Greeting Card Conundrums

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card.jpg

So I'm tidying up at home today (it does happen) and I come across a box of Christmas cards that I bought last year and never sent. Oh well. 

Last year I got everything wrong. I bought a whole bunch of cards and then didn't get around to writing them. Then I noticed that some folks around the place were not writing cards this year, but instead donating to charity and sending round an email . So I thought I'd do the same.

Then the Oxfam web site crashed half way through my transaction and I wasn't sure whether I'd donated or not. By the time I got a bank statement that confirmed the money had moved it was too late to send any messages around. So I looked like I'd not even tried.

So this year I did things properly. Cards were written and delivered around the department (I was especially proud of how I wrote them in the order of the offices in the corridor so I could deliver them in one pass) and I've also made a donation. I had just enough cards too. (or so I thought until I found this extra box). 

The non-special Special Tool

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Last week a bit fell off our oven, forcing me to abandon some pinball fun and go home to fix it. I love pinball, but I like eating even more. 

Anyhoo, once things had been put back together I noticed that the bulb in the oven light had failed. It was underneath a screw in glass dome that wouldn't come off. So I did what every self-respecting man of the new millennium would do. I went on to Amazon to find out what was out there that I could use to fix it. And I turned up a kit that include a replacement glass dome, a bulb and, most importantly, a special tool that could be used to remove the dome. 

Except that it didn't work. What do you call a special tool that doesn't work? Well, it's not special, that's for sure. So I had to do something that really, really, hurts. In all kinds of ways. I called in a man to fix it. 

Thanks to a cancellation he turned up in good time, produced a special too that looked exactly like mine and used it to remove the dome. Oh well. Perhaps some of the specialness in these tools comes from the person wielding it....

Anyhoo, we are now in a position to be able to watch the Christmas turkey cooking, which is exactly where I wanted to be.

Making Less of Rob

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I've been trying to lose weight for a while. When I first made the decision I did what anyone in my position would do, which is that I bought some gadgets to do the job for me. I got a Fitbit to track my activity levels, and a set of Fitbit Aria scales to track my declining bulk.  And I waited to get lighter. 

This did not work. 

In fact it didn't work to the extent that the scales stopped recognising me as Rob and referred to me only as "Guest". I'd managed to put on so much extra weight that I was no longer me. Turns out that gadgets alone don't work. 

So I tried another extra step, which was to exercise a bit more and eat a bit less. I tried to live by the maxim "No snacks after seven pm". It wasn't easy, but after a while I got back on the radar of the weighing machine and started losing a few pounds every now and then. 

The scales are rather neat. They are hooked up to WiFi and each time you weigh yourself the numbers are sent up into the cloud. A couple of weeks ago I weighed myself and promptly got an email from FitBit congratulating me on reaching one of my goals. I think the goal I had reached was "You have got back to the same weight you had when you started the programme", but at this stage I'll take any praise, even that from a faceless piece of robot software.  The Fitbit activity tracker is neat too and did a good job of tracking my activity right up to the point where I lost it. Maybe I'll get another one when I start doing more exercise.

My plan is to get to the point where I can  put on some trousers I bought a few years ago thinking "They are a bit tight, but I can slim down into them.". We shall see.

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.