I'm trying a new technique for dealing with jetlag on the return flight this time. It involves getting up at 2:00 am on the day you fly back (which is around 10:00 am in the target time zone). That way I figure that I will sleep on the plane and then wake up perfectly adjusted.
What could go wrong?
Bottom row on the left, if you are interested....
We are very lucky to have a bookshop right on the university campus. It's been through a number of names while I've been here. It started as Haigh and Hochland, then changed to Bowes and now it is Waterstones. I've not been in for a while, and I must admit to my eternal shame that I only dropped in last week out of vanity. Someone had mentioned that they still had a copy of my XNA book on sale, and it turned out to be true, which I found amazing. Now we just have to get someone to buy that copy and see if they restock....
Anyhoo, the bookshop is great. Like most bookshops it has branched out a ways, and along with course books there are is now a goodly selection of games and other bits and bobs. They've even got a copy of the awesome Cash and Guns board game. And a big shelf full of graphic novels that I don't remember seeing last time I was there. And lots of other stuff that would make good presents if I ever find myself in the position of needing something to give away in a hurry.
If, like me, you've not been in for a while, go take a look. If you are new to the campus it's a very useful resource. Bookshops are taking a hammering thanks to scarily useful services like Amazon, but we really should support their business. Starting by buying my book.....
I think the marketing people have discovered the apology as the latest tool to get you to engage with them. I've recently had quite a few companies getting in touch and apologising for not having been in touch with enticing offers. Ebay recently apologised profusely for something that I don't remember them doing and offered a special discount to make things up. Which I'm sorry to say I haven't used.
On the way out of the carpark I found this leaf on the ground.
We had our first University Open Day of the new academic year today. The place was mad busy and it was nice to see everybody having a good time in the sunshine. I did two talks. I promised to put the pictures up on my world famous (in my world) blog, so here they are.
This is the first cohort being told what to do by Mike
..and this is the second, slightly smaller, one.
I had a kind of highlight last week at the New Students Welcome Party. We were playing 8 player Smash Brothers and I, much against the advice of the "experts", decided to play as "Mr Game and Watch".
And I won.
This will probably never happen again, but it was rather nice. On Saturday, to celebrate this accomplishment, I invested in the Mr. Game and Watch Amibo. It's rather nice too. It comes with four different character poses which you can slot into the base, depending on your mood.
Just discovered that the university is using one of my pictures to illustrate the Room Bookings and Timetables site. I think this was taken at a Three Thing Game presentation a while back.
I wonder if people now think that students at Hull turn up to lectures in ponchos and sombreros? I really hope so......
This is the weekend of the Hull Freedom Festival. The BBC set up some tents containing all things digital, and the folks from Hive (Hull Immersive Virtual Environments) were there showing off their VR tech. Great fun.
I'm a strong believer in paying for stuff I use on the internet. I really like the idea of a service provider having a stake in making me happy. I've been a Flickr Pro member since 2005. But I'm not sure if I'm going to continue.
I've just received a notification that my Flickr Pro subscription is up for renewal, which is fair enough. But what isn't fair is how they appear to be hiding the cost of this. If I click on the "information link" in the notification email (which doesn't tell me the cost) I get a page which tells me of the "benefits" of a subscription. But nothing about the price. Even the FAQ page is useless in this respect (see above).
Turns out that I have to pay nearly fifty dollars a year to stay on the "Pro" service level, which strikes me as rather expensive. Having had a look at the benefits over the free service I don't think anyone would want to pay for that. So I'll be cancelling my Pro subscription. If the charge had been twenty and they had been up-front about it there's a very good chance that I'd have stuck with it.
Well, we got closure on our pipe situation. Just as I suspected, a tiny hole had opened up in the copper. This was in the process of getting bigger when we noticed it.
The good news is that it could have been worse. The bad news is that we now have a smoking crater where the downstairs toilet used to be. We'll have to wait for it to dry out a bit before we put the floor back in.
Since we were just down the road from it, we took a trip to Winchester today. Lovely town. Got a great big cathedral in the middle. Yesterday we were in Salisbury, today Winchester. I reckon this is cathedral country.
Anyhoo, it is a lovely place. It is huge, with a fantastic atmosphere. It is also the resting place of Jane Austen and there is a lovely memorial to her.
They also have some fantastic stained glass windows. I had a go at taking pictures of one or two. They are surprisingly tricky to get right. I ended up taking different exposures and then merging them to get something that looks reasonable.
Today was a special day for one of the family. Number one son got his birthday treat, in the form of a driving experience at Thruxton. Thruxton is a lovely little racing circuit in the south of England, near Salisbury. They have a number of experiences you can sign up for, including a chance to drive something like the car you can see above.
Number one son didn't get to drive the Lambo (as we call them) but he did get a twirl in a Porsche and a Formula Renault racing car. He had a great time, and we had just as much fun watching him whizz around the track and trying to take photographs.
We all attended the briefing for the racers and I worked had to absorb all the advice about corner apexes and car balance. I'm sure these'll come in handy for driving the Cube to work.
So, we were all set for a few days away. Bags packed. Cameras charged. Route planned. Then I heard myself asking a question that nobody wants to hear just before a trip away.
"Can you hear running water?"
Number one wife was even less happy to hear me ask than I was. But the thing about questions like this is that you can't really un-ask them. Instead you have to twiddle stop-cocks and faff around until you've determined that yes, there is water running when it isn't supposed to. And now you are half an our late leaving. Not good.
We've been here before a few times. It seems that our house was made with pipe with a penchant for leakiness. So we turned the water off at source, left a key for the plumber and headed off into the distance.
Who knows what we will come back to? But at least it shouldn't be underwater.
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....
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.
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.
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.
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....
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.
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.
Now that we are starting to move things back into the bedroom things are returning to normal. It seems quite luxurious to be able to reach into a drawer and pull out a pair of socks, rather than going on a hunt around the house to find some.
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.
