Went out for lunch today at Skidby Mill. Very nice. Thought I recognised someone I knew, but lacked the confidence in my identification to go over and say hello. Oh well, sorry Emily. I think it is time I got some new glasses.
I hate water. I'd rather wire up a hundred mains plugs than do anything involving plumbing. Well, perhaps not a hundred. But certainly lots. Today I thought I'd to something simple involving pipework. And of course it all went wrong. After all, it does involve water. Hate the stuff. Have I mentioned this?
We have this fancy water filter thing under the sink and I figured it might be a good idea to replace the filter cartridge. Well, it has been a few years. So I carefully researched the item, bought a couple (in case I break one fitting it) and then successfully made the swap. In five minutes.
I was very impressed with me, as was number one wife. That was, until a puddle appeared under the sink. Turns out that the filter replacing shenanigans had caused a completely different part of the plumbing to start leaking. I can only think that I must have dislodged something hair-triggered under there. I've tightened things and bent them into a position where I think the leakage has stopped, but I'm now researching replacement bits and bobs to fix the problem properly.
Some time ago I bought a flood alarm from Maplin. This is a little circuit that you can put under your sink and it will sound the alarm if it detects water that shouldn't be there. I got it because we had a rather unpleasant homecoming a while back involving a flooded kitchen. I never got around to fitting it though. I worked out that the only real difference it would make would be to change "coming home to a flooded kitchen" into "coming home to a flooded kitchen and an unpleasant buzzing noise".
I'm now researching Raspberry Pi powered solutions which would mean that in the event of a leak I could receive an email which says "You are going to come home to a flooded kitchen...", which might be an improvement I suppose.
I'm doing some writing at the moment. V. exciting. I've spent some time playing with ideas and I've got something that I'm almost happy with. And one consequence of this is that I've opened a "scrap" folder for the project. Turns out I never feel I'm making progress until I've started throwing things away.
It might just be me, but my first attempt at something complicated is not usually much good. It's only when I've tried a few things and thrown them away that I feel I'm getting anywhere.
My scrap folder is a big part of this because one of my golden rules about working is that I never really throw anything away. Instead I create a scrap folder and throw it in there. Two reasons for this. The first is that these days I don't think anyone is ever really short of disk space, so deleting things is not necessary. The second reason is that it might be that my "better" idea is actually a worse one, and I need a way back to where I was.
I could use source code control for this I suppose, but since the work is really a collection of documents and bits and bobs it feels a bit like overkill. So I just make a folder called scrap and drop things in there when I don't think I need them any more.
Went up town today and bought an ironing board that can be adjusted to a height that makes it quite comfortable for me to use. Not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing to be honest...
I'm not a huge fan of TV shows about food preparation to be honest. I've been known to shout "But it's only cooking" at the telly during the final moments of MasterChef, when the music picks up tempo and the voiceover solemnly intones '..and now Anton only has two minutes to finish his Béarnaise sauce..".
To me cooking is that thing you do when you feel hungry, or if you are into advanced cooking an hour or so before you feel hungry, because that's the time it takes to bake a couple of potatoes and lob some sausages into the oven to have with them.
All this means that I didn't have the highest of expectations today when we set of to the Good Food Show. But it was great. First off they had lots of stalls dishing out samples of food (including a wealth of cheeses) and then we got to see the Hairy Bikers do a live presentation.
I was really hoping that they would bring out a Yamaha motorbike engine and discuss how to adjust the valve timings, followed by a few minutes on caring for greasy hair, but instead they did some cookery. However, it was great fun to watch then cook up some bits and bobs. They have a great banter and worked hard to make it very entertaining. Harrogate is a great location for this kind of thing. The theatre is lovely, see above, and the exhibition centre is near the middle of the town, which is a nice place to walk round.
We left burdened down with a whole bunch of samples (including a pint of milk each, which struck me as strange as I already know what milk is like) and some really nice cheese. Much more fun that I was expecting.
Spent the day doing good. Two trips to the tip, one to drop of stuff at the charity shop and then setting up a new run for the guinea pigs. Who, as you can see, are very pleased with the result. Then did some gardening, washed the car and cooked tea.
I'm going into work tomorrow for a rest.
We went to Slimbridge today to look at ducks. As you do. This is easily the most impressive one I've ever seen. I've no idea what make it is though.
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/
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.
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.
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.
I promised these folks, who came along to our open day today, that I'd put them in the blog.
Turns out that I'm a man of my word.
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.
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.
