Boggled

Number one daughter got me an uber-Boggle for my birthday. It does 5x5 puzzles. Wonderful.

How many words can you make?

Back from the smoke

Spent today recovering from the London day trip. We got up bright and early and were in London by 9:30.

Kings X

We drifted over to Tate Modern, had a look round and a coffee and took in the view over the river.

St. Paul's, wobbly bridge and boat

Then we wandered down to Covent Garden

St. Paul's rear entrance (so to speak)

Badges and bangles

Then it was on to Harrods for coffee and donuts.

Oh goody, they have a sale on....

And then back to Hull and a lovely sunset

The train wot brought us home.

Taking your memories with you

I've been spending some time scanning old photographs and loading them up onto the computer. It helps to pass the time whilst watching dross TV and I've found some gems in amongst the albums. The thing that has impressed me most is the quality of the results though. Using a fairly modest Canon scanner and 6x4 inch prints I've been able to get some very nice looking results, even when viewed on the big screen telly.

Today I used the Vista Media Centre option to burn a whole bunch of pictures onto a DVD. This is wonderful. It gives you a lovely, ever changing slide show of pictures which works in any DVD player. I've been dishing these out to family members, who have been very impressed. Even though the images include one of me wearing shorts.

Fair Weather Friends

Had a BBQ today to celebrate my upcoming annual event. Most surprisingly the weather was very good to me, with a break in the rain just long enough for Tim to cook some burgers and sausages, and us to sit in the garden and drink beer whilst solving the problems of the world.

Colourful cutlery

Folks turned up with presents and cards and I was supplied with a special T shirt to wear, celebrating the fact that tomorrow I'm very old. Unfortunately no photographs were taken of this.. Good stuff and thanks to all.

A great time was had, even though I was beaten at Mario Strikers on the Wii by someone less than a seventh of my age...

Sun, Sea, Sand and Certificates

Did the Scarborough degree ceremony today. Lovely. The weather was a bit brisk, but it never actually rained. I took the bigish camera and the wide angle lens. And had some fun taking photographs.

Fun on the beach

Grass

Graduand's Lunch

Funfair

View from the stage...

..and from the back.

There are a bunch more on my Flickr site.

Degree Ceremony Wide Angle View

I took the medium sized camera with the wide angle lens down to City Hall to try and take a picture of the congregation. It sort of came out OK, but I had to turn the speed up to get any kind of picture, and that makes some of the detail a bit noisy. Nevertheless, I'm not too unhappy with the results...

Can you find yourself on here?

...or here?

Embedded Reading

Went to Reading today to give a talk about the .NET Micro Framework for an Embedded Development day. I've often found that a bunch of academics make around the toughest audience you can get, but these folks were great - even though they showed a marked lack of appreciation for my jokes.....

My demos mostly worked and the tiny tablet behaved herself impeccably. And the trip back on Hull Trains was as smooth as smooth. And I watched "Love and Death", one of the best films ever, on the Smartphone. Wonderful.

I'd taken the camera, but I got the best pictures when I got off the train at Hull after the journey back.

Great to be back

Neat Sky

While I was going through Reading on the bus I saw a sign at Reading Baths that said "Learn to swim here". I thought about going in and asking "What if I want to swim somewhere else?".

But I didn't.

For those at the academic event, I'll have the slides and demos here tomorrow.

Cottingham Day

We went for a walk this evening, it was end of "Cottingham Day" and the fairground was just winding down. I had the camera with me (of course).

 
Hollywood comes to East Yorkshire

Barrel'o'Lights

All the fun of the fair

July Open Day

The university had an Open Day today. I shot back from town and then turned up suited and booted to do the talk. Thanks for being a good audience people.

Could have used a slightly wider angle lens.....

We will get C# books out to everyone as soon as we get another batch printed up. And we will be doing the draw for the PSP on Monday.

Anyone who was there but didn't get their name and address to us, all you have to do is send me an email with the name of the fish the Dutch audience didn't know, and we'll send you a book and enter you in the draw.

Got the Bird

When I got out of the shower this morning I found that I was being watched by a bird. Well, with a body like mine I suppose I should expect this to happen every now and then.

Actually, it was not quite like that. The bird was sitting on the bathroom window sill

I don't think she saw much

When I left for work the bird was still there.

I think that particular part of the house has the attraction of the updraft from the boiler flue, which is probably a good way to warm up (it was slightly chilly first thing).

Bonus flower pic

"Box of de Lights"

What kind of fool goes to Ikea after dropping number one son off at the airport, buys some garden lights and then takes 40 pictures of them in the box, before spending half an hour picking the best of them, image processing them a bit and then putting them on his blog.

That would be me then...

Pack shot

A close up

Colour fiddling

Vendgance

Who would have thought it, eh?

Fancied a bar of chocolate this afternoon. But it was not to be.

Slide 7 Rocks

Today is Slide 7 day. Slide (Students Learn Innovative Developer Expertise - or something - we picked the name because the domain name was available) is run by Microsoft the Academic team at Microsoft UK in Reading. They put on sessions about professional development and get a bunch of students to turn up. This year it was all about connected applications.

Our posse on the way into the Mother Ship....

I took a minibus full of folks from Hull to join the hundred or so others that had made their way from all over the country for the show.

And the show was good. There was a slight dip in quality after lunch, when I did my bit on Web Services, but the rest of the material was top notch. There were sessions on Web 2.0 (where we discussed the question of what Web 2.0 actually is), ASP, Windows Live and Orcas. And then a great talk at the end on Sliverlight.

People, you should find out more about Silverlight. You should also sign up for Popfly since this is mucho funo. I've been playing a bit with my Popfly account and it makes it dangerously easy to develop impressive applications.

My Audience (most of the students were next door, but we manage to make more noise than them...)

Mingling at the BBQ

At the end we had a BBQ and a great time was had by all. There will probably be a Slide 8, you should get your name down for it if there is...

Ed Dunhill, the Microsoft bod who made it all happen (Kudos Ed) is going to post all the slides and other material on his blog.

Then, after a five hour rumble up the motorway it was home in time for bed.

Amsterdam Gets XNA

Had great fun today doing a session about XNA for DevDays. The audience were wonderful, and I took some happy snaps:

on the right...

...in the middle...

...and on the left

Thanks for paying attention people, and I hope you use XNA to get to some interesting places.

Before my talk we had a session from Dave Mitchell of Microsoft. He was able to tell us that the XNA Creators Club memberships are going to be part of Microsoft Academic Alliance. This is the best news. Now we can put a bunch of machines in our labs for people to write for and it won't cost us extra on top of our AA subscription. That news alone was worth going to Amsterdam for. If you are a member of a university faculty you owe it to yourself (and your students) to follow this up and get your hands on one of the best bargains in education at the moment).

Dave at the start of his presentation

Earlier today I went to a presentation by Scott Guthrie about Silverlight. This is a fantastic technology that lets you make very impressive user experience. It lets you put .NET powered behaviour into web pages and also gives you the Windows Presentation Foundation to drive your user interfaces. Excellent.

Scot talking about multiple language support in Sliverlight.

I've had a really good time in Amsterdam. I went out for a meal last night and took even more pictures:

Standard Canal picture

Artistic cake

There are some more on my Flickr site.

Wedding Daze

Confetti

Went to a wedding today. We went to the service and then the reception and then came home. Everything was great, even the weather. Number one wife was going out to the evening party, whilst I stayed at home and nursed the jetlag. Before she went out again I thought I'd print off a few of the photos I'd taken. Bad plan. The process went like this.

1. Upload pictures to computer. Select picture and press print.
2. HP printer drops out the print onto 6x4 as requested, but the ink cartridge has run out.
3. Insert new ink cartridge.
4. Printer refuses to do cartridge alignment.
5. Take out all paper. Reset printer. Put paper back in. Reset printer again. Printer does alignment.
6. Restart print.
7. Printer prints out picture on A4 paper, not 6x4.
8. Move lever on printer to get the right size. Print again.
9. One good print. Hurrah. Print two more. Works again. Hurrah.
10. Move on to next picture. Select print, ask for three copies. Go for cup of tea.
11. Come back and find that all three copies have groom's head cut off.
12. Examine the pictures carefully and note that all photographs are being cropped.
13. Spend ten minutes trying to figure out how to get the HP driver to print the actual size that I want.
14. Discover that this is impossible.
15. Select another picture with groom's head closer to the middle. Ask for three copies. Go watch some Dr Who.
16. Come back and find that the 6x4 paper has run out, so the printer has printed the three copies on A4.
17. Load some more 6x4 paper in and ask for three more copies.
18. One print comes out, with the picture diagonally across it as it has not loaded properly.  Printer then stops and flashes a red light.
19. Give single print to number one wife, and walk away from the computer/printer before I do it some serious damage.

Virgin on the Ridiculous

Tonight I had to fly back to the UK. I'm a tall person. On the way out Virgin Atlantic were kind enough to swap my seat for one near the emergency exit so that I could sit with my legs in front of me. On a normal seat I just can't do this, so it is always nice when an airline makes an allowance for my particular shape. 

On the way back Virgin Atlantic were also happy to swap my seat. As long as I paid them 75 dollars. I thought that stank. I paid up though, since the prospect of nearly nine hours sat with my knees above my ears and no circulation in my feet did not appeal. Are they really so strapped for cash that they have to resort to ripping off people who have no choice in the matter? Up until that point I had been very impressed with the airline, who seem to have the most chirpy and upbeat cabin staff I've ever encountered.  Now I'm a bit less pleased. I've emailed customer relations (I'm reaching the age where I can dash off "Yours, disgusted" emails quite quickly) and we will see what happens.

Inside Orlando Airport. Big place.

Prime Outlet Shopping

After a morning on the booth telling people they were now embedded developers as well (most people with C# and Visual Studio 2005 are, thanks to the .NET Micro Framework) it was time to head out for some shopping. I quite like strange watches, and I knew that at the Prime outlet there was a Fossil watch outlet store.

My plan was to catch a bus up to the top of International Drive, have a wander round and then catch another back. As I was leaving the conference hall I heard a strange sound, like a very long round of applause. It was the rain on the roof. Lots of rain. I carefully charted my route back to the hotel so that I was under cover for most of the way, except for the last 50 yards.

I got soaked. In Florida, when it rains it rains. Muchly. After a complete change of clothes I ventured out again, but standing at a bus stop was not a plan. So I was forced to spend a goodly chunk of cash on a taxi ride instead.

I much prefer buses to taxis. In a bus I reckon you have safety in numbers. Being alone in a taxi cab with a person I've never met always makes me nervous. In a bus, even if the driver does turn out to be an axe wielding maniac with a passion for driving off cliffs you have a few people with you to help take him on. In a taxi it is strictly one on one. Also, with a bus when it stops at the lights or in traffic there is no worry about the price going up. In a taxi I can always see that number steadily rising, and making me poorer. And I always think that the taxi driver will spot that I'm from out of town and take me to my destination via Brazil or something.  Having said all this the taxi drive was, like just about every one I've ever had, smooth and uneventful and within around 15 minutes I was at the Prime discount mall.

Which was a dump. I'd taken a camera so that I could snag some pictures, but there was nothing worth photographing. Everywhere had an air of decay and moving on, I suspect there must be other discount malls in Florida doing well, because this one was more than a bit quiet. Anyhoo, I found the watch shop and after a long and happy search through the display (I like looking at watches, OK?) I selected one for me and one for number one wife.

On the way back I was lucky to walk straight onto a bus which took me right back to the hotel.

View from a bus

Play poker with your fridge

Another day on the stand describing the Micro Framework. Half way through an explanation I mentioned to one chap that on Thursday in our lunchtime session Roger will be demonstrating his program that lets you play wireless poker using Zigbee devices connected to a Micro Framework board. The delegate thought about this for a moment. "You mean the .NET Micro Framework lets you play poker against your fridge?" he asked.

I can't think of a better way of putting it. You can easily add lots of intelligence to a tiny device, and then connect it to other things to make life interesting. Although in that situation a poor poker player might starve to death, or at least have to drink black coffee for the rest of their life.....

After stand duty it was time to head up to a demonstration of the framework. I had been invited to provide some closing remarks (nobody can close down an event better than me) and so I told everyone there about one of my major claims to fame - around 10 years or so I wrote some code which helps put datestamps on bottles of Budweiser beer. There was no .NET Micro Framework then, of course, so the application was forged in the hell of cross compiling, no debugging, and code that had to be strange "just so it would work". I made the point that if I was doing the job today it would take me a lot less time, and be much more fun to do. You can read one report of the event here - it is great to hear nice things about the platform.

On the way to the event I poked the camera out of the bus window and grabbed a few snaps.

Apparently "Inverted pimply pyramid" means "Titanic Museum" in Orlando

Believe it or not

Nirvana in a box?

So Many Questions

I spent a big chunk of today telling folks all about the .NET Micro Framework. We had a stand near the Visual Studio booths, so I had the pleasant duty of telling lots of people who had C# and Visual Studio 2005 experience they are now fully qualified embedded developers too. Embedded development is the fiddly business of putting code onto tiny processors.

One example application we have is a C# controlled massage char (which proved very popular as the day wore on) but we also have Micro Framework controlled RSS display sign and also a Z-Wave network interface device that was developed in weeks rather than months thanks to the fact that the company was able to use C#, VS 2005 and all the powerful emulation and debugging support that comes with it.

Once folks cottoned onto the idea they were well keen. Quite a few had experienced the horrors of writing embedded code and really relished the thought of controlling hardware with software again. Particularly as there are no new skills to learn (I'm starting to sound a bit like a salesman now, but what the hey, I like the stuff).

Then it was back to the hotel. I had a quick shower, lay down on the bed for a minute and then woke up four hours later. I love jetlag....

Another satisfied customer

What it is all about

Free Massages

One of my favourite ever jokes was on an old Monty Python record. As I remember it went "And now for a massage from the Swedish prime minister". Followed the sound of heavy slapping. Wonderful stuff.

We haven't got the Swedish prime minister available, but we are giving out free massages at our stand in the TLC Blue area at TechEd 2007. We have a couple of .NET Micro Framework controlled massage chairs which are just the thing to ease away the strains of the day. And you can find out all about how you could be an embedded developer but just not know it yet....