Earlier I was talking about Dyson Recursion and I illustrated the item with a picture of our Dyson vacuum cleaner. You may have noticed that it is slightly dusty, and could probably do with a bit of a clean. The question of course is, what with?
One of the inarguable facts of life is that if you throw away a particular cable you will, within minutes, have a need for exactly that type of connection. We're doing some industrial strength tidying up at the moment, and I've been sorting wires into bags. A number of categories, mains cables, power supplies, network cables, video cables and USB cables. It's actually been quite therapeutic. It's nice to have imposed some order on what was a whole bunch of tangled chaos.
I've been helping with graduation ceremonies for a while as a Graduands Marshall. Each year I try to take a picture of the audience. This is the effort for 2016. I've used a very wide angle lens to get everyone in. The results are a bit dark (sorry, there is not a lot of light in the hall), but you should be able to find yourself. You can click through the image above to find a larger one on Flickr and go exploring.
This was my final graduation ceremony as a member of staff of the university, and I'm very pleased to have been given the chance to do it. It's a matter of great personal pride to me that for a long time I've been the first person to present to prospective students on the Open Day and the last person to present to them at their graduation ceremony.
Well, that was fun.
We've just come back from a couple of weeks in Chicago. Lovely city. Pictures and discourse will follow over the next few weeks I'm sure. If you really want to see my holiday snaps (and why would you not?) they can be found here. More will be added over time.
It was most interesting to be abroad after the Brexit result. The universal reaction to our admission that we were English was "Oh. I'm sorry about that.".
By the end of the holiday we were telling people we were from Sweden.
It's interesting how some things can acquire a life of their own. A couple of weeks ago I wrote a little item for The Conversation about the way that floppy disks are still in use in nuclear missile silos, among other places. One thing led to another, and since then I've been on BBC 5 Live taling about the issue, had the item printed in The i paper and there's now a German translation out there too. Great stuff.
I've done talks at Cottingham WI before. Great fun. I was invited back again this year and, rather than talk computes I thought I'd take along the 3D printer and print some cheese.
The printer behaved herself impeccably. I love the way that I can throw my Ultimaker into a blue IKEA bag, take her somewhere and have her just work. Anyhoo, everyone was fascinated. Best question of the evening: "Why is it called a 3D printer?"I really don't know. You can't really call it a printer as it does't print as such. It makes things. I quite like the name "fabricator", but the world seems to have decided its a printer. So that's that.
Thanks for inviting me and being a great audience folks. And I got to judge the chocolate brownie competition, which entailed sampling every one. Which was lovely.
The tap arrived today. Amazing. And it fits. Amazing. And when it is tight in the fitting the tap is upside down. Not so amazing.
Anyhoo, by the use of copious amounts of PTFE tape, which can be used to cover a whole multitude of pluming sins, I've got the tap nice and tight, and the right way up.
Go me.
One of the reasons why I like writing software is that I always find doing things in the "real world" much harder. Simple tasks can take on a life of their own. Take our kitchen door lock for example. We're doing some painting, which involved removing the handle. When I tried to put it back together I discovered that the catch mechanism had completely collapsed. Of course, I only found this out once I'd closed the door and then couldn't open it, which required some fancy shenanigans just to get the door back open.
Once I'd isolated the broken part I was very pleased to find that I can get a new lock mechanism from ScrewFix for just 79 pence. I was somewhat less pleased to find that this replacement was a tiny bit too big for the hole in the door, so I had to spend a fiver on a smaller one. Which it turned out didn't fit either. I think our house was built in a time when the inch was slightly smaller than it is now.
Anyhoo, the proper way to make the lock fit would have been to reach into my toolkit and produce a shiny, sharp chisel of exactly the right size and cut out the excess wood. Of course, that's not going to happen in my house, so I ended up using an electric drill to just enlarge the edges of the hole until it was big enough. We now have a door with a handle that works, having done only around three times as much work as I thought I'd have to....
I was very pleased to find that my little article about floppy disks has now made it into print in a national newspaper. Go me. If you are quick you could conceivably nip out and buy a copy of the "i". Alternatively you can find the text of the article here.
I spent a big part of today looking at student work, and then talking about it. Maybe not your idea of fun, but I quite enjoyed it. And the sunshine definitely helped.
It's kind of annoying when, having spent a huge amount of time and cash trying to get the best camera you can you press your phone up against the train window and get this...
I'm in Dundee for a couple of days, doing external examining things for Abertay. The weather here is wonderful. I'm assured that it is like this all year round.
Had tea at this lovely place which had a Fiat in the window.
Busy day having fun today. Here's a picture of some tulips.
I know, don't I ever, that nobody really cares that today I managed to get our mirror on the wall but I really like it.
I saw this thing on a home improvement show where they advised putting a mirror opposite a window to spread the light around a bit. So we got one and, after last week's failure, today we (thanks Chris) managed to fit the little hooks on the mirror onto a couple of overly sturdy bolts stuck in the wall.
I hate it when people tell me absolute whoppers. I find it rather offensive that they think I might be daft enough to believe them. I was in conversation with someone whose company had rather dropped the ball and was messing us about a bit, and the other person said "We've been trying to contact you for a while..."
How? What with? Were they shouting on street corners, writing slogans on walls, sending out carrier pigeons, trying remote Vulcan mind melds? They've got my mobile and home numbers, plus email address. How could they try and get in touch and not have me notice?
Well, really.
We didn't go out to buy a mirror. Especially not one that is octagonal, around a meter in diameter and weighs a ton. But we did. Here you can see the carefully calculated plans that I used to work out exactly where to drill the holes for the two bolts on which the mirror will fit. Unfortunately, even with this level of careful planning I still ended up with the mirror sat forlornly on the floor.
The extra chunky coach bolts are in exactly the right place on the wall, which is nice. But the hooks on the back of the mirror won't fit over them. Life eh?
I've never considered myself as having particularly large feet. But apparently I have. I went into a shop today to try and buy some new shoes (something which I only do when the existing ones are actually falling apart) and they had nothing in my size. Nothing. (well, nothing that looked sensible anyway - I had number one wife with me as my "stlyistic sanity check").
What we want is a way that I can go on-line, tell the shop I'm coming in on Saturday with feet that need shoeing (if that is a verb) and then walk in to a plethora of fitting footwear. And you know, in the future I reckon it might just happen. I certainly hope so.
A completely irrelevant picture of earrings
Yay! Today, at around 4:30 in the afternoon we finished marking the First Year programming coursework. We've been at it, on and off, for two weeks. It's been interesting seeing just what our students have been getting up to with their programs, but will be nice to be able to stop and do something else for a while.
Went to Leeds today. Ended up in the Corn Exchange. There's an amazing camera shop there which has cameras from way, way back. Of course I bought one.
When I was younger I used to enjoy reading my grandmother's collection of Which magazines. This was way back in the sixties, when consumerism was just getting going. I still get the magazine today. It has turned into a bit more of a lifestyle publication than it used to be; when it is recommending tumble driers that cost more than five hundred pounds as "best buys" you just know that something has come adrift. It still has teeth though, as its latest investigation into the way that products are getting smaller but not cheaper illustrates.
However I think it had its heyday in the fifties and sixties, when there were many such issues to address. They also had a way with graphical design which was quite ahead of its time. Take a look at these covers for a glimpse of history.
Last week I had to ring up PayPal to liberate some funds that they were clinging on to rather more than they should. The call went smoothly and we sorted everything out. And I've since had two emails from PayPal giving me the "Opportunity to share my feedback." Or, as I put it, do their quality control for them.
I'm a helpful soul, but I'm not sure about all this. It seems that everything I do now results in a friendly request to engage in a dialogue to discuss how well it went. Even my un-solicited calls from EE about upgrading my phone were followed by a text asking what I thought. Fortunately for them I demurred on that occasion.
I've got two worries about this kind of thing. One is there really should be more driving good customer service than the fear that someone might get a bad review. And the other is more scary. It is all to do with what my feedback tells the company about me.
As a generally easy-going soul who has no great love of upsetting folks I tend to rate my experiences in a positive way. Since my ratings can be data-mined in the context of what other people will have said about the same operatives I could therefore be placed in an "easy going" category that might change the experiences and offers that I might get if I ring up with a genuine problem some time in the future. I've been looking fairly carefully at the disclaimers and I've not found anything that rules out this possibility.
Perhaps I should leave a really stinking review. Just in case.
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.
