MVP Chronulator

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One of the nice things about being a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional is that you get a free gift each year. Last year the gift was a rather nice business card box with some toys in it. Whilst it was a nice box, I don't have much of a need to store that many cards. Having seen number one son's Chronulator I had an idea....

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The world's first MVP Chronulator

The workmanship is not first class. You can see a scuff mark on the bottom left where the Dremel slipped, and I need to line the meters up a bit better.  I should also change it so that right hand meter goes up rather than down.

But it works, and it is showing the correct time (near enough).

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The guts.

Doing the Impossible with Vista

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I put Service pack 1 on another machine today. It was the media PC I built a while back and use it for watching the odd telly program. The upgrade took ages. There was much hard disk rattling and everything moved as if in treacle. I wasn't very impressed to be honest, in fact after the upgrade everything seemed to have slowed right down, even simple things like opening up the browser took over a minute. Very poor. Then one program claimed that there was not enough memory for it to run, which was a strange thing for it to say on a one gig machine with nothing else loaded.

Except that it wasn't a one gig machine any more. The ram had come loose and I had Vista Ultimate running on a box with 256M of RAM. I suppose I should have spotted this earlier, but I'm very impressed that it did anything at all. I opened up the box and re-seated the chips and it seems a lot better now....

Déjà Vu with Vantage Point

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Just been to see the movie Vantage Point. Kind of In the Line of Fire crossed with Groundhog Day. The president has been shot and you get to see this part of the action several times from the viewpoint of different protagonists.  Each time you find out a bit more of the plot until finally you make it to the evil doer's point of view and find out what is really going on. Then you get a really good car chase and a happy ending for those that survive. The constant repetition of the same scene grated a bit for me, but the ending mostly made up for it. Not as big or dumb as Die Hard 4.0, with no characters you really get time to empathise with, but not a bad way to spend an evening.

And we did get to see the amazing Grand Theft Auto Coke ad.

Top Billing?

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Just watched Die Hard 4.0 (Will there be a 4.1? Will it have networking and workgroup support?) on DVD. Not seen it before. It is a big, dumb, action movie with some great lines and even greater explosions. For me the best bit was the credits, where some up and coming actor was billed as playing the part of "Nearby Agent". I don't think that's very helpful as a description. Lots of agents were near to John McClane at one time or another in the movie, but not usually for very long....

Holding the Baby

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Had a visitor today who brought her four month old baby round to see us. Other people's babies are great. You can hold them for a while and when they burst into tears, look like they are going to throw up or make a funny smell (or all three at once) you can hand them back to the parent with the words "I think she wants you now..".

Actually Ellie was great, and took me back to the halcyon days when our two were tiny tots and didn't know more about programming and science than me.

Pictures of Lisbon

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This place reminds me a lot of San Francisco. Same nice weather. Same driving on the wrong side of the road.

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Kind of similar bridge

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Same amazing skies

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..and they had a very nice conference centre too

I had a really good time over here. Next time I'm going to try to stay a lot longer.

On the way back to the hotel I passed a bus full of students who had been at one of my talks and were now heading home.

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Frankly, I fear for them....

Hello From Lisbon

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After a very smooth trip last night I'm now in Lisbon at TechDays 08. I came along last year, to the sensibly name TechDays 07 and had such fun that I've come back again and to do two sessions. I've just finished the XNA one and it seemed to OK from my point of view (although I'm worried that I might not have mentioned the book enough....)

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Where I'm speaking (they have lovely weather here)

As is usual for Portugal, I had a fantastic audience.

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Left

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Middle

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Right

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After I told my first joke (the people at the back are sound technicians who are paid to be there....)

I had a great time promoting the book and VerySillyGames. I've got another session this afternoon. Wish me (and the audience) luck.