I actually typed this in live in front of the First Year class this afternoon, just at the start of my 1:15 lecture. I was very impressed by the silence as I was typing it. But it stayed silent when they saw what it said......
Oh well. Welcome back folks for another semester of C# shenanigans.
It's hard to put into words the fear and paranoia that you suffer as a result of your garden waste bin going missing after it has been emptied.
But I'm going to try wheelie hard. (sorry)
At least it came back. And we are going to stick a large friendly number on it. Before someone else does....
Ceremony 2
Ceremony 3
There are two Rob Miles's working at the University of Hull. This can cause problems occasionally. As when you hear "We've ordered academic dress for Rob Miles to wear at the degree ceremony on Friday" and think that all will be well.
Of course, that wasn't me. So I had to make do with a gown and cape that we grabbed from the returns, plus a hat that was strangely large. In fact I really wished that I'd spent some time practicing the Michael Jackson spin before the ceremony. I reckon that I could have done one of those without my hat actually turning. That would have been so cool. At least I think so.
Anyhoo, hat problems aside (I gave up on the hat in the end as it kept falling off) we had a couple of really splendid ceremonies. It's always a bit nerve wracking getting everyone into line and doing the warm-up speech, but it was so worth it to see the looks on the faces of the graduates and their families. I took my usual pictures from the stage, they came out quite well. If you click through the pictures onto Flickr you can find the larger versions and seek out yourself.
The only real snag with today was that it's put me in the wrong place to get into the Global Game Jam that is running over the weekend. Jon took a bunch of students over to the Grimsby event and I'm going to be nipping over during to see what is going on, but I don't think I'll have the time to get down and build an entry. Then again, when I find out the theme and the mood takes me, who knows.....
It wasn't the tiny bit of snow we had today that caused the problems this moring. It was the fact that it had melted and then refrozen, covering everything with shiny ice.
Frozen the movie is a nice enough diversion (although I prefer Brave which has much the same story and fewer songs). But Frozen the drive to work doesn't have much to commend it.
Spent some of today making the Lego Birds that we got last week. This is what our mantelpiece looks like now.
We got the robots last year on holiday. We don't have the heart to split them up...
One of my more sensible resolutions is to have a tidy desk where possible. I tried this before and it worked well, until some kind of task based entropy kicked in and things got all untidy again. But today I started with my "making things" desk and it is now a lot more tidy, as you can see above. .
The idea is to have enough storage space so that I can get something out, work on it and then put it away before moving onto the next task. We'll just have to see how this goes. When I get my office desk tidy (which is presently such a mess that I'm too ashamed to post a picture) then I'll be able to say that I've cracked this one.
..then I decided that this would be silly.
I thought Id try out a few New Year Resolutions, just to see if any of them would work.
One thing I thought might be sensible and give me a bit more free time would be to resolve not to blog every day.
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).
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.
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.
I did a Rather Useful Seminar yesterday about how and why you should blog. Unfortunately I forgot to record it, but you can find the slides here.
Spent the afternoon watching the Grand Prix and making lights come on when we pressed buttons. Good times.
Today I reduced the number of emails in my inbox from around 1,400 (stupid number) to around 20 (much more sensible).
Go me.
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.
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
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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.
I did a couple of Open Day talks today. Two good audiences, (see above). I took the Kinect 2 Sensor and the 3D printer along to Lecture Theatre A as well, so I was able to show how it all worked and even imortalise a few visitors in Carbonite.
I hope you all enjoyed the day and had a safe journey back.
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).
I was alone in the house with these last week, and didn't eat one. Such willpower..
We had our first programming lab today. I was popping in and out as I had a bunch of other things to do (including writing some briefing notes for our first ever "Festival of Daring and Excitement" which is tomorrow. Everyone seemed to be getting on fine, which is nice.
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.
Rob Miles is technology author and educator who spent many years as a lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Hull. He is also a Microsoft Developer Technologies MVP. He is into technology, teaching and photography. He is the author of the World Famous C# Yellow Book and almost as handsome as he thinks he is.
