For some time we've been having phone problems. It seems that calls weren't being recorded, messages weren't getting through etc etc. So today I bought some new technology to try and fix the problem. Rang the home number to test it.....
"What is the mass of Jupiter?"
Strange. Rang off and tried again.....
"What is the population of China?"
Checked the box. Turns out we had bought a question machine by mistake.
If you've got a Smartphone with a free internet connection you might like to take a look at what Virtual Reach can do for you. They provide a neat RSS feed reader for mobile devices and also some quite cute services that you can use to get local information as well. And all for free.
I've been playing with XNA for the new book (book news coming soon, along with another chapter). As part of this I investigated the use of layers and transparency and what happens if you draw lots of coloured things on top of each other. I ended up with this rather attractive arty looking display which I've made into a clock.
Having decided that the output looked nice, I then reckoned that from a software point of view the code could be a lot better organised. So I went in and tidied things up, re-factored classes, improved the scaling and made the movement of the layers more realistic. And of course the "proper" version looked rubbish.
I'll be making the clock available on verysillygames.com later on. And you can actually see the clock in action here. It is a bit jerky, but it gives you an idea of how it works.
I love it when things just work. Yesterday I took the tiny tablet PC to a meeting where we spent a couple of hours discussing reports. I opened them all on the tiny tablet in Office 2007, added ink annotations and then when I got back to my office Groove just synchronised them back onto the main machine, where I updated the text, cleaned off all the ink and sent out the updated version in about ten minutes.
I did most of this without thinking, and it just worked. Of course I could have taken a notebook and pencil along instead and done pretty much the same I suppose, but it wouldn't have been half as much fun.....
We've just got the latest batch of C# books back. We get literally hundreds printed each year. One batch gets given to our new First Year students (the book is the basis of our programming course) and the rest we give out to people who come to see us on admissions days and anybody else who asks for one.
Each time we get them printed we change the colour of the cover. A couple of years ago it was green, last year it was yellow. Someone suggested that lilac would be a nice colour this year, and so that is what we went for. The books look a bit pink. I still think they are lilac, but opinions differ on this.
Actually, I'm not that good where colour is concerned. I bought a bright red watch that I didn't think was a bit girly (I have this thing about watches that I'm getting slightly worried about. Nothing expensive, but I must have around 20 or so now.) Whilst the assistant was taking my money she rather spoiled things by offering to enclose a special gift receipt in the box "In case she wants to take it back".
Somehow, after that, it just doesn't feel the same to wear it.
We ordered a new mattress on Saturday. The springs in the old one are starting to poke through the cover and it makes a noise like a bag of spanners being thrown downstairs when you roll over in the night.
It arrives tomorrow. We've gone for one with a "memory foam" layer. The first thing I'm going to do is ask it "Who won the Cup Final in 1976?".
One of the things that you get to do on holiday is read. But only if you've taken some books with you on holiday. Fortunately our cottage, as well as being wonderfully positioned and sparkly clean throughout, came with a few that had been left there over the years. One of them was a Readers Digest collection of condensed stories. This is where they take a six hundred page volume and boil it down to a couple of hundred pages. Oh, and they add pictures too...
A tale of daring do, and centre partings
"..and if I were you young man, I'd clean the other nostril too..."
He watched them together, all the time waiting for the trick chair to fold itself up again....
"I wonder if this rock will leave a mark on my trousers" he thought to himself while his girlfriend wondered why she seemed to have somebody else's legs.
If they ever need a way to boost my blood pressure all they have to do is give me some software to play with. We've been using the Navicore sat-nav in the Nokia 770 quite successfully for the last week. I like it because it is mostly correct, only crashes every now and then, can find most places and the lady's voice is wonderful. She just sounds so perky all the time, even when asking you to turn right across three lanes of busy traffic. And sometimes she says "Tada!" when you arrive at the destination. Anyhoo, I thought I'd install the upgrades, because there are supposed to be some even better voices there. And the new version might be able to locate Hereford.
The Navicore upgrade experience is kind of strange. You run a program which opens a browser window which does things up until the point where IE crashes and you lose the lot. Then you find the program doesn't work any more. So you do it all again and it tells you that the software is upgraded and ready to go. Which of course it isn't. Then you re-install from the DVD and try again. Third time you notice the message about re-installing the upgrade on the device once you've installed it (if you see what I mean). So you do the upgrade again, re-install it, and then find it still doesn't work. So you email customer support and put the original back on from the DVD. By now you are viewing everything through a red mist and figure that it is probably time to go off and do something else.....
And so I am back home. I love the way that as you get closer to Hull the roads get that bit quieter, and the traffic reports of jams around the rest of the country have less and less meaning. And now I have my nice fast broadband connection (rather than climbing a hill, holding the phone above my head and waiting for a single bar of signal to appear).
But the holiday was fun though. I bought a Ferrari for five pounds. It turned out to only have three wheels, but I have plans to stick the missing one back on. I saw some stunning art, had a conversation with a horse (although it was a bit one-sided) and met up with the oracle pig again. Who turns out to be called Esmerelda. I also read some exciting books, one even had pictures in. Of which more later.
Oh, and I took the camera.
What a pity that mobile tower isn't my carrier.....
You may have noticed a slight dip in the quality of my blog this week while I have been away on my so called holidays. The posting have in fact been made by the 'QuipMaster 3000', a program that uses advanced artificial intelligence and third generation humour algorthms to produce output almost indistinguishable from a 1970s episode of the Ken Dodd show. All this will change tomorrow, when I return and fire up the 'Blogmaster 6000' again....
How to look young...... Hang around with very old people.
Today I actually achieved one of my many ambitions. I actually got to ask a horse 'Why the long face?'.
Do skeletons drink their tea out of bone china?
Did you knpw that every year 200 roadsweepers drown in Venice?
This is another test post. What an exciting morning. -- from the pen of Rob Miles' keyboard www.robmiles.com
I've just found a web site that is truly scary:
http://www.microsoft.com/MSPress/books/11849.aspx
In celebration of this I've added another chapter to the preview directory: /xna-book-downloads/.
Let me know what you think. Someone, please....
Took number one daughter to London today, where she is going to continue her studies. We had a car which was pretty much full of stuff. Parking was a bit restricted, so I stopped the car on someone's garden path and we executed what can only be described as a "reverse burglary", where the contents of the car were transferred into the flat at record speed.
Then, after a trip to Tesco and an impromptu TV purchase it was back to Hull.
It has come to my attention that some shops are stocking DVDs of the "film" Wild Hogs. It might be that people are mistakenly buying them for entertainment purposes, bearing in mind that they are being placed in the entertainment sections of some stores.
Do not buy this film. It is not nice. It manages to be offensive, unoriginal and unfunny in equal measure. I made the mistake of watching it on a 12 hour flight. You might think that in such a situation pretty much anything is preferable to sitting staring at the hands on your watch as they go round much too slowly. This is not true. I would much rather stare at my SPOT watch than this film. In fact I would rather stare at my spots than this film. I only watched it to the end as some kind of bet with myself. Which I lost.
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.
