Excel Prize Competition

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I don't use spreadsheets very much, but every year we have to produce a demonstrators timetable, and Excel is how we do it. I've got a very clever spreadsheet that lets you enter things and automatically highlights cells for the demonstrators, counts their loading and all sorts. I'm quite proud of it.

It uses a named range, called Times, which has all the timeslots in it. This year we have added modules and moved things around, and now the named range does not reflect the part of the spreadsheet that I want it to.

And nothing in Excel 97 would seem to let me change this.

The help, like always, tells me in mind numbing detail how to do things which are either too simple for words or too complex for me to ever want to use. I have that sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach that there is a very easy way to do this (in fact I even remember doing it once many years ago) but I don't know what it is.

Very frustrating.

So, I turn to you, dear reader. You have already shown that you are highly intelligent just by the kind of blogs you read (i.e. this one). So prove this by letting me know how to do this "simple" thing. First answer that works wins a Mars Bar.

Sometimes Everything Breaks

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I had all kinds of plans for today. I was going to record my lectures using Camtasia and post them on our intranet for an adoring public. Unfortunately fate had other plans.

Even after testing it still turns out that things can break. And then some. Vista shut down the tablet. Three times. Even though I was in the middle of a presentation. Of course, my plugging in the tablet power supply and neglecting to turn it on may have had something to do with this. My remote mouse failed to control Powerpoint, even though it worked with everything else. The presentation recordings were interrupted and out of sync. And to make matters even worse, they had my voice on them. Not good.

I'm going to try again, of course, but I think this serves as a lesson to us all that even if you try to do everything right, it can still all go wrong.

For the love of Mars bars

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Today we had our first practical session. As part of the work I thought it might be a larf to ask the class to email me with the answer to a simple debugging question. This is the first ever lab for these folks, and so I thought not many would get in touch. I offered  a prize of a Mars bar for the first correct answer.

Lots of people like Mars bars it seems. Loads of responses. I've just spent around an hour going through and sending "Right but too late" messages.

I'm wondering about getting our labs sponsored by Mars...

First Year Welcome Party

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Qn: "What is the combined age of the "Chuckle Brothers"?

Ans: - you'd know if you'd been at our First Year party...

We had a quiz, and Guitar Hero, and a PS3, and Wii Tennis, and 8 player Halo 3, and free drinks and food, and, and, and.....

And it was good.

Many thanks to Warren for bankrolling the operation and Adam, Simon, Dan, Zoe, Sam, Helen, Joan and Amanda for helping make things go with a swing (and apologies if I've missed anyone out). I took a camera (some of our students have got some amazing cameras - we must sort out a Flickr group for pictures) and took some happy snaps.

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Full Swing

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What half the room does when you shout "smile"

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What the other half does..

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These folks came first in the Quiz

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These came second

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And these won the, er, "special" prize

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Big riffs. Sam found this amazing disco sound system that we ran Guitar Hero through. And dig those groovy lights on the pillars...

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On the left we have Wii Tenis and PS3 Motorstorm, in the middle we have Guitar Hero and on the right, for your pleasure, we have 8 player Halo 3.

It was a great night. Hopefully more (and perhaps less grainy) pictures will surface. I'll put them on Flickr if they do..

Never Buy Clothes Un-supervised

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As part of my drive towards greater sartorial elegance I was pleased to discover that "The Only Shop Where Rob Can Buy Clothes That Fit"(tm) was having a "three for two" deal on shirts at their new web site.

I was very proud of the way that I actually went Internet clothes shopping with a spring in my digital step, as it were, and ordered up three (including a rather racy one with red stripes).

I told number one wife about my cleverness at teatime.

"I hope they are not all cotton" she said. "If they are, they'll be swines to iron, and I'll make you do it".

Hmm. Oh well. They arrive in a couple of days. Here's hoping for a bit of polyester goodness..

Halo House

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In keeping with the much anticipated launch of Halo 3 real soon, tonight I saw a house with "Master Chief" windows.

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This is an original, completely unretouched picture. And I've got the RAW file from the camera to prove it. Spooky eh?

What Price Loyalty?

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I was in Waterstones yesterday buying a couple of books. When I paid for them the person at the till asked me if I had a Waterstones "Loyalty Card". I said no and paid up. As I left the shop I began to worry about this.

Was it disloyal not to get a loyalty card? When you get one, do you have to swear an oath? If you get one of the cards and then buy a book from Amazon, do they mind? Can you get stripped of your card for such transgressions? Do they have loyalty police?

I think I had a near escape there...

I Love Autumn

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I really like this time of year. I like it when the nights get that bit longer and there is a bit of a chill in the air. I've been wondering about why I like September so much, and I reckon that I've figured it out.

The students come back on Monday, including a whole new bunch of First Years. It means I'll be knee deep in lectures, labs and tutorials. Great stuff.

If you are reading this and coming to Hull for the first time as an undergraduate it will be nice to see you, and make sure that you come along to the welcome do on Thursday evening . We are going to have big screen Wii Tennis and Guitar Hero, along with a PS3 and other bits and bobs, free food, beer tokens and a silly quiz with impossible questions. And a prize (which I really must sort out).

Untamed Workforce

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Microsoft has put up quite a funny spoof web site to showcase mobile working:

http://www.untamedworkforce.org/

It is quite neat, but the links drop you onto the Windows Mobile web site, which kind of gives the game away.

However, I was very pleased to find that the best of these sites (in my opinion) is still live. If you've not seen "Escape from Yesterworld" before, it is quite a treat. I especially like the videos:

http://www.escapeyesterworld.com/

XNA Bits and Bobs, and the power of XACT

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I've added a new section to the XNA Book part. This is where I put all the little things that I've found out about XNA development. I've discovered a couple of things about using XACT which you might find useful. They are here.

On the subject of XACT (the program that you use to create audio content for XNA games) I've gone from mild loathing to strong affection. Sort of a love affair, but with wavebanks. It lets you do really nice things with your samples, so that you can create complex sound stages with only a few wave files. It will change playback settings each time it plays the same waveform, to make a single sample sound like hundreds of different ones. It will randomly select a sample from a range, so that you get a nice variation in sounds. It will even let you bind variables in your program to settings used for playback, so that the sound can get louder on the left when the spaceship moves to the left.

So far I've only really scratched the surface of the tool (which is all I'll have time to do in the book) but if you want a nice way to add sound to games you should take a look. It is free, supplied as part of the XNA 2.0 developers kit.

Widsets: another good link

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Taking of good links, which we were, Simon put me on to this:

https://www.widsets.com/

They are little gadgets that you can load into your phone. A bit like the lovely PopFly, but for your mobile device. You can create and download gadgets into your phone, and the user interface is very neat.

They are written in Java, but I can live with that and they seem to work OK on my Smartphhone.