Amazing Sunset

Drove home into an amazing sunset tonight. Of course this isn’t a picture of it..

Letting the Smoke Out

An engineer friend of mine has this theory that electric things are really powered by smoke. He bases this on the simple observation that if you let the smoke out of anything electrical it promptly stops working. I did this today with our shredder.

I have a deep seated fear of Identity theft (along with a puzzlement that anyone would really want to pretend to be me).

Anyhoo, to deal with this I have a policy of never throwing anything away that might divulge identity type information. This is kind of futile I suppose, in that pretty much anything you want to know about me is out there on the interweb, but it keeps me amused. And shredding.

To keep things shredded we used to use this little shredder and I was happily shredding bank statements and the like when it suddenly stopped. And the smoke came out. And now it doesn’t work.

I was wondering if I could just use a two bins technique instead. Rather than shred things I could just have two bins. Anything secret is torn into small pieces, some of which go into one bin, and the rest into the other. Then I empty one of the bins every other week. This means that to steal my identity you would have to go through two lots of rubbish. Or perhaps I should just stop worrying…

Low Quality Pictures Look Better

I spent all this money on posh cameras, and have been obsessing about things like dust on my sensor. Then I find myself using a low quality camera in my phone and an application from Hipstamatic to make it look even worse. And the result looks great. Very strange.

Fez Micro Robot Bottom

If you are having bother positioning the support posts to hold your Fez Mini robot together you might find the above picture useful.  The PDF gives lots of good detail about how to fit the motors to the battery tray, but lining up the unit with the right screw holes on the base is a bit tricky. I think mine is right, at least the wheels seem straight enough for me. The back of the robot is at the bottom of the above picture.

Oh, and you don’t have to fit the line detectors where I have (just outside each wheel). This is part of an experiment I’m doing to find out how well grey scale line following can be made to work.

Dodgy Memory Chips

The thing that amazes me is that the memory card on the left has a thousand times the capacity of the one on the right. And this advance took place in five years or so. Amazing.

If you are interested in the slightly murky world of memory chips and hardware  manufacture you will find this post from one of the engineers behind the Chumby very interesting.

Geek Night Fun and Games

This is a still from a very embarrassing video:

http://www.devdays.nl/Video.aspx?pid=75

I’m doing it again. Geek Night at Dev Days. This time I’m taking my little robot Jason and a bag full of sensors and bits and pieces. We are going to create some embedded devices on the fly and have some good old .NET Micro Framework fun and games. If you are coming to Dev Days 2010 at the end of March, then it would be great to see you. You can find out more here:

http://www.devdays.nl/GeekNight.aspx

Windows Phone 7 Series Looking Good

I like the look of the new Windows Phone. I especially like this new blog from Charlie Kindel who sets out very nicely the priorities and the approach being taken to make this new device. It seems to me that the thinking behind this is very sensible indeed, and I’m really looking forward to getting my hands on a device.

Jetlag Levels

Jetlag Level 0: Normal amount of incompetence.

Jetlag Level 1: Forgetting things, but remembering you have forgotten them.

Jetlag Level 2: Forgetting things and not noticing.  Or caring.

Jetlag Level 3: Inability to do two things (such as walk and talk) at the same time.

Jetlag Level 4: Inability to one thing at the same time.

Jetlag Level 5: Staring at the PUSH sign on a door and not understanding its relevance to the problem that the door won’t pull open.

Jetlag Level 6: Can only recognise and use the simplest of things. Namely, a bed.

Missing Sunday

Not sure what happened to today. Bits of it seem to be missing.

Flying Home

Nothing like an 18 hour journey. Nothing. When we got to Amsterdam we found that the weather had laid on some special fog just for us.

With a two and a half hour stopover I had plenty of time to take pictures.

This is all we saw of the sun all day..

Final Summit Friday

Today was the last day of the Summit. It has gone by real quick. Amongst the final presentations was one by Satya Nadella who heads up the new Microsoft search team.

These are the people bringing you Bing. Personally I quite like Bing. I like the user interface, the pictures and the way it groups results. I don’t like the way that it doesn’t always find what I want though, which means moving over to Google for the more technical searches. Hopefully Bing will catch up in due course.

It was interesting to hear how Microsoft are trying to improve the “search experience” and are working on why we search, in a bid to improve the usefulness of the activity. The way I see it, they are changing Bing from “search” to a “research” engine. When you search for a place it will try to pull down travel and hotel details, along with pictures and links to official sites. Quite neat. This all needs some frightfully clever algorithms to recognise content, along with a fair amount of editorial input as well I would think. However, it is nice to see Microsoft not just trying to equal the competition, but to go beyond this and move the field on.

In the afternoon we had a final wander around Bellevue and then headed to a nearby place for tea.

..can you guess where?

After tea I’d booked seats to see Avatar again, at the local Imax cinema in 3D. Awesome.

MVP Summit Party

MVP Pool

Went out to the MVP party tonight at the Garage in Seattle. Free food and drink, along with pool and bowling. Worked for me.

..oh and cocktails.

Smashing Seattle Sunset

We are getting some lovely sunsets at the moment. I took this picture from our hotel window (lots of frantic setting up of tripod before the light faded). If it wasn’t for the crane this would be a perfect shot.

Hull Reunion

I met up with Phil, Andrew, Andy and James today for lunch. They are graduates from Hull (and three of them are also old hands at the Imagine Cup). They all now work for Microsoft on various development teams around the company. It was nice to see them, even though they made fun of my haircut. Or lack of it…

MVP Summit Sessions Again

I met another MVP in the lift today on the way to the sessions on the Microsoft campus. He asked me how I was getting on. “Fine” I said. “Yesterday they opened the top of my head and poured a whole bunch of stuff into it”. “Oh”, he replied. “With us they opened our heads and took a whole bunch out”.  Perhaps that will happen to me.today  Not sure what they will benefit from in my case though…

The weather is lovely again. Although we had some frost last night, the morning looks great.

Redmond Shuttle.

MVP Summit Product Sessions

I set off on the bus at 7:00 am this morning. I’m trying to keep to “sort of UK time” by getting up at stupidly early hours. Because we are in Bellevue the bus journey is very short, which is nice.

As usual they had MVP banners on the Microsoft campus, which was nice.

Went to the company store as well, and bought some tasteful clothing.

We really are having fantastic weather this week.

MVP Summit and Fish Throwing

This evening the MVP summit started with the opening keynote. Before the session started they were showing things about MVPs of note. And for some reason my name came up on the big screen.

As you all know I am very vain, and so I pulled out my camera and grabbed a picture. If you look very carefully at the middle screen you can see my name…

The session ended with some fish throwing. As well it should. Then we went on for some free food, including hand thrown salmon, and discussion with fellow MVPs.

The agenda looks very interesting.

Genuine Bonafide Monorail

Caught the monorail to the Space Needle today. The weather has been very kind to us. Then of course we went to the top.

Nice view.

Then we had some sweeties.

Bellevue Mist

The long range weather forecast for this week was rain. Thank heavens it was long range. And wrong. Today started really misty, in a fantastically photogenic way.

It must be like being up in the clouds in those buildings at the top.

We found this place that did great pancakes, and nearly failed to eat all of them. They had a great set of posters advertising upcoming events in Bellevue.

Hmmm. I’ve missed the bicycle conference.

Then we grabbed a car and went for a drive.

View over the lake

Highway and sky

Mountain, truck and sky

We went out to the mall and I bought another robot. A friend for Jason.

The summit proper starts tomorrow. I’m hoping to find out a bit more about Windows Phone 7 which was announced today. It looks really good. It is definitely going on the “want one” list.

Seattle Sunday

Imposing buildings

Went shopping today. I got number one wife a Lego Heart for Valentines day, and she got me this…

Managed to stay up long enough to take this picture from the hotel window. You can see the lights of Seattle on the horizon.