Power Presentations

This afternoon finds me as one of the distinguished judges at the Imagine Cup Software Development Challenge finals. This is being next to the Louvre in the centre of Paris. A good place to make an exhibition of myself methinks.

The  setting was fantastic. The whole hall had been decked out with moving Imagine Cup logos and video screens, plus this really cool little camera on a boom, which gives all an excellent view of the hardware projects. In the middle of this we have the student teams who now step up from presenting to a handful of judges in a little room to performing in front of an audience of many hundreds.

First up were the embedded challenge finalists. These presenters not only had to deal with an unfamiliar stage with camera crews milling around but also the scary prospect of giving live demonstrations of their systems. They were all excellent. The subjects varied from remote robotic environmental sensors to systems to protect animals crossing highways, preventing them from becoming road-kill.

My personal favourite was the Irish entry, which uses a cunning combination of hardware and software to allow a standard diesel engine to run on ordinary cooking oil. This system was so effective they had even managed to drive all the way to the venue on fuel they picked up at the local supermarket.

Then it was on to the Software Development finals, and my turn to shine, quite literally as we had to sit in the glare of the TV lights when we posed our questions to the presenting students. It is quite un-nerving when you are trying to think of something sensible to say and you glance up to see a huge image of yourself, looking sweaty and harassed, on the video screen above the stage.

Anyway, I managed to get to the end without asking anything too obviously stupid, and then we were ushered out to complete our deliberations. The judging is based on categories set down in the competition rules, and so we all filled in our numbers, passed them on to the organisers and then were pleasantly surprised to find that we were in broad agreement about the winners.

I said in the final that I love watching presentations and I hate deciding who has won. Every project had its own merit, and all of them were presented with spirit and style. One of the judges, a battle hardened venture capitalist who has seen many pitches from aspiring entrepreneurs, commented that several of the presentations were better than ones he has seen in the course of his job. And these were delivered by students on technical subjects, who are not expected to be good at this kind of thing. So, fantastic job everyone.

I'm sworn to secrecy over the results, which will be revealed tomorrow at the grand presentation.

Climbing the Tower

This morning there was a tiny lull in the Imagine Cup proceedings, and so we went off to climb the Eiffel Tower. The queue for the lifts was huge, but there was nobody waiting to climb the stairs, so off we went. Of course I had the camera with me.

Looking up from underneath

Even at the first level the views were amazing.

I've actually got a a confession to make. At the first level you can transfer to the lift (which is actually worth knowing, and a way of beating the queues on the ground) and so we took a lift to the next stage.

Telescope

Waiting

Impressive sky

And more so

At this point we kind of ran out of time, because we had to head off to the Imagine Cup finalist presentations. So I never quite made it right to the top. But I will next time.

Imagine Cup Dinner Cruise

Tonight we were all invited on for a boat trip. Free food. Free drink. On the Seine. In Paris.

Sign me up.

The boat was huge, I couldn't believe that they would get everyone on board but they did. I took the big camera, and loads of pictures (there are a bunch more on Flickr).

All aboard

Kite from a bridge

Nice sky

 

The tower by night

The whole thing was excellent. At the end I staggered back to the hotel and collapsed for the second time in a day...

Shopping for Fleas

Today is a rest day. I thought it might be fun to search out the Paris Flea Market at Porte de Cligancourt and so off we went.

Here comes our train

During the journey a bloke turned up with an amplifier and microphone and serenaded us for a while. Dennis and Nannette don't seem that impressed to be honest.

This was the view from the place we had lunch. I could have bought a rug, but in the end I didn't. The food was great though.

The market was huge. We were there for a while, and we only saw a tiny part of it.

Got some nice presents here.

Then we wandered back to the metro, ambled back to the hotel by way of a pavement cafe and I sat down on the bed for a second and woke up an hour later....

Imagine Cup Open for Business

I've been lucky enough to go to quite a few Imagine Cup finals. Each host nation works really hard to give the contestants the best time ever, and this time it is the turn of France. I was looking forward to this. If there is one thing the French are good at, it is having a great time.

First off we boarded the bus to the opening ceremony, which was being held at City Hall. I had been told this place was pretty impressive. We shall see...

On the way there we drove straight towards the Eiffel tower, which was nice.

City Hall is impressive. Very impressive. The ceilings in the entrance staircase were good enough, but when you got into the main rooms things got serious.

The poshest ceiling I've ever seen. We got to mill around and take pictures (I took lots - there are more on Flickr). It was nice to meet up with old friends from previous finals.

Each team got to walk up the "stairs of fame" into the competition, to a round of applause from those in the hall. This is the UK team having their moment of glory. Then we had a few speeches.

This is the Deputy Mayor of Paris, the chap on the right is his interpreter. I'm quite proud of the fact that I understood some of the bits that he said in French.

Jean-Phillipe Coutois very cool He talked about computers from way back when, stuff that I actually remembered using. Young developers have it so easy these days....

Joe Wilson made the very good point that this is probably the largest gathering of international students there has ever been. With teams from 61 countries here, there has never been a gathering like this before. That in itself makes the Imagine Cup pretty special, before you even look at the entries.

Finally Eric Boustoulier rounded things off by reminding everyone that we actually are going to go out there and build something of the future.

Once the ceremony had completed, and the competition was underway it was time for some food and a look around Paris.

Our train back to the hotel.

Tomorrow the judging gets underway.

Flower Power

The Lily in the garden is out.

..as is another, as yet unidentified (at least by me) flower.

Spot the Graduate

Somewhere in this picture of Durham is hidden a recently graduated "Master of Mathematics". See if you can use your skill and judgement to pick him out.

Kudos to number one son. Well done sir.

St Anne's Masterclass

We had a bunch of students come to see us today from St. Anne's. They were great. As usual I took a picture of the audience at the start, while they were still smiling.......

Audience View

At the end of the talk I did a kind of Aibo vs. Pleo thing, where I turned Digby and Trevor loose together to see what would happen.

Will they fight?

They seemed to ignore each other most of the time, although Digby did keep trying to climb off the edge of the table.....

Hull in the Evening

Went up town this evening to fetch number one daughter. Took the little camera (of course) and the light was very kind to me.

New York has definitely seen better times

Fast Food

Mending Headphones with McDonald's Straws

I got some Ultimate Ears headphones a while back. They sound wonderful. However, they have a little problem which has been causing me grief recently. They use an "in ear" design, with a tight fitting plug which goes inside your ear so that all the sound comes your way. Nothing wrong with that, until the plug bit starts to come off and stay in your ear when you try to remove the phones. I think this is caused by the rubber stretching slightly and becoming slack on the fitting. Whatever causes it, I don't like it as it then leaves me picking bits out of my ear canal, which doesn't look very cool.

Anyhoo, I've fixed the problem by the use of some drinking straws from McDonalds. I've put them around the outside of the rubber sleeve that goes over the headphone bit. This stops the sleeve from stretching quite so far, and makes it fit really tightly. I don't think it is the kind of thing you can get the Nobel prize for, but it works for me.

Earpiece with straw power

Oh, and while we are in a McDonalds mood, don't the drink lids look a lot like faces?

Scary face or coffee cup cover? You decide.

Universal Saturday

With the conference over we headed out to Universal Studios for another visit. We went there on Thursday, but we wanted to see it again in daylight. Even though this time we'd have to pay for food.

..we got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes....

This picture is in no way faked.

The Simpsons ride (good but nowhere near as good as Spiderman at Adventure Island)

TechEd Party Time

Imagine a theme park where the queues for the rides are around 10 minutes, all the food and drink is free, and there are people wandering around just giving you stuff. I don't have to imagine this (lucky me) because I've been to the TechEd 2008 party. It was at Universal Studios, which was nice because we got to go on the brand new Simpson's ride, which is ace by the way.

Entering the park.

Invasion of the nerds....

The Simpson's ride is quite a big deal, and great fun.

...indeed it does

The end of a perfect evening.

The .NET Micro Framework in Action

Today I went down to the Hands On Lab area at TechEd and had a go at the Micro Framework lab, just to see what it was like. The first exercise was to drive an LCD panel from a Micro Framework device....

Shameless .NET Micro Framework promotion....

Then it was on to building a little burglar alarm controller. Great fun. And the lab section was enormous.

We think our labs are quite large at the university in Hull, but this is just silly....

In fact the conference itself is just plain enormous. This is one part of one part.

If you want to find out more about the .NET Micro Framework, including devices and how to get hold of the development kit you can go to their site on MSDN. They also have a very active blog.

From C# to Sea World

I feel terrible about this, but whilst other folk were working in the conference hall myself and number one wife went to Sea World.  (actually, my conscience was clear in that I have got all my slides done and checked in, and my demos all work fine).

Obligatory jumping killer whale shot

Seaworld was excellent. Gave me plenty of chance to play with the new camcorder (this including recording five minutes of "non-video" when I forgot to press the record button...).

There is probably something very interesting and fish related in this picture, but I'm darned if I can find it now...

Experience those penguins...

Back to work tomorrow, my session is at 10:30 in the morning, right after the keynotes. I quite like this, in that it means that I get it over and done with.

Sign of the Times

These "lucky" people were at my XNA talk today.

..and here is the rest of the room

Another smashing audience, thank you for laughing in all the right places..

I'll put all the content up here tomorrow.

Then it was off to do  book signing. The man who runs the bookshop had, perhaps somewhat optimistically, got 100 copies of my book in to sell.

I ended up selling 10, which was nice. Then I went around and took a look at what the students here are doing with XNA.

The answer is lots, and very well. I saw some Imagine Cup entries and some very impressive work. Well done folks. And now I'm zooming of to catch a plane home for fish and chips.....

A Night for the Geeks

Geek night was a blast.

 

I've always wanted to see my name in lights. This is the project of the team presenting before me, who showed what happens when you marry dance floor displays with Wii remotes. They could draw on it, play games and, as you can see above, write silly messages.

The audience. Sorry it is a bit blurred, but the house light were off at this point..

The talk was fantastic, even the 8 player button bash game went well, although the players on controller one did suffer a bit when someone reset the counter....

I'm doing it all again tomorrow. And a book signing.....

Micro Framework at DevDays 2008

So today it is time for another chapter in my jetsetting life...

The view from the plane was nice.

They had this special machine for installing tall presenters..

The talk was on the .NET Micro Framework, which is something I really enjoy taking about. The audience were great, and put up with my jokes, which is nice. I got to know them so well that I told them about "My Awful Experience in Schipol Airport a Toilet" this morning.....

I always take the pictures at the start, while the audience is still smiling. And in the room....

Hornsea Bank Holiday

Good weather on an English Bank Holiday? Shurely shome misthtake. We went to Hornsea for the afternoon.

Baby geese

Hornsea mere looking good

Even the sea front looks good today. Although that water does look a bit brown...

I love stalls like these.

This is Hornsea Sunday (and Bank Holiday) market. Amazing place, with a water feature and a place you can buy old photos that might have you in it. I checked, but there were none of me.

Collectormaina Calls

Today saw us up at the crack of dawn and haring down the motorway to Milton Keynes to take part in another Collectormaina. Well, at least it is a trip out.

So, who is this chap?

..or this lass?

The "throng"

I don't think this is a family portrait as such....

Any nightclub owners out there?

A Lego shop opposite an Apple shop. Seems somehow appropriate.

The Milton Keynes Tree. And some concrete cows.

Cramped Saturday

Before flying back we had our last "Breakfast in America" at our favourite diner. Which has very shiny stools. Then it was up to the airport to be crammed into a metal tube for 9 hours.

At the airport they had this lovely little thing. Sort of robbery target and getaway vehicle all in one.

I didn't get any extra space on the long flight. But the bloke who was sat next to me, who must have been all of four feet tall, had one of the precious legroom seats. And my in-flight entertainment thingy didn't work. Oh how I suffered.