Flying with Bad User Interfaces

So today I was lucky enough to get to fly out to Seattle for the MVP Summit. That’s twice in one year. Lovely. We took off and before long I was playing with the in-flight entertainment. As you do. The picture quality and sound were excellent. The range of movies and TV shows as wide. But the user interface was horrible.

Take the screen above. The user interface is touch driven, so you are reaching out with your fat fingers on the end of your wobbly arm to hit one of the two buttons, which do fairly critical things. Get the wrong button and you will be upset. So why are the buttons so close together, so small, and why is the text on them so hard to read?

And then there’s this:

This is how you pick the films. The screen is pretty enough but it is filled up with useless information. The titles of the films themselves are impossible to discern on the artwork and the scroll targets are tiny tiny.  If they had thought about it they could have put the name of every film, in text, on one screen and saved us the hassle of grinding through the pages.

Add to this a very unresponsive and inaccurate input and you have a recipe for an unhappy user. And the annoying thing for me is that the service, once you started watching, was very good indeed. It was just that someone really didn’t think how the user interface was supposed to work.

Triella WI ask the hard questions

One tough audience. No really.

Some time back I was invited to give a talk about computers at Triella Women’s Institute. So today I went off to strut my stuff. It was great  fun. I talked a bunch of what I thought was computer common sense and then I stopped and asked for questions.

I’ve forgotten what the first question was, but I won’t forget the second one in a hurry. “Why did Blackberry go bust?”. Hmmm. Tricky. And not quite what I was expecting. Anyhoo, I thought I’d better have a crack at the answer. Blackberry have managed to go from Hero to Zero in a few short years. There was a time when everyone who was anyone had a Blackberry phone. Now just about nobody does. Personally I reckon they took their eye off the ball for too long and assumed that people would always want what they made because they always had.

Blackberry aren’t the only ones who have taken a pounding from the new wave of touch screen devices spearheaded by Apple but they were the ones that were last with a proper response. And they are now paying the price. And it didn’t help that their service broke more times than it ever, ever, should have.

Next up was a question along the lines of “Why is Windows 8 so horrible?”. Hmm. Tricky again. Actually Windows 8 is not that bad. It is just irritatingly different when you first start with it. My top tip is to use the Windows key to start a search for your chosen program. I just press Windows, type “WO” and then hit enter. And up comes Word. Much easier and quicker than any mouse powered start menu. Of course I didn’t help my case by being horribly inept when I was trying to show this off, because the keyboard to my tablet was safely stored in my bag….

Then we talked about all sorts, from Smart TVs, to password policies, to the perils of dodgy power cables. Great fun, and thanks for inviting me.

You can find the slides here.

More Big Lego Brick Storage Boxes

Today I bought some more Giant Lego Bricks today to store things in. I’m going to fit them together with the ones I bought last week. Number one son was not convinced. “You’ll have problems getting things out of the boxes at the bottom” he said.

“That’s where you’re wrong” I replied. “I’m not going to put anything in the bottom boxes”.

That told him. I think.

Great Big Lego Bricks

Just bought a bunch of these to put things in. They are great big Lego bricks, around 25cm x 50cm which you can put things in. And they fit together just like normal sized ones. So you can build a fort with them.

From the look of the reviews on Amazon they are very popular. Particularly with five year olds. But I like them too.

John Mayer at the O2–thanks to Hacked

In July this year I took part in Hacked at the O2 in London. It was an absolutely brilliant hackathon, made all the better by the fact that I managed to win one of the competitions. My Difficultifier got People’s Choice Award, which was completely wonderful. What made it even better was finding out that part of the prize was four tickets to any show at the O2 Dome over the next year. Splendid.

I mentioned this to Number One daughter. “John Mayer’s playing the dome in October” she said. Done.

So, thanks to those wonderful O2 people, particularly Cristiano Betta and Kevin Prince, today we were sitting in seats up close to the stage, having just come from the O2 Lounge where we had been preparing for the performance with a couple of cocktails. As you do (or as had been laid on for us)

This is Gabrielle Aplin, who did a sterling job providing support and had an absolutely cracking backing band.

.. and this is the man himself, with some good advice for us all. He started early and gave us a two hour demonstration of why he is just so darned good. If you’ve not heard of John Mayer, then seek him out. Blues, rock, country, playing the guitar behind your back.  The works.  Just really, really good.

A Trip to London

This is the fancy new roof over the courtyard of the British Museum. We’re here because we are having a couple of days in London and fancied seeing all the good stuff that our enterprising ancestors plundered from ancient civilisations far and wide.

I think that this is a very early prototype for the very first Simpsons episode. But I may be wrong.

We were looking at the mosaics and noting that the resolution was reasonable, but the frame rate seemed a bit slow. Great fun and probably even cultural.

All the Fun of Hull Fair 2013

Hull Fair is in town. We didn’t manage to make it last year, what with one thing and another and horrible weather. Today though we thought we’d go for it. I took the big camera and cunningly concealed it underneath my jacket, so that I looked like any other heavily pregnant middle aged tall bloke.

We just went on the big wheel to take pictures and then on Hook a Duck to win a teddy. Then we bought some nougat and headed off for a pie at Fudge just down the road.

Indeed.

3,000 Followers on Twitter. Sometimes.

I’m pleased (and a bit surprised) to find that I now have over 3,000 followers on Twitter. I’ve been close to the magic number for a while now, but it seems that there have been a bit of un-following going on where I’m concerned (or perhaps some Twitter spam-bots have been shut down). All I can say is that this has caused my numbers to bounce around the magic figure for a few days, but now I really can say that I’ve made it past the magic number.

I wonder if I should tweet about it?

Improving your University Timetable

This year the university is making available an electronic version of the timetable for all staff and students. It is best described as “a work in progress” because that is what it is. Lots of wonderful things are promised for the future, including Outlook integration and proper, personalised timetables. But for now it is a bit unwieldy to use.

Which is not good enough for Tom, one of our students, who has built a Python program that reads the data and then lets you display your timetable and do all the things that you’d really want to do with it. You can find out about it here.

Incidentally, I found his blog post via http://hullcompsciblogs.com/

This has a bunch of good student blogs, and if you are from Hull and starting blogging you can ask them to add yours to the syndication.

Saturday Open Day

First sitting

Second sitting

Up until now we’ve been very lucky with the weather for our open days. Not so today. The weather dial has flipped over to “horrible” and seems to be stuck there. However, we did have quite a few brave souls who made it through the wind and wet to come along to see us. I did a couple of presentations and showed off my Cubelets And why not.

Thanks to both bunch of folks for being great audiences, laughing at my jokes and even going “Wooo” when I uttered the immortal words “robmiles.com”.

Postgrad Party Fun

We had our Postgraduate Welcome party today. Some of the same attractions as lst week’s Undergraduate paty, including the Occulus Rift, which I had a go with and turns out to be great fun.  We had the racing cars. And some of the same quiz questions.

These folks came first and were very pleased with their prize. As they should be.

These are the folks that came second.

And this is the “Malteaser” team who came third. But they did get two boxes…

My favourite question from the quiz was this:

Any ideas?

Hornsea Mere on Sunday

After lunch the weather was lovely, so we thought it might be nice to go out to Hornsea Mere for a walk and take some photographs. So we did.

New students, if you are looking for a nice place to go with mum and dad when they drop round to see you, then I can recommend it. The coffee shop has had an overhaul and does a really nice line in scones and cream. It is around 25 minutes from Cottingham, you can feed the ducks and then go and have a look at the seaside.

You can even hire a boat and splash about a bit.

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.