Saturday Open Day

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Today we had our last Saturday Open Day for a while. Thanks for coming folks. I said I'd put your picture up on the blog, and here you all are. Hope you enjoyed your visit and have a good journey home.

Very pleased to see that they've used one of my pictures on the posters on the stands. I took the one on the right when I was acting as Graduands Marshal in the July ceremonies. You can find the original here. 

Creating Surveys using OneDrive

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I really like surveymonkey. I use it quite a bit. When we want to pick the pizza toppings for Three Thing Game I put up a quick survey and then I have a cunning little Excel spreadsheet that works out how many pizzas I need to order. The only problem I have with the service is that I'm from Yorkshire in England, and this gives me a disposition which is not disposed to parting with money. And the free surveys that you get are great, but for some of the good stuff you have to pay money. 

However, I just found a way of getting free surveys from OneDrive. Better yet, it makes the surveys and delivers the results straight into an Excel spreadsheet that you can work in online. So I might be able to integrate my cunning spreadsheet (Pro tip: around 2.5 students per large pizza seems to work) into this as well. 

You make a new survey by pressing the Create button on the OneDrive website. Select Excel survey and a wizard starts up that will talk you through creating your survey

 

You can enter a number of different kinds of question, including Yes/No and multiple choice. Each question can have a subtitle if you really want it to.

Finally, when you've finished, you can preview the questionnaire and get a link to it, which can be shortened into a tiny one. You can find my cheese survey here.

The survey results end up in a spreadsheet in your OneDrive storage which you can use as you would any other. When you open it all the responses are there for you to look at. 

Very nice, and I'll be using it for the next Three Thing Game I reckon. 

Mugs Game

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I actually got to see one of our 2014 mugs today. As a way of saying welcome in August we sent out a bunch of mugs to all our new students. We're going to do this every year, and of course they are numbered with the year of entry. One of our first years brought his into the Festival of Daring and Excitement and I managed to grab a picture.

We had the mugs printed and posted by those lovely people at JaCee Print and I'd never actually seen a "real one" until today. 

And they do look rather good, which is nice. (Oh, and if you were a late arrival with us and you never got your mug, get in touch and we'll sort you out with one). 

Car Trouble

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I managed to get this stepper to turn, which was more than I did with my car engine...

I managed to get this stepper to turn, which was more than I did with my car engine...

I've not had a car let me down for a very long time. It happened today. I was moving at speed, heading for the C4DI Hardware Meetup when I pressed the button to start the engine and nothing happened. 

Nothing.

So I checked all the obvious things, changed the battery in the remote and finally called the RAC man. He arrived in very good time, took one look at the car and said "I got called out to one of these a while back. Couldn't get it to work".

And so it turned out. The car is presently awaiting  transporter awaiting a trip on a transporter to the garage for diagnosis and hopefully repair. The fault seems to be with the steering column lock (which is at present unlocked but might lock when we start turning the wheel). 

I'd put the notes for the C4DI stuff on the web (we were playing with stepper motors, you can find the stuff here). Hopefully everyone did too.

Royalty at Hull

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This is HRH Prince Andrew, Duke of York, with Prof. Ken Hawick, our head of department

This is HRH Prince Andrew, Duke of York, with Prof. Ken Hawick, our head of department

I've not thought that much about royalty in the past. I like collecting small paper pictures of the Queen, or as it is more commonly known, money, but beyond that our paths have not crossed much at all. Until today, when His Royal Highness the Duke of York came to see us at Hull.

Prince Andrew stopped off in the department, where we showed him some of our new toys and what we were doing with them. Then he moved on to a meeting at C4DI which had been organised by the Yorkshire Post Business Club to bring industrialists, educators and local government together for a roundtable debate on apprenticeships, education and vocational learning. It was very interesting. Prince Andrew showed has obviously thought very hard about the issues and had a lot of sensible things to say.

Two things came out of this for me. One was that as the Duke of York he has a very deep interest in Yorkshire (I'd not thought of this aspect of the title before) and the other was that in our department we are doing a lot of the things that he thought were essential to get business and industry going in the area. I said as much (I hope I didn't interrupt him) and I mentioned that I'd been talking to our First Year about just these issues that morning (I had).

In my talk to the new students earlier in the day I'd said that you should regard your time at university as least in part as an exercise in brand building. I'm very keen that folks make sure that when they do something rather good they get the maximum benefit for it. This includes publishing things (both in the marketplace and shared source), blogging, taking part in forums and giving talks. If you get it right they call you, not the other way round.

As he left the prince called out to me "Good luck with your students..", which was rather nice. 

All Star Departmental Video

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We thought it might be fun to make a video that gives you a tour of the department and shows you what we get up to. So we did. Camomile is the tour leader and does a wonderful job of showing you round the place. Kudos to Rachel for putting the whole thing together and making it look so good.

Warning: This report does not contain any flash photography, but there may be a cameo appearance from yours truly.

Watch "The Men Who Made Us Spend"

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I'm a dream target as far as advertisers are concerned. I like new shiny things and have got pretty good at rationalising my impulses to purchase gadgets. I don't buy a new game console, I "invest" in it. I reckon that if you do the maths you would probably discover that my shiny Xbox One purchase actually makes about as much commercial sense as buying shares in a bank. So I reckon I can call it an investment.

Anyhoo, I watched "The Men Who Made Us Spend" last night with more than a smidgen of interest. It told the story of how advertisers have turned us all into eternal children who can be provoked into impulse buying simply by showing us stuff in films and on TV. The presenter told the story of how the makers of the Star Wars films were the ones that first discovered this magical effect but I'm not too sure about that. I remember Thunderbirds.  

I, along with thousands of other schoolkids of the 1960s, were glued to to the antics of International Rescue, with their squad of numbered machines that made them very easy to order in toy shops. Which just happened to be full of them at the time. They even managed to corner the girls market too, with  Lady Penelope. I also remember my dad showing a keen interest in the program, and often reading my TV21 magazine before I did. And we were bonding over Men from Uncle movies and James Bond cars as well. 

"The Men Who Made Us Spend" made some very good points, but I think if they had gone a bit further back in time they would have discovered that this kind of thing has been going on since the point in human existence when we had a bit of spare cash jingling in our pockets. The scale has changed and the toys have changed but this stuff is all powered by human nature. And that hasn't changed for thousands of years.

The whole series is well worth seeing. I watched the episode while building a Lego Mini. Go figure. 

Most of Monty Python Mostly Live

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Monty Python Live.PNG

I was just a bit too young for Monty Python first time around. That is, the show was on telly, but dad wouldn't let me stay up to watch it. At the time I was mostly into radio comedy, being a huge fan of I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again.  I still have some reel-to-reel tapes of their shows in the loft. Now that was the proper stuff. And anyway, Spike Milligan and Q5 were already doing that kind of thing.

When I finally got round to watching the show (on the old black and white telly that we kept upstairs) I thought the first few seasons were marvelous. The structure was just amazing. They were supposed to be anarchic and wild but to me the best bit was the way that the various sketches were threaded together.

That linkage disappeared in the later seasons, when the cast discovered that their success was such that they could to turn up and shout at the camera to get huge laughs from a devoted fan base, but if you've not seen the first two seasons you really should seek them out, they are fantastic constructions of comic genius. 

Their earlier films brought back the tight structure again and of course I ended up with the books, records and whatnot over the years. The world of computing owes the comedy troupe a debt as well, the origins of "spam" email are the celebrated "spam with everything" sketch and the Python language is so named because the creator "Just likes Monty Python". 

And so we come to the live show this evening, either a cynical cash-in from once great performers or a chance to see the magic live again. Or perhaps a bit of both. But you have to go along, don't you?

We turned up at the cinema and were told that "due to a satellite fault" we would not be able to see all of nearly all of Monty Python. Technical troubles meant that a third of the picture was being lopped off the screen. They didn't blame the satellite for the failure of the air conditioning (perhaps they thought that an audience with a high geek factor wouldn't fall for that one) but at least the ice cream was keenly priced.

As for the performance, it was everything I expected. Even with the missing part of the picture. Most of the gems were present and correct (even if John Cleese kept forgetting his lines - probably out of boredom). There were some clips from the original shows, including the wonderful Fish Slapping Dance and some sparkly song and dance numbers.  All in all the evening delivered.

I think there is probably an ancient Chinese saying somewhere along the lines of "Age turns you into the things you most despised when you were younger." And if there isn't, there probably should be. At the end of their career the Pythons are the kind of thing that the younger versions of themselves would have lampooned mercilessly. But they are all clever enough to be aware of that and the need to keep the customers happy. In the end we all left with smiles, humming "Always look on the bright side of life".

And I'll probably end up buying the inevitable Blu-Ray and book.......

York Chocolate Story - A Delicious Place to Go

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We went to York Chocolate Story today. It's an exhibition in York that tells the story of chocolate. So its name really makes sense. Its also very good. We had a genial guide who talked us through the history of chocolate makers in the region.

Lots of names that were huge in chocolate and sweets were based around York. (My claim to fame is that for many years the laser marking machine that put datestamps on Kit-Kats was powered by software what I wrote).

Anyhoo, if you are looking for a well put together little tour and you fancy making your own chocolate bar, or you've got kids, I can strongly recommend it.

Free Zinio Magazines for Lumia Owners

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Most of the flat surfaces in our house are covered with magazines. Every now and then we have a clear-out, and every now and then I want to read an article that I've chucked in the bin. So, apart from the fact that they are the absolutely best way to read anything, magazines aren't working as well for me as they could.

This weekend I wanted to read a camera review from a copy of the Amateur Photographer magazine  that I hadn't bought when it came out a while back. So I took a look at getting an online copy. Of course I could get it from the Apple store, but that would tie me to Apple products, and I don't use my iPad enough to have it charged and ready to go at any given time. 

So I ended up downloading Zinio onto my Lovely Lumia 1520 and then buying the magazine from them. Zinio is available for lots of platforms, which means I should be able to read it on any device, including my Surface Pro 3 when it comes. (such excitement)

The app and the purchasing experience were pretty smooth, although I was a bit confused when I was asked to pay in dollars. Turns out that because a while ago I told my Lumia it was american to get Cortana to work in the UK, all the apps think they are in america too. 

This actually works very well because at the moment Zinio are doing three month's free subscription to three magazines for american Lumia owners who join up. In other words, if you have a US Lumia you can get a whole bunch of free magazines, including Popular Mechanics, a really interesting US magazine that doesn't seem to have a UK counterpart. 

The reading experience on the phone is not as good as a proper magazine, but then putting ten magazines in your pocket is tricky too. I'm not sure if I'll go over to reading all my magazines on phone and tablet, but given that this would mean I could read all the old issues really easily, it is quite tempting. 

What I really, really, want though is some way that I could convert my printed paper into an electronic licence. I'd be quite happy to pay a small fee (say fifty pence or so) to be able to access the digital version of a magazine that I'm about to throw out. This could be activated by scanning a barcode in the publication, and it needn't go live until a couple of months after the magazine is published. 

A Cunning Use for Screen Shots

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This picture is not particularly relevant to the post, but  Hull Station is just over to the right, and I don't want to show you any of my booking codes....

This picture is not particularly relevant to the post, but  Hull Station is just over to the right, and I don't want to show you any of my booking codes....

I'm not sure I'm the only person who does this, but I don't think everyone does, so I thought I'd mention it. You quite often find things on your phone that you want to "bookmark". This happens to me when I need to use that email with the magic sequence of characters that will unlock a rail ticket delivery from the machine in Hull station.  I don't like having to open the email, scroll to the right bit and then enlarge the characters so that I can read them. Particularly if there are a bunch of people waiting behind me. 

So what I do now is open the email, zoom it so that it just fills the screen how I want, and then take a screenshot of the phone display. This is really easy to find later and has exactly the data that I want, with no messing at all. Once I've picked up the ticket I can then erase the picture, ready for the next one. 

Works for me.