Tonight finds me on a boat on the way to Amsterdam. P & O do these wonderful little min-cruises, which for only slightly more than the cost of a return ticket to London will put you up for two nights on their luxury ferry and take you to Amsterdam for the day to boot (or should that be clog).
Anyhoo, we set sail tonight and, in spite of poor weather, spirits are high.
View of the estuary
Leaving port
We are to be up bright and early tomorrow (5:00 am)...
One other thing I had my my uber posh hotel in Korea was a soundtrack. Sitting in the Bose CD player in my room was a disk called "Warmth of Cool_Interlude", a pretentious (and somewhat meaningless) name. Out of interest I pressed the play button.
There were some good tracks on there, including the wonderful Imogen Heap. There was also one from someone called Helicopter Girl. The song, called "Umbrellas in the Rain", seemed very appropriate, since that is what we had been all about that morning in Seoul.
Once back in the UK, I tracked down the album that it came from. The album is called "Voodoo Chic" and is completely wonderful. Very tuneful and atmospheric. If you can get hold of a copy, I think you'll like it.
When you have no common language, but you want to agree on a number, a calculator is a very useful device. Having decided on a suitable present for number one wife it was all down to the price. The lady in the shop smiled, bowed, entered a number on a big calculator and handed it to me.
I looked down, clearly I now had to do something to move the situation forward. A smaller number seemed like a plan. I examined the calculator carefully. It had clearly been involved in a lot of haggling. Several of the keys had worn so that they no longer had any markings on. Feeling that I had to do something, I stabbed at some keys, typed in some digits and handed it back. The woman's eyes widened in surprise, apparently I had just offered her the entire gross national product of Korea for a necklace and a bracelet. The calculator was handed back to me.
By now I reckoned I was gaining control of the situation, having worked out how to clear the display by the simple process of pressing all the unmarked buttons until I got a zero. I entered a number only slightly larger than the original one, handed over a wad of notes and made it out onto the street with my purchase.
I've just spent 24 quid. That is probably what some people spend on drinks on a Friday night. I could have got half of Bioshock for the 360 (which number one son says is worth a punt). I could have bought "Elite Beat Agents" for the Nintendo DS (but I don't have to because number one son got me it for my birthday). Instead I've bought:
- for two years. I know I could have got it cheaper, but I like to have all my domains in one place and I've used my favourite company for years and they have a very easy to use interface.
It occurred to me that I'm going to need a place to put all the silly XNA games that will form part of the book. So I bought the domain. At the moment it points into this site, but that can change. Anyone fancy setting me a site up for 25% of the equity, a profit sharing scheme and fringe benefits (in other words no money at all)?
Oh and Chapter 3 is coming along nicely. I should have it on the site some time next week. Prepare yourselves for the gaming sensation that is "Color Nerve" (note American spelling in vain attempt to increase market penetration).
There are a couple of patches that you might want to apply to your Vista machine. I've put them on two of mine, and whilst I've not noticed a huge improvement, they haven't made things worse....
KB938194:Improves the compatibility and reliability of Windows Vista
<http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=938194>
KB938979: Improves the performance and reliability of Windows Vista
<http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=938979>
I've posted a second chapter of the XNA book (actually I put it there on Tuesday). Remember that you can keep up to date with the book progress by subscribing to the RSS feed for the book journal. You can find my feeds here.
Went up town first thing today to do a paper review for Radio Humberside. We had a chat about the UK A-Level results, which are out today. Apparently everyone has done better than ever, and this is a national scandal. Although if everyone was doing worse, that would be a national scandal too. And if everything stayed exactly the same, that would be regarded as deeply suspicious because someone would obviously be fiddling the results....
I've seen modern A-Levels at first hand. I've know the amount of work that kids have to put in to get through them. All I would say is kudos to anyone who has got good grades, I hope they take you where you want to go.
Early morning Hull. Don't you wish you lived in a place that looked like this?
The BBC building
These are the last few pictures that I've just pulled off the camera. Korea seems an awfully long way away now, even though it is really less than a week.
On the way to the airport. Not sure what the red stuff is
Lottery burgers. Guess which one is for the Microsoft person....
We went to see the Simpson's Movie tonight. It was good, but not great. Around 2 episodes worth of good stuff spread over three episodes worth of time. Worth seeing though, just for some of the one liners. And I'm sure that if I watch it again I'll find a whole new bunch of things to laugh at.
Stephen put me on to this, which seems very appropriate. After some fiddling I came up with a Simpson's version of me which I'm reasonably happy with...
...perhaps because it doesn't look much like me at all.
I'm writing another book. If you want to learn how to program an XBOX 360 using C# and XNA it might be just what you want. You can find out more, and get your hands on the first chapter, here.
Wish me luck....
My biggish camera can take pictures in RAW format. This means that rather than compressing and processing the image data when it takes a picture, the camera simply dumps the output of the photo sensor into a file. It results in rather large files (around 14Mb in my case) for each picture but it does represent the epitome of quality, as you get all the data from the picture. It also means that you can do things like white balance compensation (making sure that things don't look yellow, or blue or whatever) after taking the picture, rather than at the time.
I was taking pictures of Seoul at night, and unsure about the white balance, so I took a few RAW pictures as well. The bad news was that when I got home, I now had to convert them into proper images. Fuji, who made my camera, supply a truly horrid set of programs to do this. They don't work very well on Vista, and I've lost the disks, so I thought I was stuffed. Until I found this.
These folks have written an image decoder for Finepix cameras that does everything I want. It is free and it works. If you want to play with RAW images and get the maximum quality from your camera, you should download the program and have a play.
Raw Seoul
Alan sent me this link. Check out the Steampunk LCD monitor. Wonderful.
In a previous post I mentioned "Planet Imagine Cup". I think that is the best way to regard it. When you go to the finals you enter a strange, parallel universe where everything is posh, the people are all interested in computers and what you are doing with them, living is free and someone makes your bed for you each day.
This means that returning home requires some small amount of adjustment. Fancy having to close your curtains by hand.
Everyone I've spoken to on the planet wants to go back again next year. For us in the UK this is especially interesting, as the world finals are in Paris in 2008. So no nasty jetlag or 25 hour journeys. And if the French know anything, it is how to have a good time....
The theme for the competition next year is "imagine a world where technology enables a sustainable environment." There are no less than 9 competition strands, including for the first time a game development one. Find out more here.
Today was the say that we had to leave "Planet Imagine Cup" and return to real life. Many thanks to Microsoft for setting up and running this amazing competition.
We got to the airport at just the right time. Found the just the right queue for just the right flight. And were told that the plane was just full. Apparently Air France use this novel technique where they sell more tickets than there are seats on the plane, on the rather strange theory that there are people out there who would spend one and a half thousand pounds on a journey and then not turn up to take it.
The charming lady at the desk told us that this would mean that either:
At the time of telling, the story sounded like a good deal. All we had to do was not make a fuss and return in forty minutes to find out which of the two options were ours. So we went off in search of breakfast and returned all hopeful to find out if it was smoked salmon and posh seats all the way back.
It was not. It was a different flight and later arrivals. By now of course it was impossible to change things, but we were offered some cash compensation and a chance to use the business lounge while we waited for our later plane.
I had the feeling that we had just been "handled" and that the mythical business class upgrade was exactly that. Never mind though, there was still the comfy chairs and free WIFI at the airport to look forward to, to say nothing of the wodge of euros that would soon be ours. Except they wouldn't let us into the lounge...
After a bit of a fight, we got in, connected to the WIFI, had a free drink and a bun and waited for our flight. We were considerably cheered when one of the VIP judges turned out to be on our flight too. If it's OK for him, it's fine for us.
We ended up using Air Korea, who provided excellent customer service and the best range of on-flight entertainment I've ever seen on a plane (even though I watched "Wild Hoggs", which I now know is a move best avoided). And I had leg room.
We got in precisely ten minutes later than our original flight and two of us managed to get our compensation euros as well (although because of another piece of daftness from "La Premiere Airline Francais" one of our party missed out on the cash).
Then it was a mad dash across town to miss the next train back. I finally got into the house at 11:15 after 25 hours traveling. I think I'll sleep tonight..
I feel rather bad about this. Rather than attend the World Fair part of the Imagine Cup awards I instead snuck out and took a trip round Seoul. I'd checked that I wouldn't be needed for anything, and it is rather unlikely that I will get to this wonderful city again in a long while, so it was into a taxi and off to the shopping district.
Taxis in Seoul are ace. They are very inexpensive and very efficient. Some of their drivers can speak English too, which is nice. And they have air conditioning, which is all important.
So, all we had was two bits of paper. One had the name of the shopping district written on it, and the other had the name of the hotel written on it. Both of them contained the only Korean language that we had on us. But at no point did this seem a problem. The sun was out, the people were friendly, and away we went. Of course I had both cameras, and of course I took loads of pictures. Most of them will be up on Flickr later, for now here are a few choice snaps.
We found this little market square area. This is the layout of the stalls.
Then we found ourselves in a video game arcade. This was tucked away in a side street. Even so there were plenty of machines.
Single player
This guy was seriously good
Draw your picture, take a call. That's multi-skilled...
The old and the new
Side street
After spending a few hours happily wandering around and steadily accumulating bits and bobs we found another taxi, gave the driver the other piece of paper and headed back to the hotel. I've got some pictures of the trip, which will appear later.
By the time we got back it was pretty dark, but the air was clear and so it was time to take some night views.
The view from the 11th floor
...and another.
Seoul is wonderful. If you get the chance to go, just go. And take me along too...
I've been thinking about this post. I'm wondering if it makes me seem more brave/stupid than I actually am. We did go off without much backup, but we had made sure that people back at the hotel knew where we were going and when we were due back. We also made sure that all the taxis that we took were proper ones, stayed in sight of each other and never strayed too far off the main streets. My impression is that Seoul is no more dangerous than any big city, but that is not a reason for taking undue chances.
Thailand, Korea and then Jamaica. Wonderful stuff. And Ireland (who were also splendid) were amongst the winners of a special BT award that will help them take their idea even further. The top six teams of the Software Development Challenge all produced entries with genuine "wow" and the standard has been excellent. You can find out more here.
This morning I got to wander round and chat with the entries. I saw quite a few that had been presenting to my group of judges, and lots of other ones which I'd not seen before. There are some very clever people out there. Everyone I talked to was very keen to come back again next year and was asking out ways that they can make their presentations better. I'm going to have a trawl through the comments that I noted down and put out some general points in a later post.
I'd never heard of W hotels before I came to Korea. I have now. This place is amazing. I could (and probably will) devote an entire post to my room. I've no idea how I managed to merit such lavish accommodation, but since it will probably never happen again, I'm making the most of it.
On the way to breakfast you pass this "wooden video wall". A camera in the middle grabs a video frame which is then used to orient thousands of little wooden blocks to show the picture. It does work, and the blocks make a super trickling noise as people walk past and the picture changes. I want to build one.
This is the view from the hotel restaurant. I suspect it looks even better by night. Say hello to Dennis and Nannette.
These are made of logs which have been sliced and fitted together to make art. Amazing.
Sometimes it feels like you've strayed onto the set of a sixties spy movie.
The lift has these amazing hanging lights. They are red when you are going down....
...and green when you are going up.
I'm sure I could get tired of living here. Maybe in 100 years.
Today was the day that the top six contestants in the Imagine Cup Software Development Challenge got to strut their stuff in front of hundreds of students, a bunch of VIP judges and press from all around the world.
And by gum they were good. I was very pleased that a few of the teams that I thought were excellent had made it through to the final. Frankly, I wish they could all get first prize.
Rogerio gets things going
They guy in front of me was certainly on message.....
All the top teams at the end of the auditorium.
Very well done people. Your lives just changed a little bit....
After lunch, and an ice cream, we set off on the next stage of our trip, which was a cruise on the Han river.
All aboard
Apartments
The captain, looking cool in white gloves
This bridge has a name, but I've forgotten it
Do I get any marks for composition?
Once we got off the boat we headed for a market street.
The pastel umbrellas are Imagine Cup students. Bless.
At this point I'm ashamed to say that I deviated a little from the enlightened path of culture when someone mentioned leaving the tour and heading for the electronics district. I'm afraid that I weakened and we headed off for the nearest subway station.
Route Planning
Hmm. Or we could just buy at the window...
Thank heavens I didn't pack my heels..
Not our train.
Tube travel
branded handrail
Now this is what I call a subway station
On the way to the mart
Mobile phones anyone?
Pink is the new black
Component heaven
Gadget happy team
People in Seoul are very obliging. I got the camera out and the guy in the booth instantly struck a pose.
Indeed it is
There is a Marks and Spencer coming soon...
Obligatory taxi shot
... and when we arrived
We found this amazing Italian place for tea. With the most wonderful artwork on the walls.
..and the calzone was wonderful too
Finally we got a taxi back to the hotel (taxis are amazing value here) and staggered into bed.
Rob Miles is technology author and educator who spent many years as a lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Hull. He is also a Microsoft Developer Technologies MVP. He is into technology, teaching and photography. He is the author of the World Famous C# Yellow Book and almost as handsome as he thinks he is.
