Journey to Agra

The first thing we had to do was fly to Delhi (actually a plane did all the hard work – I just sat and watched telly and luxuriated in the emergency exit seat legroom that I ended up with – thanks BA). Once at Delhi we caught a bus to a complex just outside town for a quick wash and brush up before the ride to Agra, competition HQ for the next few days.

Everyone has been fantastically welcoming. The team who greeted us at the first pit stop were really excited about having us here. We were a bit jaded, in that we had just had a long flight. But to us it was just early evening. To the home team it was after midnight, and they had obviously been working like mad all day to set things up for our arrival. To get from Delhi to Agra we had a four hour night drive. At first it was dark, but as we got to our destination the sun came up and we got to see more of the countryside.

Agra sunrise

Driving in India is interesting. It involves a lot more use of the horn than back home. And there is always the possibility that might be a cow stood in the middle of the carriageway just around the next corner. When the road side cafes feel the urge to drum up trade they simply put up a road block outside their establishment to give you more time to read about their special offers.

However we all got here safe and sound after around a days solid travelling. (I felt quite proud of this until we met up with one of the Microsoft chaps from Seattle, who had spent 47 hours getting here).

The courtyard outside the room

The hotel is very impressive. Nice and cool and with big rooms and the most attentive staff I have ever experienced. Everyone seems determined to do their utmost to make your stay a really happy one. I think they are going to succeed.

Reverse Jetlag

This is the first time that I have ever flown east on a trip away. The fact that I have up until now only flown west, never had a problem coming home, and anyway there is only a four and a half hour time difference to India has lulled me into a false sense of security.

I feel my head has been injected with rice pudding under pressure. The thinking bits in my brain are fighting with other bits which only want to sleep. If the following posts don’t make much sense then that is pretty much par for the course from me. If they seem dafter and more ramblesome then ever then I apologise, I hope that normal service (and mental function) will be resumed soon.

Go Belgian!

After having arrived and got unpacked we headed back into the city for a “Good Luck” meal. Andy Sithers had heard good things about a Belgian restaurant and so we went there. In my mind Belgium is famous for two things; chocolate and not being famous for much. I really had no idea what to expect.

Andy Sithers said we should take the stairs at Covent Garden. So we did. On the way up and on the way down..

It turns out that Belgium cuisine is actually great stuff. The Belgians (or at least the ones that operate the place we went to) are very good at sea food and a whole bunch of great tasting dishes. We all had something different and it was all wonderful. They make their own beer too, which is also good stuff. And, for reasons which were never properly explained, they also serve all this dressed as Trappist monks. If you are after excellent food you should go there.

The team with their beer menus. Like the sound of that.

Tube travel

Tube Travel

The flight leaves tomorrow morning, and so we are having a night at the airport so we can get an early start. The train journey was smooth and on time. Then I had to face around an hour on the tube to get out to the airport, which I suppose could have been worse. It wasn’t that hot, but the carriages were packed and I had the dubious pleasure of staring at someone’s armpit for much of the journey. I don’t think they enjoyed the experience much either.

Fate and Immodium Plus

I’m heading out to India tomorrow. Today is the first leg of the journey, when I, Andy from Microsoft and the team all meet up at Heathrow Airport in London.

So this morning I sallied forth to the chemists with my copy of “Which”, the consumer magazine, which recently published a foreign travel special. In amongst a whole slew of scary statistics about how likely you are to fall ill if you ever leave this sceptred isle were some recommendations for various potions and lotions which would keep the nastiest things at bay and reduce their effect as much as possible.

With a bit of luck it all stays in the boxes....

This is of course insurance, in that I’m buying it because, having spent 35 quid on the various cans and tablets; with a bit of luck I’ll not have to use any of the stuff. Of course if I decide to take a chance and buy nothing then I’m pretty much doomed. Then again, I’ve not had a lot of success in the past second guessing fate...

Hiatus Status

I'm just about to dash out of the door and catch a taxi on the first leg of the trip to India. So blog posts might bet a bit interrupted. On the other hand, the ones which make it through might have nice pictures.

Sent Packing

Been packing for the trip to India for the Imagine Cup finals.

Time to pack gadgets and vital equipment : 2 hours

Time to pack clothes : 90 seconds.

I may not be very satorially elegant. But I will have all my power supplies with me....

Cars the movie

 

Not as annoying as I was expecting

The critics have been very unkind to Cars. Previous Pixar movies (Monsters, Toy Story, The Incredibles) have been lauded as great almost before they hit the screen. Not so Cars, the build up was muted, and the reception somewhat ambivalent. I can kind of see where the critics were coming from. The idea of a world run for and by cars is  a little hard to swallow. Somehow hairy monsters living in a parallel universe powered by scared children seems a lot more credible. However, if you work a bit harder on suspending your disbelief belief you will find a lot to like about the movie.

For a start there is the look of the film. Pixar can do pictures. They can really do pictures. The images of the cars are wonderful, and Pixar pull off traditionally hard things like water, trees, gravel, smoke etc etc with almost contemptuous ease. Only mud seems to give them a problem, and it is still around the best looking mud you will see in a computer drawn movie.  It is worth seeing just for the scenery. Whether you believe in the cars or not the way they look is just incredible.

The story is a completely hack effort, no twists, no turns, you can just about set your watch by the progression of the hero as he/it becomes a more human car. There is some great imagination at work though, and some lovely visual gags. I'm sure if I watch it ten more times I'll find ten more great things that I missed each time.

I think at this point I should come clean and say that I've never liked Owen Wilson. He always seems to me like a big heavy weight that pulls down any picture he is in . However, in Cars he does a workmanlike job as the voice of the red racer with a lot to learn about life, and his surrounding voices are all well realised.

If you don't go to see this film because of the mediocre reviews then you will lose out. There are some bits which are so funny you will be laughing out loud (I was, and I certainly didn't expect to be doing that) There are also some tear jerky moments and a solid gold happy ending which I think we could all do with around now. Recommended.

The Walls Have Ears

We were in the tearoom having one of our high level discussions (as I remember the question was "Why were the 'Yellow Bus Company' busses never actually yellow, but usually grey" - the prevailing opinion was that the yellow paint had been scraped off them and used for no-parking marks on the road).

Anyhoo, at the height of the discourse one of the large posters in the room suddenly peeled itself off the wall and seemed to be making for the door.  I hope it wasn't a statement on the quality of the conversation.

No More Shorts

I'm getting some made....

That does it. I'm starting a new campaign. I've seen things at work over the last couple of weeks which would have driven a lesser man to madness and worse. This has got to stop. Fortunately the weather has been kind to us for the last day or so, with a fall in temperature ridding the coffee room with some of the more horrid apparitions. But I'm not taking any more chances. It stops now, and it stops here.

I'm talking about the practice of wearing shorts to work. If your job is a footballer, or some other sporting profession then shorts are fine. But once you come off the playing field the shorts should replaced by proper slacks.  There is probably a Geneva Convention or something about things like this. And if there isn't, there should be. Sign up now. Banish those knees.

The Letter K

Maureen Lipman (great actress, wonderful writer and born in Hull) wrote in her column in the paper today that Neil Simon (famous playwright) reckons only words with a K in them are funny. Apparently chicken is funny, whilst tomato is not. I told number one wife about this.

"But cheese is funny" she said.

I could not have put it better myself. Case closed.

Samsung Q1 First Impressions

I'm going through a gadget frenzy at the moment. Only a few days after my first tiny PC (the Motion LS 800) arrived, now I have a second one to play with. This time it is a Samsung Q1. I must say I'm impressed. The Motion machine is very neat, made of aluminium alloy and has a screen that is visible in bright sunlight (and looks pretty amazing in the office). The Samsung is shiny black plastic, and is a proper realisation of the "Ultra Mobile PC" (UMPC), an evolution of the Tablet PC idea.

The Motion machine costs around twice the Samsung, and so you would think it was better. Well, it is and it isn't. It has the advantage of a proper touch screen, using a wireless stylus which lets you rest your hand on the screen as you write. The Samsung has the cheaper touch sensitive screen, which renders it is all but useless as a note taking device. The Motion also has a slightly higher resolution and physically larger display. But I don't like it as much as the Samsung, because of two things it hasn't got.

Firstly it has no fan. All the cooling is done by convection. Therefore it gets warm, very warm. So warm that if you give it something hard to do (charge the battery whilst installing Microsoft Office for example) it first complains it is too busy, and then it shuts down completely.  Using the wonderful Speedfan program I can watch the processor get hotter and hotter until things go pear shaped. I'd be very nervous about performing development work or playing with images on this device.  The Samsumg has a tiny fan which pumps warm air out of a vent in the back. Consequently I can be much more relaxed about giving it demanding things to do.

Secondly the Motion machine has no kickstand. This is a terrible omission. The Samsung has two, one which angles the machine slightly, and another which stands the machine at 80 degrees, the perfect angle for using it or watching DVDs. You can stand it up and use it, which is as it should be. For the Motion I had to buy a Bookchair (these are great by the way) so that I can use it on the desk.

The Samsung will be going with me to the Imagine Cup Finals in India as my main machine. I'm going to use it for photo processing, blogging, listening to music, watching movies and a bit of software development. I'm pretty sure that it will more than do the business.  The screen is  a bit tiny, but it has this amazing "Auto Scaler" button which squeezes down a 1024x600 screen onto the display with surprisingly useable results. It also works very well with an external monitor/dual desktop configuration. I'm writing this on a 1280x1024 monitor full screen, while the Samsumg shows me Outlook alongside on its smaller screen. Very nice.

I'll have a full report about life on the road with a Q1, and the usefulness of the UMPC in general, when I get back.

Bin Boggled

The kitchen bin has broken. (actually it broke a long time ago, it is just that the first time it broke it was brand new, and we didn't have the heart to replace it). However, now it is properly, as in more than one piece, broken. This poses two problems.

1. We now have to obtain a new bin. Particularly difficult as properly working bins seem very hard to get hold of these days. The ones in ASDA were pre-broken, and I've yet to find a design which I think is solid enough for my lot.
2. How do you throw away the old dusbin?

Profound Questions in York

I wanted a go in a red boat. But nobody else did. Wah.

We went to York today. There were rumours (nay, legends) that a branch of "The Only Place In The Country Where Rob Can Buy Things That Fit 'Cos He Is Tall (tm)" had reopened in the city. And was having a sale. Wowee.

We turned up at ten past ten to a shop full of "Sale signs" which was locked with an iron gate. The notice on the side said "Open 10:00 on Saturdays". Such is life. After drink at Starbucks and a Rocky Road (which with hindsight was probably a bit risky, given my state of excitement I probably should not have sugar rich cakes) we went back and found that the shop was now open.  Nothing much for sale unfortunately, but I did get a couple of shirts. (it has just occurred to me that there is no reason for me to assume that you have any interest in the fact that I bought two shirts today - but remember that you are hear for the kwality of the riting. Oh yes).

Anyhoo, then we went walkabout around York. Profound questions abounded. The York Psychic museum had a number on the door you could call to arrange a meeting.  Why? Surely they would be expecting you whatever time you turned up. And next to the roadsweeper was one of those things that helps you pick stuff up from the floor. A sort of remote hand thing. But it was lying on the floor. I do hope he has another one he can use to pick it up.

Maybe it's the heat.

Read all about it

Sometimes you come accross something which is so interesting that you just have to tell everyone else about it as soon as you can.  For example PressDisplay. This site has a wonderful interface that lets you read just about any newspaper from around the world. If you sign up for a demo you can get the papers free onto your PC for a week, after that it is around ten dollars a month for up to 31 issues, which is pretty good value if you are after reading the news from around the world. An interesting take on the way that electronic media is going.

Thunder and Lightning

We had something of a storm last night. A few days after I get my shiny new TV aerial on top of the house we have one of the biggest thunderstorms for ages. Most impressive. All the lights and all the sound effects. I couldn't do the old "count the time between the flash and the boom to find out how far away it is" because there were so many flashes and booms that I couldn't pair them up.

I didn't know whether to hide under the bed or go out and take photographs.  In the end I did nothing, which strikes me as a wise choice.

Guitar Hero Quite Literally Rocks

One other birthday present that I was lucky enough to receive was a copy of the PS2 game "Guitar Hero". The first thing you notice about this game is the the controller. It is a plastic guitar, around three quarters the size of a real one, but still plenty big enough for posing.  On the fret board are six colour coded buttons, there is a plastic tag that you "strum" and a "whammy" lever for vibrato.

The basis of the game is the old "press the right button at the right place in the song" routine beloved of dance mats and bongo drums. But this time you are playing in a band and it is up to you to get the important riffs down.  Best of all, if you get the timing wrong there are a variety of "bum note" sounds which come out. Do this too often and the watching crowd gets restless. Do it too much and you get booed off the stage.  As things get more complex you have to play chords. And you get a special "Rock Star" mode where you can hold the guitar upright and really show off.

The game disk has all the rock standards you'd be expecting. Smoke on the water, More than a feeling, Killer Queen, etc etc. Not the originals, but well good enough.

We set it up at the party and it was in pretty much continuous use. Great stuff. You can even get a second guitar controller so that you can duke it out musically with a rival axemeister.

Strongly recommended. Oh yeah.

Broadcasting to a waiting world

I did my last webcast tonight. I've been cranking these out at a rate of one per week for the last few weeks, and today was the last one. It was all about mobile game development using Direct3D on mobile devices.

I'm going to miss doing them, they were fun.  If you came along and took part, good on you and I hope you found them useful. If you missed out, you can download them and enjoy them at your convenience (or some other small room in the house).

You can get hold of the resources, and find links to the recordings, here.

Adobe Updater needs your attention

I got another new toy today. Seems to be the season for deliveries and new toys. It is a Motion tablet PC and it is a tiny wonder. I'm going to use it in the labs for marking assessed work with handwritten comments and then uploading them back to Class Server. This is on the back of a Teaching Fellowship which I was awarded last year. (I'm going to set up a blog section all about it when I get round to it).

Anyhoo, the manuals are all on the machine itself, so I fire it up to read them. Of course they are in PDF format. I hate PDFs. Not because the format is a bad one, but because you have to use the Adobe reader to read the documents. This has one of the most malignant update managers I have ever seen. If it fancies doing an update one of its favourite tricks used to be to hide a dialogue box behind all the other programs asking about this, and then cause Internet Explorer to freeze until you realised what had happened and searched the thing out, or reset the machine out of sheer frustration.

Now it has a new trick. Because my machine is shiny new, the reader has two updates to perform. So it installs the first update, calls for a reset of the machine. And then installs the second update. Which also resets the machine.  People, this is a document reader. Not a security manager, missile launch code keeper, or deadly virus which if given free reign would destroy civilisation. Even windows update is nowadays quite reticent about rebooting your machine. And I'm kind of OK about windows doing reboots. It is an operating system. That's its job. But not a dratted document reader.

The good news is that eventually the updates completed and I was able to actually use the machine to read how the machine works.

Good Service and Fate

Sometimes one can be forgiven for assuming that the universe is actually out to get you. Then, every now and then, just sufficiently often to scotch the "out to get you" theory, things happen as they should do.

The only bad thing that happened on  Sunday was that the Oven Door exploded.  Fortunately it was my birthday, and pretty much nothing upsets me on my birthday, but it still left us with a pile of broken glass where it used to be, and no way of cooking anything much.

So yesterday I rang Cannon and asked about getting a replacement sent through.  This morning a big parcel arrived. Addressed to "Mr Yales", but we'll gloss over that. The good news is that it was exactly what I wanted,  and after a bit of wrangling with my trusty (and a bit rusty) philips screwdriver, we are back in the cooking busines.

And earlier today I needed to send my Jasjar back to Microsoft for some fettling (they are going to give me some new software to play with - which is nice). At ten past ten I rang DHL to arrange the pickup. At ten thirty the man was in the office waiting for the parcel. Apparently he was on campus in the post room and so just ambled over to pick up the box - before I'd even finished putting the label on. Amazing stuff.

There are two possible ways to explain this:

1. The universe actually is out to get me, but is lulling me into a false sense of security for now.
2. The universe is not really out to get me at all, but just doesn't care. I just put whatever interpretation I like on what happens, depending on how things are going at the moment.

I was just putting the finishing touches to this missive, when I found I'd just spilled a whole glass of water all over my desk. Read into that whatever you like. I'm off to get a cloth.