Last Open Day for a While

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We had our last Saturday Admissions Open Day for a while today. Thanks to everyone who came along, particularly those who had travelled a long way to get to us. Don't forget that you can get an electronic copy of the C# Yellow Book here. You can also find a complete set of our first year programming content on the same link.

We had a question about masters level Computer Systems Engineering during the Q&A session. If you want to know exactly which courses we teach (including MEng Computer Systems Engineering) you can go here.

If you want to keep up with news from the department you can keep up to date with what we are doing here. http://www.wherewouldyouthink.com/

Trains, Taxis and Open Days

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Today we travelled back to Hull. Things were a bit time critical as it turned out. The train arrived in Hull around 50 minutes before I was due to give an open day talk. But thanks to the magic of taxis I got up to the university in time and it all went swimmingly. Sorry if I bored you with tales of who I'd been mixing with the night before.

The talk went great, thanks for being a lovely audience.

Fixing your WiFi Radio

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I'm quite proud of myself. I've managed to fix something. In the kitchen we have an internet radio which works quite well. We need one because there are no other radio signals that work properly there. But sometimes it stops working, It's taken me a while to figure out the cause of the problem, but finally I have the answer.

It's the microwave. 

The confusing thing is that because the radio uses a lot of buffering it doesn't stop as soon as the microwave comes on and blocks out the signal. The radio plays for a minute or so and then drops out. Then, when you turn the microwave off it takes a few seconds for the radio to re-establish connections with the server and start working again. 

I've checked on-line and apparently this is not an uncommon problem and the microwave radiation isn't hazardous as such, but it is irritating. 

For me the fix was quite easy. I just switched the WiFi channel from 6 to 10 and the problem has gone away. Go me. 

Students that Blog

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I strongly encourage all our students to blog. Not because I think they'll gain a world following, but because it is a great way to practice writing. And it turns out you don't need a world following anyway. You just need that one potential employer to find their way to your site and suddenly you are streets ahead of everyone else.  I know students who have had job offers purely on the basis of their blogs. 

Anyhoo, here are a few Hull folks who have taken up the blogging challenge. These are just the first few that sprang to mind. Apologies to anyone I've missed out. Ping me an email and I'll update the list. If you want to go on the Blogroll (not sure about that name) at wherewouldyouthink, let me know about that too.

Hatless by Degrees

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Ceremony 2

Ceremony 2

Ceremony 3

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..... 

The Quest for a Tidy Desk

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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. 

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.