When is Next Tuesday?

/

Outlook is kind of clever. It will find phrases in emails and offer to do sensible things with them. If it sees "11:00 next Tuesday" it will offer the option to make an appointment for that date.

Thing is, if you get the email on a Monday a human knows that "next Tuesday" is a week tomorrow, not tomorrow. Since if it was tomorrow the sender would have said "tomorrow" rather than "next Tuesday".

If you see what I mean.

Unfortunately Outlook doesn't. Which is why I had some minor palpitations when something I thought was comfortably distant in the future appeared a lot sooner than I was expecting....

Needy OneDrive

/

I love Windows 10. Working well for me. Apart from the way that OneDrive has suddenly become all needy on me. Nary a day goes by without one of the files that I've worked with throwing up a cry for help like the one above. Usually I can fix this by just opening and closing the document, but it is a bit annoying to have to do this.

One thing I have noticed is that if you get a "Couldn't contact the server to get the latest version" message (which I seem to get a lot more often than I should) you can go into the files menu and force Word to use either the server or the local version, removing a potential conflict. But then I usually end up saving everything in a different file anyway just to be safe which is a bit annoying.

But then again, OneDrive did save my bacon today when I, ahem, made slightly more dramatic changes to a file than I intended. All I had to do was drop onto the OneDrive site and pull back the previous version, which was very nice.

Toads at Hull

/

If you do visit the campus you should take a look in the new Art Gallery attached to the library. As well as some lovely paintings they also have displays of all the Larkin Toads that were displayed around the city a few years ago and recently brought back together for a reunion. You can also meet up with one of the original toads that you can just see peeking out of the right hand side of this picture.

Saturday Open Day

/

We're holding a couple of special open days this weekend for admissions candidates. We used the lobby of the spiffy new library to set up and show off our new 3D stuff, which includes a chance to walk round our new student accommodation that hasn't been built yet.

I went fully suited up, and was even complemented on my sharp attire. Mike was doing tours and I was manning the fort with some summer interns who did a great job of showing off the tech.

Throw Away Pictures

/

I'm rubbish at throwing things away. We are in the middle of some domestic renovation that has forced us to confront the huge amount of stuff that we've accumulated over the years. I've found things I haven't touched for years, and I'm still loth to chuck them out.

However, I have found a way to ease the pain of passing in this situation.. I'm taking pictures of the stuff before it goes in the bin. Then I make them into collages, like the one above. The perfect end to this would be to print the collage out and throw it away I suppose....

Irrelevant Picture

/

We've been away for a couple of days and today we drove back. The picture above has nothing to do with any of this. But I do rather like it.

I took the shot last week in London. When she gave me the key the girl at the check-in said "I've given you one of our nice rooms, with a great view". At the time I wondered if this was the best possible pitch she could have used as it might call into question other rooms in the place, but she wasn't wrong about the view. It will be even more interesting when they finish building whatever it is they're building.

Clifton and Balloons

/

Today we spent some time wandering around Clifton, which is a lovely place to be. I've always had fond memories of the place, what with it being where we had our wedding reception a remarkably long time ago.  This is the view of the Clifton Suspension Bridge from the Clifton Hotel terrace, which always brings back memories.

Just around the corner is Royal York Crescent, where number one wife used to live. Great place.

It just so happened that today was the start of the Bristol Balloon festival. We've tried to go and take a look before, but this time we satisfied ourselves with some long distance views over the city.

Quick on the Drawer

/

I made nine drawers tonight. By the end I had a little production line where I worked on the same part of each drawer before moving on to the next one.

I've got one of the drawers slightly wrong, in that the drawer bottom (the thing you can see being slid into the drawer in the diagram) is the wrong way up. But at the moment I don't care that much. Because I've finished making drawers.

Coping with a Skewed Universe

/
20150810_063031337_iOS.jpg

Today I was fitting handles to doors. As you can see. Note that the handles line up exactly. Turns out that there are two ways you can make the door handles of your wardrobes line up.

  1. Fit the handles in the centre of the door and then make the doors line up. (difficult to impossible outside of laboratory conditions)
  2. Fit the doors and then put the handles in the place where they line up. (easy if you stick some tape across the gap and then use this to line the holes up).

I much prefer the second method. Experience has taught me that when you put big things into houses the concepts of "level" and "right angle" kind of go out of the window. This frequently means that you can't get furniture to line up with the floor and ceiling because they are already wrong at the start.

So you have to go for the solution that looks right. If you look very closely at the very top of our wardrobes you'll notice that the doors are very slightly out of alignment. But the handles are perfect, and those are the bits you focus on.

Press Reviews and Colds

/

I don't mind having a cold. It's the getting of it I don't like. For me there is a stage where your body knows that something is wrong and is trying to work out what is going on. Then the throat and the nose kick in to make it clear what is happening. But for me this is a good thing, it means that I can begin the process of getting better. 

Yesterday I was in stage one. Today I'm in stage 2. Of course, life being that it is, today was also when I had to go into town first thing to do a paper review thingy with Radio Humberside. It was great fun, and this time the picture that I took with the fat lens actually came out. 

Hymers School Summer Students Visit

/

We had some visitors today all the way from China. They are summer school students who are visiting Hymers College in Hull.  I did a talk about developing for the Arduino which was great fun (at least I enjoyed it) even though I managed to break one of my props half way through the session.

Thanks for coming folks, and I hope you enjoyed your visit to the university.

International Driving Permit - Most Unimpressive

/

We're heading off on our holidays over the weekend, and in a change of style, I've hired a car. This is because one of the stops is Los Angeles, and apparently you can't get anywhere without wheels in that part of the world.

The travel guides reckon that an International Driving Permit is a useful thing to have in this situation, and since my driving licence is made of paper, very old and falling apart (in other words it has two things in common with me) I sent off for one to bolster my credentials behind the wheel. 

It arrived earlier this week. It is a paper document with a colour picture of me stuck inside. I reckon you could produce a reasonable facsimile of it with a colour printer and maybe ten minutes of effort.

I just hope the relevant authorities are more impressed with it than I am.