Train Trip

When on a proper train trip today. Unfortunately they wouldn’t let me drive.

.. although some parts look quite hard work.

Taking the Wrong Train Home

Waiting for the Wrong Train

After the fun and games last night it was time to pack up and go home. Having successfully negotiated the tram to the station I was feeling quite happy. I know the Dutch for “Schipol Airport” (it contains the word ‘Schipol’) , and having heard the announcer use the phrase in reference to the train on the platform I was quite happy to leap aboard in the confident expectation of going there. Unfortunately I don’t know the Dutch for “does not go to”, which meant that after 45 minutes or so I had to leap out of the train and find one that did.

Thanks to a very helpful lady who not only understood panic-stricken English but also knew where the right train was I was able to change direction and get to the airport in time for the flight.  I’m taking a phrase book next time…

Now with Added Pigs

Pepsi and Galaxy. Not sure why they are named after high calorie snack fodder, but there you go.

Two new arrivals chez Miles today. We now have even more guinea pigs. I actually like having guinea pigs as pets, they are one of the few animals that I’m fairly sure I’m cleverer than.

Edward Bowden Art at Hull

People at the Open Day on Saturday probably walked right past this amazing artwork on the wall of the entrance to the Applied Science building without noticing it. It was made in 1963 by Edward Bowden, quite a famous artist. He used expoxy resin and the lid of a coffee jar to get the indentations and shapes on the wall.

Great stuff.

Mega Open Day Madness

Some of the audience. Captured with the big camera.

We had a really big Open Day today. Really big. We used the big lecture theatre and I had to do my talking bit twice. Because the Open Day was so big.

Great fun though. Two very good audiences, thanks for coming along folks and I hope you found the day worth the trip. I took the proper camera with the wide angle lens, the tripod and the remote release to guarantee the quality of the pictures. Unfortunately I then left the lens on manual focus and so most of the pictures came out a bit blurred….. Oh well, I’ll know for next time.

There was even a jazz band in Staff House. Good stuff.

Update on 2010-03-15 20:03 by Rob

It seems like at least two people who attended on Saturday have bought a copy of my book! Well done folks, let me know how you get on.

Frozen Monday

I’m bored with winter. Particularly if I’m still scraping ice off the car each morning.

Low Quality Pictures Look Better

I spent all this money on posh cameras, and have been obsessing about things like dust on my sensor. Then I find myself using a low quality camera in my phone and an application from Hipstamatic to make it look even worse. And the result looks great. Very strange.

Final Summit Friday

Today was the last day of the Summit. It has gone by real quick. Amongst the final presentations was one by Satya Nadella who heads up the new Microsoft search team.

These are the people bringing you Bing. Personally I quite like Bing. I like the user interface, the pictures and the way it groups results. I don’t like the way that it doesn’t always find what I want though, which means moving over to Google for the more technical searches. Hopefully Bing will catch up in due course.

It was interesting to hear how Microsoft are trying to improve the “search experience” and are working on why we search, in a bid to improve the usefulness of the activity. The way I see it, they are changing Bing from “search” to a “research” engine. When you search for a place it will try to pull down travel and hotel details, along with pictures and links to official sites. Quite neat. This all needs some frightfully clever algorithms to recognise content, along with a fair amount of editorial input as well I would think. However, it is nice to see Microsoft not just trying to equal the competition, but to go beyond this and move the field on.

In the afternoon we had a final wander around Bellevue and then headed to a nearby place for tea.

..can you guess where?

After tea I’d booked seats to see Avatar again, at the local Imax cinema in 3D. Awesome.

MVP Summit Party

MVP Pool

Went out to the MVP party tonight at the Garage in Seattle. Free food and drink, along with pool and bowling. Worked for me.

..oh and cocktails.

Smashing Seattle Sunset

We are getting some lovely sunsets at the moment. I took this picture from our hotel window (lots of frantic setting up of tripod before the light faded). If it wasn’t for the crane this would be a perfect shot.

Hull Reunion

I met up with Phil, Andrew, Andy and James today for lunch. They are graduates from Hull (and three of them are also old hands at the Imagine Cup). They all now work for Microsoft on various development teams around the company. It was nice to see them, even though they made fun of my haircut. Or lack of it…

MVP Summit Sessions Again

I met another MVP in the lift today on the way to the sessions on the Microsoft campus. He asked me how I was getting on. “Fine” I said. “Yesterday they opened the top of my head and poured a whole bunch of stuff into it”. “Oh”, he replied. “With us they opened our heads and took a whole bunch out”.  Perhaps that will happen to me.today  Not sure what they will benefit from in my case though…

The weather is lovely again. Although we had some frost last night, the morning looks great.

Redmond Shuttle.

MVP Summit Product Sessions

I set off on the bus at 7:00 am this morning. I’m trying to keep to “sort of UK time” by getting up at stupidly early hours. Because we are in Bellevue the bus journey is very short, which is nice.

As usual they had MVP banners on the Microsoft campus, which was nice.

Went to the company store as well, and bought some tasteful clothing.

We really are having fantastic weather this week.

MVP Summit and Fish Throwing

This evening the MVP summit started with the opening keynote. Before the session started they were showing things about MVPs of note. And for some reason my name came up on the big screen.

As you all know I am very vain, and so I pulled out my camera and grabbed a picture. If you look very carefully at the middle screen you can see my name…

The session ended with some fish throwing. As well it should. Then we went on for some free food, including hand thrown salmon, and discussion with fellow MVPs.

The agenda looks very interesting.

Genuine Bonafide Monorail

Caught the monorail to the Space Needle today. The weather has been very kind to us. Then of course we went to the top.

Nice view.

Then we had some sweeties.

Bellevue Mist

The long range weather forecast for this week was rain. Thank heavens it was long range. And wrong. Today started really misty, in a fantastically photogenic way.

It must be like being up in the clouds in those buildings at the top.

We found this place that did great pancakes, and nearly failed to eat all of them. They had a great set of posters advertising upcoming events in Bellevue.

Hmmm. I’ve missed the bicycle conference.

Then we grabbed a car and went for a drive.

View over the lake

Highway and sky

Mountain, truck and sky

We went out to the mall and I bought another robot. A friend for Jason.

The summit proper starts tomorrow. I’m hoping to find out a bit more about Windows Phone 7 which was announced today. It looks really good. It is definitely going on the “want one” list.

Seattle Sunday

Imposing buildings

Went shopping today. I got number one wife a Lego Heart for Valentines day, and she got me this…

Managed to stay up long enough to take this picture from the hotel window. You can see the lights of Seattle on the horizon.

York Laptop Shopping

Went to York to do some shopping today. The weather was great for photographs. I took a quick bunch of the Minster and then stitched them together. The above isn’t perfect, there are some rather strange shadows here and there, but I’m still quite pleased with the result.

And we bought a laptop. We managed to get quite a powerful beast for dad with 4G of RAM, 500G hard disk and Windows 7 64 bit edition. All for less than 400 pounds. Which got me to thinking. This is the entry level price for the Apple iPad when it comes out in 60 days and 60 nights or so. Why would you want to buy something small and shiny when you could get something much more useful for less money?

I remember coming up with a similar argument against the iPhone when that came out. For the same money, I reasoned, you you could get a really nice little 3G SkypePhone, and an eePC.  (You still can).  Much more sensible. And yet the iPhone was a roaring success and I’m expecting the iPad to do just as well. People are going to use it and fall in love with it. A whole section of users (those who don’t really aspire to an all powerful computer) is going to appear and, having had what the iPhone offers, buy the same on a bigger platform.  And number one wife quite fancies one too. Case closed.

Hull Graduation Congregation

I did the warmup for today’s graduation day for students from our faculty. Thanks for being a great Congregation. It was a really good occasion and we had a lovely speech from our honorary graduate. I’m sorry that some of the pictures I took from the stage came out a bit more blurred than I would have liked, but you should be able to recognise yourself. There are much larger versions in Flickr. Click on the images to find your way to the pictures on there.

…to the right..

Left of stage

Right of stage.

Using Digital Photo Frames as Lamps

I was wondering the other day why nobody had thought of using digital photo frames as lights for macro photography. So I thought I’d find out for myself. I’ve got a couple of little frames (the ones that you can now pick up less than 20 quid in some places). So I made some images of single colours using Photoshop Elements and spent some time balancing the frames precariously over the two model cars I wanted to  photograph.

You can see how I arranged things here. I used one frame as the “sky” and the other to light the background.  You can just see the front of the cars peeking out from underneath the black frame at the front. I just used white paper as the background.

Once I had the frames lined up I put the camera on the tripod and fired it up. I was using a macro lens to focus onto my tiny cars and it was hard to keep everything sharp. I ended up using a really small aperture (F16 or so) to get as much depth of field as possible. At that aperture, with the camera set to 200 ASA, I was exposing for a couple of seconds or so.

I’m quite pleased with the results. The great thing about working like this is that changing the colour of the light is very easy, you just advance the frame to the next coloured image. On the picture frame I had, I could do this using the remote control for the frame, so I didn’t have to touch anything.

So,  as a light source the frames do work. The light you get is not that bright, but it is very even, which is nice. This is probably as effective as using a small light tent,  and it works best if you can get the frames really close to the items being photographed. I’m certainly going to try some more later.