Beamish is Wonderful

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We'd never been to Beamish before. People had told us that it's great. Turns out they were wrong. 

It's awesome. 

It's history meets Disney in a wonderful way. Think of something on the scale of a theme park, but with a strong historical strand running all the way through. It has themed areas, rapid transit all around and helpful and enthusiastic staff everywhere. Plus you learn stuff. 

We didn't quite see it at its best, what with the weather and all, but we saw enough to make us want to go back there. 

Thanks for the Trombone Tom

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I've no idea who Tom is. But he has been reading my blog from 12 years ago. He noticed my lament that I'd failed to find any hits for the search "trombone playing dog" and responded with a link.  Thanks for that. Made my day. 

In fact, things have really moved on. I've just done my own search for "trombone playing dog" and found loads of hits. Such is progress. All we need now is world peace and a cure for cancer.

Birthday Moth Hunt

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Saturday, and it's my birthday. And I'm up town with an unfamiliar lens. It happens. 

Anhyoo, the weather is rather nice and I decide to seek out a few moths. The "Moth for Amy" art initiative celebrates Hull lass Amy Johnson who flew a Gypsy Moth plane all the way to Australia, the first female to do this.

There are lots of moths scattered around the Hull area, including a "Stealth Moth" almost directly underneath my office window at the university campus. I've no idea which moth this is to be honest, but it looks lovely. And it was a nice test for my lens. 

Here's another one.  What with the photography, the cake and the presents I had a rather awesome day. Which was very nice. 

Light Musings

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So, I'm having lunch in the library cafe at the university (a most excellent place) and I happen to glance at the ceiling. And it confuses me. I looked at the arrangement of the lights and it seems that the person laying the black trunking to the light fittings has done things in a sub-optimal way. It seems to me that if the "cross piece" was one section further to the right, the wiring could have been a bit shorter and there would have been no need for the connections running across to the near and the far lights. 

If you see what I mean. 

Anyhoo, I pondered this for a while and came up with two possible explanations:

  • the fittings were originally put in the wrong place and then fixed.
  • Somebody decided that it was artistically more valid if there was a "fork" of cables. 

Personally, I really hope its the "artistically valid" explanation. 

Bags of Wires

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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. 

Graduation Fun and Games

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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. 

...and we're back

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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.

German Floppy Discs

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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. 

3D Printing at Cottingham WI

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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.

There's always a catch in it...

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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....

Hello Dundee

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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. 

Mirror, Mirror on the wall

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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. 

Out of touch?

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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.