Olympic Secret

I was watching the Olympic opening ceremony last week when I believe I uncovered a great truth. If I suddenly vanish after this post, and it is mysteriously erased (well, you won't be able to read it, but anyway) then you will know that I have uncovered one of the greatest secrets of the age.

I think the Olympics is actually secretly run by the Walt Disney corporation. Consider the facts:

Olympic rings, or Mickey Mouse Ears?

Similar handwriting, eh?

Just think of it. All that TV time, advertising, merchandising, how can they not be doing it. I think the whole thing is actually being filmed in a big warehouse in Florida, with Pixar doing the animation for the outside shots. Every night a team of crack scriptwriters gets together and decides who wins each medal. It makes perfect sense. I just hope they are going to use the same approach for 2012.

Moving On

Number one son has left home. He's done it before, during his university career, but each time it was with the expectation that he would come back.

Not so this time.

He has gainful employment, a new place to live and lots of good times to come.

Good luck son, it will not be the same at home without you.

The Dark Knight

We went to see the Dark Knight last night. And it was dark. What are the chances eh?

We were lucky enough to see it at IMAX in Bradford, on the huuuuuge screen. And it was great. A bit bleak perhaps, although there were some points where the finer aspects of human nature rose to the fore they tended to be slapped down again by the generally better organised forces of evil. They seemed to have unlimited supplies of barrels full of explosive that they could move around Gotham city and wire up at will.

Batman as a character doesn't really get the chance to do much but those around him more than make up for this, with a truly astounding  performance by Heath Ledger who doesn't much seem to perform the role of the joker as inhabit it. 

They seemed determined to give good value to the cinema goer, with set piece after set piece and some really cracking scenes. This perhaps made the film a little overlong, but the pace never lets up. And the sound is worthy of special mention, with very impressive bangs and crashes that really packed a punch.

It is very violent, particularly given the 12A rating, but you really should see it.

Temptation, thy name is....

Update on 2008-08-08 20:17 by Rob

Actually, it turns out that this is not actually very good strawberry flavoured milk. The absolute best is from Marks and Spencers ("Not just strawberry flavoured milk.....") with second place going to Sainsburys. 

I was wondering about setting up a Strawberry Flavoured Milk group on Facebook. We could exchange tips (two for two pounds at Sainsburys) and recipes (Strawberry milk marshmallow surprise) and experiments (I wonder what happens if you make Yorkshire pudding with strawberry flavoured milk?). Then again, there might already be one...

Cool Dad

This morning on the radio they were saying that the best way to see the new Batman film is on the super large IMAX cinema screen.

Like we are doing this evening.

I mentioned to number one son how lucky he is to be able to hang around with me, what with me being a person who does so many cool things.

"Yeah." he replied. "Like opening the fridge door...."

I'm really going to miss him.

Love that Long Tail

When I was younger I used buy single records on 7" plastic. I've got a whole load in a box up in the loft, alongside the turntable that I used to play them on. Occasionally I get one out, look at the tiny wavy groove on it and shake my head in amazement that we actually used to store music that way.

Last week I really fancied hearing one of my old singles again ("Living by Numbers" by New Musik). So I searched out the YouTube video and had a very retro TV experience, even down to the blurred picture and muffled sound we used to get on our telly back in 1982. And then I wondered if I could still buy it. And it turns out I can. Amazon have links with vendors that sell all kinds of old stuff and so earlier this week the CD with the entire album ("From A to B") turned up in the post.  (great album. Starts with a very convincing doorbell sound which actually had us checking the front door......)

This is called "long tail" marketing. There are probably not that many fans of New Musik out there, but there are enough worldwide to make it worth someone keeping a bunch of copies of the disk and sending one out every now and then.

Now I'm looking for some albums by Synergy.....

The eeePC Comes of Age

I am sad. And weak. And I go through phases where I buy new computers. I also sell slightly older ones on ebay, and so it kind of balances out. Today I bought another computer.

Last week I sold my Asus EEEPC 701 because although it was lovely and implausibly cheap I never really used it much. And besides I needed the money to pay for yet another computer that I seemed to have bought, of which more later when I actually get my hands on it.

Anyhoo, having sold lots of things on ebay for more than I expected I found that I could afford to buy the computer that I've got today (I hope you are all keeping up).

The 701 sold me on the idea of a mini-laptop, it was just that I wanted one that was genuinely useful. And to me that means running Windows. I quite like Linux, but it turns out that most of what I want to do has a Microsoft flavour. We managed to get the 701 to run XP quite successfully, but the small screen size made using it a bit of a pain, and the lack of a proper keyboard was also somewhat irritating. And to put all the software I wanted on the device would have filled the solid state memory several times over. So off it went.

What I actually wanted was a mini-laptop with a proper keyboard, a slightly larger screen, a hard disk and running Windows XP. And it turns out that you can get exactly that in PC World, for only sixty pounds more than the original device.

The Advent 4211 is a re-badged MSI Wind. This is one of the newer mini-laptops with one of the latest Intel Atom processors. It comes with 1G of memory, a 90G hard disk, a lovely 10" display delivering a very useable 1024x600 resolution and it works a treat with Windows XP. It is nowhere near as funky looking as some of the mini-laptops, being a rather somber black, but it goes like a rocket. And it only costs 280 quid, which to me is a major bargain.

This afternoon I put Visual Studio Express and XNA Game Studio on it and was soon running some of my XNA demos with no problems at all. It won't have the grunt to do the 3D stuff, but for simple programs it is well up to the job. Windows XP on the Atom seems to zoom along very satisfactorily. The keyboard is nice to use with good sized keys and the screen looks great. It also plays movie files extremely competently, the only let down is the rather poor quality of the internal speakers (but you can of course add headphones or an external amplifier).

It actually comes with a copy of Microsoft Works on the hard disk which means that you can be writing documents and spreadsheeting to your hearts content straight out of the box. I've not had a chance to test out the battery life yet, but from the reviews I reckon that a couple of hours should be tenable. And there is also a high capacity battery available.

If you are in the market for a dirt cheap, and very portable, laptop then I don't think you should look any further.

Profound Question

Whilst looking in the fridge for my ration of strawberry flavoured milk I noticed that we had some "Thousand Island Dressing" in there. I started to wonder (always a bad thing) how the name came about:

Marketing Drone 1: "We've got this new pink stuff that you can put on salads"
Marketing Drone 2: "OK. Is it anything to do with the sea?"
Marketing Drone 1: "Nope"
Marketing Drone 2: "OK. Ships?"
Marketing Drone 1: "Nope"
Marketing Drone 2: "OK. Landfall?"
Marketing Drone 1: "Nope"
Marketing Drone 2: "OK. How about 'Island Dressing'?"
Marketing Drone 1: "Nah. Not impactfull enough."
Marketing Drone 2: "OK. How about 'Hundred Island Dressing'?"
Marketing Drone 1: "Nah. Too small fry."
Marketing Drone 2: "OK. How about 'Million Island Dressing'?"
Marketing Drone 1: "Now you're just taking the piss."
Marketing Drone 2: "OK. 'Thousand Island Dressing' it is then."

Actually it turns out that it was named by actress Mary Irwin, at a posh dinner party in a hotel. But I guess you already know that.

Whether Forecasts

I've been watching the weather forecasts again. I watch them for one reason really, to find out if it is going to rain on me or not.  This is kind of annoying, in that most of a weather forecast these days is taken up with telling me what weather has already happened in places where I'm not. Usually focusing on conditions in London. However, I have become quite good at decoding what their sayings mean in respect of the question "Will it rain on me?":

"scattered showers": we don't know

"outbreaks of rain in some areas": we don't know

"changeable": we really don't know

"unsettled": we really don't know, and don't rule out hurricanes

I think, actually, that perhaps the best job to have is weather forecaster. You get paid whether you are right or not. And apparently if you just say "The weather today will be the same as yesterday" you are correct more often than not.

Update on 2008-08-07 08:43 by Rob

Number one son has asked me to point out that I really did mean to use the word "Whether" in the title of this post. He is somewhat concerned that readers might think that I'd mis-spelt "Weather", rather than attempting a (in my opinion) rather clever pun.

Last Choir Standing. Fight!

There is something rather surreal about listening to number one son playing Soul Calibur IV over a background of number one wife watching "Last Choir Standing" on TV.

The X-Files Movie - I really wanted to believe

Just got back from the X-Files movie. I was expecting lights in the sky, backlit gray aliens and lines like "You're dealing with powers beyond your comprehension". What I got was a somewhat grisly movie with a sub-1950s horror story plot and a whole boat load of angst.

Much has been made of the way that the film breaks away from the original X-Files staples of global conspiracy, alien invasion and strange goings on from "out there". Unfortunately it seems to also have jettisoned original plotlines and anything particularly engaging about Mulder and Sculley, who spent a lot of time grappling with "issues" and pulling unhappy expressions.

If you are a fan of the TV show and the earlier movie I can't particularly recommend it. If you have never seen the X-Files before I don't think you will particularly enjoy it either.

Fantastic Fun with Fantastic Contraptions

Simon just sent me this link:

http://fantasticcontraption.com/

It is a puzzle game very like the Physics Illustrator in the Tablet PC Power Toys but with directed challenges. Great lunchtime fun.

Casting?

I'm writing some new teaching material at the moment. It is going roughly half as fast as I expected, which is about right in my experience.

Anyhoo, I'm doing casting, where you tell the compiler to convert from one type to another by putting the type in front:

int i, j;

float factor = (float) i / j;

I have to cast i to floating point in the sum, otherwise I get an integer division and no fractional part.

In other words, in the above code if the value of i is 1 and the value of j is 2 I want the value of factor (1/2) to be 0.5 (floating point division) rather than 0 (integer division). I get this result by casting i to float in the sum. C# uses floating point division with floating point operands, and everything comes out OK.

This is a standard computing thing, most languages provide support for casting. And I started to wonder why it is called casting? Popular wisdom seems to be that it is related to casting things in a foundry, where you pour liquid metal into a mould of a particular shape. The shape of the mould determines the result of the cast. So by casting you can change one thing into another.

However, I've thought of another way to look at it. You can think of casting as making a movie. You take an actor (Christian Bale) and cast him as a character (Batman). For the duration of the film the character will behave in terms of the role they have been cast into. This even works when we consider stupid casts. In C# you can't do things like cast a string into an integer. In films you can't do things like cast Christian Bale as City Hall. I quite like this way of looking things, but one thing does worry me. Maybe this is the original meaning, and it has taken me years to figure it out.....

Kung Fu Panda Kicks Ass

Went to see a kids film tonight. We went to the new Vue cinema at the top of Princes Quay in Hull. They use digital projectors and the picture was wonderful.  The film itself wasn't half bad either. I'd heard good things about it and they were all right.

There is a kind of production line for these kind of computer generated films at the moment, and many of them are are kind of "sub-Pixar, straight to DVD" kind of affairs. However, Kung Fu Panda is definitely a cut above any of these, mostly down to the great voicing by Jack Black amongst others. Nice story, some wonderful set pieces and generally lush images make this a film worth getting to see.

I was pleased to find that Vue was nice and busy when we came out of the film. It is a nice place to go to the movies and I hope it does well. In fact we are planning to see the X-Files movie at Vue on Friday...

Bogey Wonderland

I've seem to have caught this kind of cold thing which is not very pleasant. I've not got a runny nose as such, but for some reason bogey production seems to have gone into overdrive. That, or I've been subjected to some ancient gypsy curse and the bogey man is coming every night with a hod (or whatever he carries them in) full of bogeys and emptying them into my head.

It's funny because I don't remember offending any ancient gypsies recently. It has done wonders for tissue sales in our area though.

I want to be a Dragon

I've decided what to be should I ever be allowed my time again on this earth. I want to be a dragon on "Dragon's Den".

Until recently I wanted to be a banker, in that no matter how stupid, greedy or idiotic I was my business was "too big to fail" and therefore my job (and large bonuses) would be secure for ever. But it didn't really give the opportunities for creative nastiness and acclaim that being a dragon on Dragon's Den seems to offer.

If you've not seen the program the format is that hapless entrepreneurs are given a chance to pitch their ideas in front of a bunch of rich people (the dragons) who can either enjoy themselves by mercilessly insulting everything in sight or enjoy themselves by backing the idea with some of their (to them) small change and walking away with a substantial profit if things work out.

I used to quite like the program, in that it seemed to me that it did provide a way that genuinely innovative people could get backing for ideas that otherwise might not see the light of day. But that was before it became big television. One of the laws of physics is that you can't measure something without affecting it in some way. TV shows are like that. Once they become popular they become an end in themselves and their original starting point becomes lost in the mist of ratings.

Nowadays the dragons have figured out that anything on the program has the benefit of a five minute prime time advertisement and is therefore worth backing on that basis. Furthermore, the pitchers have also figured out that appearing on the program (regardless of whether or not you actually make anything worthy) gives you a change to get on TV. Last week the only two ideas that got backing were a fairly indifferent rock band and a company which will provide you with a person dressed as a tree for a large fee. And these days only one of the dragons actually seems to be involved in making anything. The others are involved in things like "retail", "services" and "investment".

This week a fashion designer took full advantage of the platform to promote her (to me) sub-Primark dresses and of course one of the dragons jumped in to back her because even if only a few percent of viewers go for the outfits they are on to a winner. And the "as seen on TV Dragon's Den" label will go a long way. And of course they all  had a bit of fun raining on the parades of other's hopes and dreams and competing with themselves for the most offensive bon-mots that they could heap on the hapless punters.

I quite like the idea of being rich, appearing on TV as some kind of demi-god and being given the chance to be as offensive as I like in front of the cameras. So sign me up.

Everything Changes

I dunno. You go away for a week or so and all kinds of new stuff happens while you are out. I love this business..

The XNA Creators Club has moved on to the next level, in that there is now a way you can start to get money for games that you have created. This is really exciting, in that it means that it is now properly possible to write games in your bedroom (or even downstairs) and then get them out in front of a mass audience. 

If you want to create 3D models for your games you can head over here and get a free copy of Caligari trueSpace 7.6, which is a proper 3D authoring package. It also has some really neat tie-ins with Virtual Earth, so you can create things and have them rove around anywhere in the world.

If you are new to programming and want something to help you learn the principles (and produce some neat flowcharts of your code) you can find the Visual Studio Middle School Power Toy here. I've not played with it yet (just got back from 7 hours driving) but it looks interesting.

Anniversary Bash

My Uncle Tony and Aunty Iris have been married for quite a while. Apparently I was at the wedding, but I cried so much I had to be carried outside. Doesn't sound a bit like me actually, but my recollection of the event is a bit hazy to be honest.

Anyhoo, to celebrate this we were invited down for a do, and as soon as I heard the magic words "Free Food and Drink" it was out with the satnav and into the route planning phase.

The party was held at cousin Lindsay's super house, which has a wonderful view out of the back. And the weather was fantastic. Food was eaten, stories swapped, speeches made and champagne drunk. Fantastic.

I've hidden a clue as to which anniversary it was somewhere in this picture. See if you can use your skill and judgement to work out the answer.

One thing that came out of the do for me was that technology is now everywhere. Digital cameras were being produced and compared, there was talk of email and SMS and Vista and many things technical. I talked quite a bit of "shop" (sorry about that) and it turns out that my cousin Sue is actually an Internet entrepreneur (try saying that after a few glasses of champers).

She runs myblankets.com which sells personalised gifts, baby presents, even stuff for your horse (if you have one). She also does a roaring trade in "taggies" which are cuddly comfort blankets for the very young.

I really liked the colours on this one, but I've been told I'm a bit old for them.

Anyhoo, thanks to everyone who worked so hard to make the party great, and best wishes to Tony and Iris.

Kipling Country

We were down in the south of England for a family "do", but the place we were staying was in walking distance of "Batemans", where Rudyard Kipling lived. So we wandered out into the morning sunshine to seek it out.

I can see why Kipling liked the place so much.

They were having a historical re-enactment thing in the grounds of the house, which meant that there were lots of people in period costume quite literally living in the past for the weekend. We didn't have much time to take a look round, but I did make time for some pictures.

Old style family entertainment.

Then it was time to get suited and booted for the main event.

Robs Travel Tips

Here's a tip. If you are going north to south in the UK it is worth thinking about using the A1 rather than the M1. The M1 is the main motorway up the UK, but it is always busy and often delayed. The A1 is not all motorway, but it is all dual carriageway and it has a certain period charm which the other road lacks.

And if you stop for a coffee you might see one of these in the car park.

We shot down the A1 at the legal speed limit pretty much all the way. The only slight problem was that the road has been "improved" by the removal of a bunch of roundabouts that the satnav thought were still there. I'm sure the machine was impressed by the way that we could find exit 2 at 70 miles an hour.....