Deep in the Mothership

Microsoft Redmond Campus is huge. No other word. Lots of buildings, lots of people, lots of software. And quite a bit of rain.

The rainy view of Building 118

..a more conventional view.

Today we had lots of sessions about this and that. I'm always surprised by how Microsoft send their chief product managers to get roasted by us. I'm glad they do though, it is always very interesting.

In the afternoon we slipped over to the fabled Microsoft Company Store, where you can get software at cost prices. We had been allocated 120 dollars to spend on stuff, so I duly did my bit. I was very pleased to be able to pick up a cost price copy of Microsoft Home Server, which I'm looking forward to having a play with. I was even more pleased to find that they had a big display of my book.

Rob in the Microsoft Company Store

I'm never sure whether having lots of copies left in a shop is a good thing ("We've sold loads") or a bad thing ("Nobody is buying it"). Anyhoo, it was just nice to see it there. I've found my book in Barnes and Noble and Fry's as well, so if people aren't grabbing copies it isn't for lack of opportunity......

They had a Microsoft Surface in Building 117. Think of it as a huge iPhone which lets you do wonderful things with multi-touch. Wonderful stuff.

Added Value

Today was the first day of the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Summit. Before everything kicked off we went for a walk around Seattle.

We found this really cool magic shop. Check out the Elvis Zoltar inside...

I managed to blag a visit to Alan's room. His hotel room is rather high, with some nice views.

Overhead view of the monorail

Seattle skyline, with clouds

Gathering for the opening session. I've never been to one of these before, but the thing that struck me was just how many MVPs there are. This is a big affair. And there are people from all over the world.

This was the gathering before we went in for dinner.

The food, and the company, was excellent. On the way out I grabbed a picture of the view from the conference centre.

Shopping Trip

The quality of the weather dipped a bit overnight, but at least it wasn't raining. Went over to meet up with Boss at his hotel and it looked like they were prepared for him.

Did somebody call the cops?

Turns out the Dalai Lama was in town, and staying in the same place as Boss. These were the outriders for his trips out. We went off in search of breakfast.

This place does good sandwiches

This place does nice peppers

The Dalai Lama hits the road.

Boss and hired car

Boss in hired car

Lego bits, lots of them.

Lego pigs

I nearly bought lots of things, but was actually very good. Perhaps tomorrow.

The Return of Jetlagged Software

I woke up at midnight here, 8:00am back home. Of course it is time to write some software. I started doing this in Seoul last year, and now I'm doing it again. We went out shopping yesterday and I frequently wanted to know how much things were in pounds. Of course you can get a very rough idea by dividing dollar prices by two, but I wanted more accuracy. You also need to factor in the local sales tax, which comes in at 9%. What I wanted was some form of Damage Calculator which would hopefully discourage me from spending too much. As if.

I wrote a currency converter jetlagged app last time, and so I thought it would just take the code and modify it. Except that the code is of course on the computer I took to Korea, not this one (I really must work on my source code management).

So I've written a better one. It converts from dollars to pounds and back, working out how much you lose to tax each way.

What you get if you enter the price of, say, a PS3 Dualshock 3 controller that you are probably going to buy. That will do nicely.....

If you are lucky enough to be in Seattle and need this, you can find the code here. Just unzip the binary and drop it into your mobile device.

Seattle in Good Weather Shock

We went out for a look around Seattle. And the weather was lovely. I'm breaking in a new camera (what a surprise). It is a tiny Fuji FinePix F50fd. I was unsure it would improve much on my old FinePix F10. But it does. It has already taken some lovely shots. Fuji seem to put some magic pixie dust or something in their cameras that make them just take good pictures.

Like this

Or this.

We had tea in a super little place on the waterfront. Seattle seems to give priority to the quirky, home grown kind of establishment, and I reckon this is a seriously good move. It gives the place real character.

This is where ate. When I took this picture they were playing a Bay City Rollers track ("Saturday night" if you must know..). If that's not personality, I don't know what is.

It had a good view of the bay too.

After tea we had a walk around.

How tasteful. But not as scary as....

Of course they have skyscrapers

"Pig and Pigeon" Sounds like a good name for a pub.

 
I think Seattle is going to replace San Francisco as my favourite city in the US. Then again, the forecast is for rain tomorrow.....

Hello from Seattle

Woke up this morning feeling much better. So it was off to the airport and on to the plane. I'm going to the Microsoft MVP Summit in Seattle and to be quite honest I'm rather excited.

I've also taken the camera(s).

Obligatory Taxi shot from airport

Seattle skyline

The view from my hotel window. Might be a bit noisy tonight....

Breaking Rob

For some reason I've felt awful all day. Maybe it's something I ate. Maybe it's excitement about going away tomorrow. Either way, today I did something I've never done before. I walked out of a lecture I was giving. I was only for a few minutes while I pulled myself together, and then I went back in and finished off. But at the end I felt awful. I was a bit sorry for the chap who asked me a question and got the answer "I'm very sorry, but I can't answer that right now as I have to leave the room for a while...".

Anyhoo, I staggered home and slept for a couple of hours, which gave me enough energy to pack.

PageFlakes and flakey Maps

I've found this rather nice custom homepage maker:

http://www.pageflakes.com

It lets you make your own home page with customised content (yes, I know there are loads of these but this one is quite nice). I've only found one snag so far. It figures out where you are and then offers up a list of events in your region, added to a map so you can find them easily.

I just hope everyone can swim.....

Photographic History

We are having a kind of clear out in the department. All kinds of stuff is going out. We found this rather anonymous looking boxy thing. Which turned out (once we have worked out how to open it) to be a Polaroid SX-70.

A real blast from the past. This is an incredible device which when it was launched was an instant camera that worked like an SLR. It had special film that gave amazing results. I vividly remember seeing it on Tomorrows World when it first came out. And now we are chucking them out. Such is life.

Fortunately the Hull University Photographic Society (HUPS) was on hand to take the camera into its collection and give it a good home (well, better than being left in my office).

It is getting very hard to find film for these cameras, but the pictures it produces are incredible. I hope that we can stump up enough cash to get a film pack and run off a few shots with a piece of photographic history.

RSS Reader on Very Silly Games

If you've ever wanted your own RSS feed reader written using XNA (and who hasn't), you can now get one at verysillygames.

You Lucky People.

Blarst from the Parst

I found this around four years ago. And now, thanks to the wonders of the Internet, I've found it again. And this.

Meet Trevor

Trevor is a Pleo. That is a computer controlled robot dinosaur. He's been through a few changes since we got him, since you can upgrade his firmware using an SD card. He has a couple of processors, a camera in his nose, 20 motors and over 100 gears. And he can't walk in a straight line as one of his back legs seems a bit gammy. And some of the white has come off his teeth because the paint sticks to the leaf that we got to feed him with.

But we like him anyway.

Update on 2008-04-08 10:10 by Rob

You can find a really good guide to how a Pleo works here:

http://science.howstuffworks.com/pleo.htm

Whitby Trip

The weather was supposed to be horrible. Snow on high ground. Roads becoming impassable. Etc etc. But we went anyway. After all, we like Whitby very much. It is a strange place really, touristy in a way that only England can do properly. And we were dead lucky, because the weather, although very cold, was wonderful. Especially for photos.

Whitby church on top of the cliffs, and a few boats

The bay.

Steam Train. Mike knows which one.

Air Sea Rescue

They say Dracula is buried here somewhere. I'm not going looking.....

Open Day Power

Today was the last big open day of the admissions season. And what a day. We had the biggest turnout ever. We had double tours and all sorts.

I had to use the ultra-wide angle lens to get everyone in. If you click on the picture you can find your way to the Flickr page and get hold of the large version for plenty of detail.

As usual we gave away a DS to one lucky student. This time I actually did the presentation. The winner was ticket number 1. As if anyone would believe that.

I'm on the right. Notice how the winner is keeping a good grip on the prize. As if I would run away with it....

Thanks for coming folks, hope it was worth the trip. To find out more about our course you can go to www.wherewouldyouthink.com. To find out more about writing games you can go to www.verysillygames.com.

Friday Night Club Reunion

I have a C# lecture on Friday afternoon at 4:15. Not the best time. I call it the Friday Afternoon club and I always take a picture of the audience.

Today was no exception. It was building applications using forms. Thanks for staying awake people.

Free Pocket PCs

We have an embedded course as part of our degree. This year for the practical David has designed this rather neat project which uses the current location of the user to plan routing and stuff. Only thing is, to really do it properly you need a Pocket PC with built in GPS.

So we bought a few.

Each student gets the use of the device for the practical work. This means they get proper experience of real device development. I dropped by to take pictures of the first students picking up their devices.

These were the first two to pick up their toys. Have fun...

Rob in Micro Mart

You know you've made it big when you are in Micro Mart. At the end of yesterday's lecture I was shown a picture of my ugly mug staring out of page 94 of issue 997 of Micro Mart magazine. It was part of an article about Social Gaming, and I had been quoted saying sensible things about XNA (I must have been caught on one of my "sensible days" - which are getting fewer and further between these days).

Of course I shot over to the Students Union and bought a copy of the magazine (incidentally, and I've no idea why this should be the case, but our Students Union shop has an absolutely fantastic range of magazines. There are titles there that I've had bother finding in other places. Kudos.)

Anyhoo, I like the magazine. And not just because it has me in it. For a weekly magazine it has some very good editorial content and it made a very good lunchtime read. Of course the downside is that it also has lots of adverts for stuff, and so it might have proved a rather expensive purchase.....

Single Spies

Went to the theatre tonight. Single Spies by Alan Bennett.  Two tales of soviet espionage. In the first half we had Guy Burgess in his awful Moscow flat (which reminded me a bit of my first bedsit) getting actress Coral Browne to order him a new suit from his London tailor. In the second half we had Anthony Blunt being buttonholed by the queen who may, or may not, have been aware at the time that he was the traitorous fourth man.

The dialogue was very sharp and very funny. I'm not sure that real people speak in a way as well written as these did, but the leads, Nigel Havers (who played both spies) and Diane Quick (who played Coral Browne and the Queen) did a splendid job in recreating the times and trying to give some insight into what makes people turn against their country. The answer, in both cases, seems to have been that it seemed to be the right thing to do at the time.

Failed Fool

April Fools Day is now an institution, perhaps it is even beyond that. When the first thing you hear on your radio alarm at 7:30 is the question "Have you found any hoaxes yet?", the chances of catching someone unawares are somewhat limited. But that doesn't stop fools like me trying.

I had a 9:15 lecture with the First Year and we hardly ever have lectures on April Fools day, so I had to try something. Plan 1 involved me demonstrating debugging with a hammer and chisel. This would have been very impressive but there were health and safety implications, and anyway nobody would lend me their laptop for the demonstration.

Plan 2 was much more subtle. So subtle that nobody noticed. When my machine went live on the video projector to show the presentation the desktop showed an open copy of Word with the document "Exam Questions 2008" available for viewing. I left it up there for a while but nobody seemed to spot this. Ho hum. I switched the view to document 2, "Top Secret Plans to merge the Computer Science and Media Studies departments". Still nothing.

Ah well. Maybe next year.

Driven to Distraction by Gran Turismo

I've always liked Gran Turismo. Ever since the first version on the Playstation 1 I've enjoyed it. Of all the car games I've played it seems to capture the spirit of driving better than any other. I was a particular fan of the PS2 version, I even bought the force feedback steering wheel with the game on the day it came out, which must have been nearly seven years ago.

So, on Saturday I bought the Prologue version for the PS3. I was expecting it to be good. I wasn't expecting it to work with my nearly seven year old steering wheel. But it is and it does.

Once you've played a driving game with a proper steering wheel you can't go back. My first ever attempt at this was with the Mad Catz wheel for the Playstation 1, which I used with the original Need for Speed. I blu-tacked the thing to my desk and had a whale of a time getting caught by the cops. They only had around four or so "cuff and stuff" videos for when you got pulled over, but they were great fun none the less. The actual wheel was a bit primitive, what force feedback you got was provided by a large elastic band, but the sensation of driving was much better. I've been through a few odd devices since then. There was that strange Necon twisty thing, and a very odd jogcon force feedback controller which sort of worked. But nothing beats a real wheel.

I never got around to buying the wheel for the Xbox 360, maybe I'll get one some time. But with Gran Turismo a steering makes the whole thing like driving. It is hard to turn when you expect it to be, and you can feel the weight of the car shifting on the tyres as you go into corners. You can even feel the front wheels letting go at the start of a skid. I've spent far too much time today trying to coax my little car into third place on one of the B series races (the solution for me was to ignore the racing line and just blast around the outside of the track) but I've enjoyed every minute of it. If you have a PS3 you really should have this game. And a steering wheel.