a light on the dashboard telling me to change up a gear, and the phone beeping to try and get me to slow down. Talk about mixed messages.

I think now that I’d never buy a car without a phone holder built in. Which I’m not sure they make. Rather strangely modern cars these days have magical unfolding cup holders that spring out of the dashboard, but nothing you can easily slip your phone into. I had to resort to buying a plastic clippy thing at a motorway service station and then wedging it on the dashboard with a pack of tissues. Well worth it though, made the journey much easier.

And now I’m back in Lovely Hull, the van has been returned, and I’ve just taken delivery of a box which should, if I’m lucky, contain a Lumia 1020 phone.

Nine Thoughts of a Van Driver

Weapon of choice.

For the next couple of days I’m leading a nomadic existence. Just me and a Bedford Luton van, hurting down the country, filling the van with stuff and then driving it all somewhere else. I’ve done this quite a bit in the past, helping families and friends move. and I quite like doing it really. There’s something about driving a great big van that is rather nice. You learn things:

1. People are more inclined to get out of your way if you are driving a big, rented vehicle with out of town number plates towards them at speed.
2. British roads are very lumpy. The number of bangs and crashes that we experienced on the M1 was quite surprising. The van suspension did the best it could, but we did have some teeth jarring moments.
3. You can plug your smartphone into the audio system of a Transit van, but the socket is right at the bottom of a glove compartment, and looks exactly like a bolt which is fitted at the bottom of another, much easier to get to, cubby hole.
4. Van sound systems are surprisingly robust and can go very loud indeed.
5. Smashmouth Astro Lounge is absolutely great driving music.
6. So is Pet Shop Boys Actually, although the first track has driving sound effects that can mask the siren of a police car coming up right behind you. Which can be scary.
7. After a while you stop missing the rear view mirror and just get good at using the wing mirrors. And looking for shadows of cars that might be behind you.
8. Nothing (speeding up, slowing down, going round corners etc) happens suddenly in a fully loaded van.
9. The sound of the sack barrow crashing about in the back of an empty van when you stop at traffic lights is very scary, until you figure out what it is.

Lego Back to the Future

So how come, having said to number one daughter “Don’t let me buy anything else today, or perhaps ever.”, I still end up with a Lego Back to the Future kit?

Office Tidying

Just had a visit from a Fire Safety person (#nogoodwillcomeofthis)

He didn’t really have to say much. Just look around my office at the collection of daisy chained mains cables, piles of paper and other inflammable detritus lying around the place. So, time for a tidy up methinks. My bin is now full and I can see part of the surface of my desk. And two mains extensions have gone back to the systems team. I also found this rather nice button while I was clearing up. Ongoing.

Update on 2013-08-05 11:05 by Rob

Ha. Found the other button. Knew I had two.

Humber Bridge Toll System Shutdown

The minic system in the bridge control room

Little known fact. Since 1998, if you have driven over the Humber Bridge and paid a toll then you have been interacting with some software that I wrote. Ian Bell and myself produced the instation and minic software that has been keeping track of bridge crossings and toll takings. We worked with Siemens Road Traffic Controls who put the hardware into the booths, our code kept track of mis-registrations and printed out the totals tables. It’s been working ever since, with a mid term upgrade and a little problem when it lasted longer than it was supposed to.

And today, just after 5 o’clock in the afternoon, I turned it off forever.

The final moments

The system is being replaced by an altogether more up to date one, which allows for toll payment without stopping, special rf badges and all kinds of new fangled things.

It seems like less and less of my software is being used in the world. For a magical time a few years ago programs I had written were putting datestamps on Budweiser beer and Cadbury’s Roses, passing part programs into machines that cut wing-spars for aircraft, measuring winch lengths on trawlers and flushing toilets in the Reckit and Coleman test labs in Hull. Happy days.