CPC Good Service

Rather a big box for just 10 3.5mm jack plugs, but it did arrive the next day....

I think you find out most about a company when they are operating in "failure mode". CPC just did this, and they passed with flying colours. I'd ordered some bits and bobs for the wedding lights (where I've been spending most of my time recently - big reveal to come later - at a wedding) and I'd ordered a pack of 10 plugs. However, just 1 turned up in a bag all on its own.

I rang up CPC and told them how lonely the plug was, and how it was missing its 9 friends who somehow seemed to have got left behind. They promised to sort it out and the following day a box with the missing plugs in it turned up. Of course I'd have been slightly more impressed if it had all arrived at the same time, but I'm very pleased to see that when things don't go right they own the problem and then fix it. 

If you are buying any bits and bobs they are a great place to take a look. Their service is good (see above) and their prices are pretty reasonable too. 

Back to Hull

..and so we are back in lovely Hull. Good weather and a trip up town for a Roast Beef and Stilton sandwich down at McCoys. Life is good. 

No Mr. Bond. I expect you to fry......

Feel quite a bit better today. Well enough to watch some telly. It's Sunday afternoon, and so that means that ITV will be showing a Bond movie. And they are. "The Spy Who Loved Me". One of the worst ones in my opinion. But at the very end I saw something that piqued my interest. The last part of the credits was given over to mentions of people the producers wished to thank. This is the list of sponsors who have given money for product placement. All the usual suspects were there, Lotus cars, Seiko watches, etc etc. And right at the end: "North Thames Gas Board". 

North Thames Gas Board? What on earth did they do? Perhaps they were mentioned in early drafts of the script:

Scene 67: James Bond's apartment. James and an exotic Russian spy are having a candle-lit dinner. The exotic spy (her name is not important) looks up from her caviar vol-aux-vents and speaks:

Exotic Spy: 'James?'
Bond: 'Yes, my darling?'
Exotic Spy: 'This food, it is so delicious. Did you cook it yourself?'
Bond: 'Yes, my darling.'
Exotic Spy: 'And tell me,  what is your secret to achieving such fantastic flavours?'
Bond: 'Well, er, actually, its all about the gas that you use......'

Scene 210: Evil lair. Bond and the exotic spy (her name is still not important) are tied together on the end of a long rope which is hung over an enormous, fiery pit. The evil villain (his name is not important either) addresses them from a control room full of shiny sponsored machinery and expendables in brightly coloured boiler suits:

Bond: 'You won't get me to talk you know.'
Evil villain: 'I think I will. You see that fiery pit below you...'
Bond: 'What of it?'
Evil villain: 'Do you want to know what kind of gas I'm using.......'

Real Man Flu

Well, that's it. I'm properly ill. I feel like I've been savagely beaten by experts. And not in a good way. I spent half of the day lying in bed feeling sorry for myself and the rest of the day pottering around the place.

Feeling sorry for myself. 

Falling Ill

I think I'm coming down with something. It took me 30 minutes to change a brake light bulb on the car, and 20 minutes of that time was finding the socket spanner that I'd dropped into the toolbox to make it easier to carry.

April Fooling

I didn't have time to set up any April Foolage this year. The best one I ever did was this one, which I did three years ago. Blimey, how time flies. Great fun. Maybe next year...

Properly Lazy Sunday

Spent a lot of time today not doing much. And really enjoyed not doing it.

Skipping

Spent a big chunk of the day in the garage. In the "Good Old Days" (tm) a garage was somewhere you kept the car. Nowadays it seems to be the place where you keep the family collection of empty cardboard boxes,bits of wood that at one time you thought you might have a use for and things that the kids once played with.

Anyhoo, I've filled the skip with stuff and covered myself with dust and nostalgia. Next stop, the loft.......

When water turns bad...

I have a love hate relationship with water. It's great for some things and I understand that it is one of the primary components of Strawberry Flavoured Milk, but I don't like the way that it lurks in my loft looking for a way out. Tonight I discovered that it had found one, courtesy of a leaking pipe connection to our cold water tank. 

I noticed this just after a shower (good water) when I found that some of the pipes in the back of the airing cupboard were damp (bad water). For half a second I managed to convince myself it was condensation, but then reality set in and I had to go up the ladder and take a look. And there it was. 

Fortunately I've got to the stage in my life where I have a collection of suitably large and scary spanners to hand which can be used to tighten things up a bit and so for now I think the leak has been sorted. And there is a Lego bucket (that is a bucket that used to contain Lego not a bucket made of Lego, that would be silly) underneath the offending joint just in case of future problems. 

The good news is that most of the water had traveled straight down the outside of the pipes towards the airing cupboard, and evaporated on the way. The bad news is that some of it stopped off in the cupboard above to ruin some bedding that we had put there. 

Oh well. At least it stopped me having a boring evening playing with computers.....

Extra Large Applicants Event

We had our last Saturday Applicants Day today, which was our biggest ever I reckon. We had overspill seating beyond the overspill seating, and Lecture Theatre A was pretty much full as you can see above. I reckon these folks are well on the way to becoming great students, they have already picked up the knack of sitting towards the back of the auditorium....

Anyhoo, a good time was had by everyone and now I can get used to not having to wear a suit on a Saturday. Thanks to all those who came along, I hope you have a good journey back and that the day was an interesting one. 

Mad March Hackathon

This evening I dropped around to see how the Mad March Hackathon was going.  It seemed to me that things were picking up nicely. The event was hosted by the Platform Expo crew and organised by James, one of our students.  I've got an open day tomorrow which means that I will need a considerable amount of beauty sleep tonight, but I stayed around long enough to make encouraging noises and take a few pictures. 

W'eve got some big plans for hackathon events in the future, it's great to see that they are as popular as ever. 

Stand Up on Friday 21st March

I've mentioned this before, but it is getting closer now.  On Friday 21st of March I'm doing some stand up comedy as part of the Geeks vs. Nerds. You can buy tickets here or on the door. Tickets will also be sold in the Students Union on the Hull University Campus every Thursday and Friday at 12-2pm.

I know my name is not actually on the poster. Maybe next time.....

Update: Unfortunately it looks like the event has been cancelled. I'm very sorry about this. Anyone who has bought tickets can get refunds, go to the site for details. The good news is that I hadn't got around to hiring the clown costume so no money lost.....

Cheque Mate. And Open Day

I was in the bank paying in a cheque  this morning. Ages ago I wrote some stuff about Learning to Program a PIC in C and last week I got what will probably be the last royalty payment as the plan is to open up the content and make it freely available. I'll let you all know when it is released.

Anyhoo I was stood at the machine and looking baffled, as only I can do, and this nice assistant ended up having to come over and point out that the "Payments and Transfers" button was the one you press to pay a cheque in.  Which I found most confusing. Why can't it just be have "PAY IN A CHEQUE" written on it in large friendly letters.

I was thinking about this before I did my talk to the Open Day crowd. They were expecting to hear from someone who is versed in the latest technology and able to bend all machines to his will. Oh well.

That's Torn it

I was going to have a play with Tearaway for the PS Vita today.  I picked up a cheap copy yesterday. But since I seem to have lost the charger and the magic Vita cable that it uses, I'm going to have to wait a bit. Oh well.  

Creativity

In case you were wondering, this is what creativity looks like. At least in my part of the house....

So now it's OneDrive...

Just found this in Word 2013. I wonder how it did that?

We Welcome our Robot Masters

I took this picture in the robots lab a little while back. We've got some "Eddie" robots that we are going to get wandering around the department. Should be fun. 

Open Day Ego Mania

We had an admissions open day today. First one of 2014. And it was packed, which was rather nice. I did the opening talk, as I do, and then we split up the attendees to allow the prospective students a chance for a lecture experience and us to have a chat with their parents. And someone asked me a question that I've not heard before, but struck me as a very sensible one. "We've been going round universities and looking at their departments for a while now. What has Hull got that they haven't?".

I could have said we have Three Thing Game or Rather Useful Seminars or Seed Software or Freeside or any number of things. Instead I said "I work here." It got a laugh, which was nice, and then we went onto mention all of the above plus a whole bunch of other things. 

As I was preparing to answer the question I looked across at Mike, John, Brian and Neil from the department and I knew that they were expecting me to say exactly what I did.......

Domain Name Suffering

Turns out these numbers are quite important

Every now and then I do something really idiotic. I try not to, but perhaps there is a "Conservation of Stupidity" thing at work in the universe which means that every half way clever thing Robert does must be compensated for with an action of outright daftness.

Anyhoo, yesterday I was working on www.wherewouldyouthink.com, a little site for use by anyone thinking about university. It has a bunch of bits and bobs about student life and whatnot. And I was re-hosting it all using glorious Squarespace Version 6. To make this work I had to update the DNS settings for the site. And I remembered that I'd done that for this venerable site only recently, so I might as well copy those settings.  So I opened up my doman name hosting folks and made some adjustments. And by mistake I ended up changing the IP address of my two sites to completely the wrong values. This turned out to be a very, very, silly thing to do. 

The IP address is like the telephone number of a host on the internet. It is now part of popular culture. There is usually a point in a crime/spy caper where the evil guys have been posting things on the internet and one of the tech guys says "I've got their IP address, let's go..." Cue onscreen map, squeal of rubber as cars hurtle down ramps and gunfight before end credits. 

We don't like having to remember phone numbers, so we have an address book in our phones that maps names onto the appropriate digits. This saves us work and it is also useful because when someone gets a new handset you can just update their number and stay in touch.

The internet works in just the same way. Normally we don't bother with 198.185.159.135, instead we put www.robmiles.com into our browser. But something has to do the mapping of names to numbers,  and that something is the Domain Name Service, or DNS for short. This is like the address book for the internet. It is very cleverly designed, with a hierarchy of servers giving out addresses for names.

If your computer asks the local network for a host and the network server doesn't know the address of that one it will ask the one above, and so on to the very top of the tree. When a new name is added to the internet it is added to the very top site and eventually the name/address pair percolate down to the all the machines in the tree.

Each server will keep local copies of the address values so that it doesn't have to keep asking the one above it for help. But every now and then it checks to see if the copy it has is up to date. This means that if the address at the top changes it takes a while for this to have an effect. 

So when I broke my DNS settings everything kept going for a while. But then my site started to become inaccessible. And in a very strange way. Depending on which network I used, the site would either work or it wouldn't, depending on whether the DNS data was "fresh" or "old". 

Of course I figured out what had happened very quickly, and fixed it fast. But it still took the best part of a day for things to settle down and return to normal.  Oh well, I'll be a lot more careful in future when I fiddle with those numbers.

Driving a Hard Bargain. And weddings.

An action packed day today. First we were off to a wedding fair. I'm not getting married, but I know someone who is..... Anyhoo, it was fun. Lots of free cake. 

Then, after lunch, it was on to look at second hand cars. Again, not for me, but apparently I'm the "car expert" in the family, mainly because I used to drive a very old, first generation Mini, and you had to become a bit of a car expert just to keep those kinds of cars going. So it was my job to kick tyres and wear a leather jacket in a knowledgeable way.

Times have moved on a bit. In my time in this part of the market the principle question you had to consider was "How much of this car is actually metal?" as the vehicles of the age tended to turn back into iron ore (or rust as it is more commonly known) really easily. The cars that we saw today, although they were at the lower end of the market, seemed to have all of their metal still present, which is the good news. The bad news is that a modern cars have very expensive engine management systems and other fancy electronic gizmos that are pretty much impossible to fix and very expensive to replace. My Mini had fewer electrical things in it than you could find in the door of a car today.  So rules about low mileage and as new as you can get it still apply in spades.

We  took a car for a test drive. That was fun. The car was being sold as low mileage. As in "freakishly low". As in "we replaced the speedometer last year low". The garage staff had definitely read "Pro-tips for car buyers" Chapter 1, where it is written that "You can tell mileage of a car by wear on things like the top of the gear stick and the foot pedals."  This car had a brand new gear lever and shiny pedals, which shows enterprise on the part of the sales team, but the amount of wobble in the gear linkage and rattles from under the bonnet told a story quite at odds with the number on the dial. 

As we were leaving, promising to think about the purchase, a chap came out with another salesman and examined the car we had just tested. We left with him looking around the vehicle with evident enthusiasm, opening the bonnet, peering inside and looking genuinely interested. I got to thinking that perhaps, if a sale looks like it is teetering on the brink, they get someone to come and do that in front of a prospective customer. But then I am very cynical. 

I only know two things about buying cars. One is that it is a lottery and the other is that it is expensive one way or another. You reach a point where you just have to take a deep breath and take the lowest risk that you can afford. Bit like life really.