The whole thing was inside an enormous tent, which we loitered in for a while. Lots of Roman technology that you could play with, which was fun.
Then we went on to the harbour area, where you can take quite nice pictures.
After lunch we went over to Victoria Market, which has loads of stalls selling mostly tasteful merchandise.
Then we staggered back for the evening.
The view from our window gets even nicer at night.
This is the view from the Melbourne Exhibition Centre, a very imposing place that we didn’t get round to visiting.
When we go travelling we always like to take in the local museums and try to acquire a bit more culture (which might be a lost cause in my case). Today it was the turn of the Melbourne Museum.
This was ace. There was a superb exhibit on how the brain works. It turns out to be quite complicated. Next to the museum is the Melbourne Imax cinema. On the way out we bought tickets for the Batman movie that comes out on Friday. To superheroes in one week, both on Imax. Can’t be bad.
This is Flinders Street Station in Melbourne. It says so on the front.
Today we started our first full day in Melbourne. Lovely place. Has trams and everything. At the moment it looks like it is to Sydney what Boston is to New York.
But with more graffiti, which makes it a bit like Seattle too.
This is Federation Square. They have the Australian Centre for the Moving Image here, which has a fantastic exhibition all about the origins of modern mass entertainment. It even has an exhibit for Skippy. There is also an interesting looking Game Masters exhibition. Perhaps we’ll take a look at that later. No, we’ll definitely take a look at that later…
After lunch we went down to St. Kilda, which is down by the beach side. Every Sunday they have booths selling crafty bits and bobs, which were fun.
This is the entrance to Luna Park.
This is the main street in St. Kilda, given a very mild HDR treatment...
I just love what they did with this place.
The weather was very kind, but one thing I have noticed is just how fast it can change from bright blue skies to grey.
To this, complete with hardy swimmer.
Anyhoo, after a good walk round and another ride on the trams we were ready to turn in. Jetlag to Australia is the worst I’ve ever experienced. The day is completely inverted and there is no way to ease yourself into it gently. After well over a week we are still waking up at odd hours and feeling exhausted at 8:00 at night. But we are not letting it stop us have a great time. More fun tomorrow.
This is the view from the hotel room. Not too shabby.
Today we headed out of Sydney towards Melbourne. People were telling us that “Melbourne is really cold and dismal in winter”. Australians don’t know what winter is. Winter is when water turns solid and you can see your breath. Winter is when it gets dark at four in the afternoon. Winter is properly cold. What Australians have is “Winter Lite”, where it gets dark a bit earlier and sometimes you have to wear a jumper. Or, was we call it in the UK, September.
Really looking forward to spending a bit of time exploring the city tomorrow.
Today was our last full day in Sydney. So we did everything. In the morning we went round the Sydney Aquarium.
..where they had some sharks...
..some jelly fish..
..some fishy cupcakes..
...and Nemo.
Then we moved on to the small zoo. This is not on the scale of the big zoo we saw on Monday, but you can get a lot closer to the animals and insects.
Butterflies
All together now, Ahhh.....
..and this would be the wombat. In the afternoon we went to the Powerhouse Museum, which is a bit like the Science Museum in the UK, with some fantastic exhibits including a virtual personality on the end of a robot arm.
I asked it a most revealing question.
It particularly likes Camembert apparently..
They also had a Verbot, which I remember playing with many years ago.
We took a ride back on a genuine, bonafide, five car monorail.
This was the view as we were having tea. Very nice. After we had eaten we went to watch the new Spiderman movie. It was good fun, although you have to ask yourself why they made it. And then you remember that you’ve just given somebody a bunch of cash to see it.
We started the day with a trip to the Museum of Contemporary Art which was fascinating. I don’t really understand all the art, but I know what I like, and there was enough of that for me, along with some thought provoking stuff.
From the cafe we got a great view of boats doing a square dance in the dock outside. 
After a coffee we went and took a look at the Sydney Harbour bridge close up. Well impressive. Some of the students and judges had been able to do the walk along the top of the bridge over the weekend. You can just see one set of plucky souls doing just that on the left hand part of the bridge at the top. I was sort of keen to do it, except that I suffer a bit from vertigo. And they wouldn’t have allowed me to take a camera….
This is a view of the underneath of the bridge. Solid Stuff.
The Sydney locals call this “The Gear Lever” or something like that. All I know about it is that you can go to the top, and when you get there the views are really, really good.
This is the looking towards Darling Harbour, where the Imagine Cup was based. The bridge in the middle of the picture is lined with Imagine Cup flags
This is the view of the flags on the bridge, complete with genuine, bonafide, electrified, five car monorail..Once we got down from the tower we walked round to the Sydney Opera Hose.
This is half way around the dock, where they had this chap drawing a really nice picture on the ground.
Once we got round to the Botanical Gardens we waited a while for the sun to set so that we could get ourselves a picture.
Today we had the World Final presentations. These are the top three teams. Congratulations to all, very well done. I’m very proud to have played a part in getting you folks to the finish podium. The standard this year was even higher than last year, and that was an amazing year too.
What was interesting to me was that of the six finalists, four of them had designed and built their own hardware. Some teams were creating and building surface mount devices (even etching their own circuit boards). Others had undertaken ambitious mechanical designs builds. Several of the teams had applied for patents based on their entries and all of them had workable business plans. As a judge I often had to pinch myself to remind me that these were student teams, not experienced developers pitching several years of effort.
In the afternoon, before the awards ceremony, I spent two very happy hours walking around the showcase booths where each of the 72 teams was set up and telling everyone all about their entries. Special shout out to the team from Peru with their Kinect based solution for helping children with Down’s Syndrome, one team member had even painted his hand bright red to help with the demonstration on the demo floor. Also I must mention the iQube team from Romania, who had designed and built some astonishing electronics inside something not much larger than a couple of matchboxes.
The Imagine Cup this year completely rocked. The organisation was top notch, with Ali and Jeff putting in sterling efforts to make everything just worked. Australia was a fantastic venue and every contestant has had a life changing experiences, as have the judges.Next year the Imagine Cup moves on to Russia. I really, really hope I can get to go there.
All set for judging
This morning we had our six finalists strut their stuff. We used two ballrooms in the conference centre, and shuttled between them so that the teams had time to set up and we could keep the action flowing. What impressed me was the huge number of students who turned up to see the presentations. The places were packed, which was great. And the presentations delivered, which was excellent too. Once we had seen all the presentations we entered our scores into the judging system and then tomorrow we’ll find out who won at the World Finals. After lunch we headed out on one of the cultural afternoon trips, to the zoo. Which was amazing, with loads of animals and a great view of Sydney.
Harbour view
One of these animal pictures is not as real as the others.
Today we did pretty much what we did yesterday, only this time we took 20 teams down to 6. We also had a new feature for the Imagine Cup 2012, we went down to the Showcase booths and had each team demonstrate their entry. This was great fun. Not having a desk between the judges and the teams made for some great interaction and interesting conversations, at least in the teams that I saw. And then there were six:
We announced these at 10:00 pm on Sunday night. Finalist presentations tomorrow. Can’t wait.
Today we had the First Round presentations in the Imagine Cup World Finals. 72 teams, loads of judges and a whole bunch of presentations to watch and score.Above are some of the teams just before we gave them their competition briefing and sent them off to sell their solutions. Once all the teams had presented we we had to get the scores back in, announce the teams moving forwards to Round 2, summarize their session feedback from the judges and then send it back. All before midnight. And we did. Congratulations to the following 20 teams:
These are the teams that are going forward to Round 2. They get to present tomorrow, all over again. The standard this year has been the highest I’ve ever seen, as were the scores, with teams separated by wafer thin amounts. It was hard to draw the line between them, but at the end of of the day we have to do that.
This was the picture just as the results were announced. If you were one of the 52 teams that didn’t make it, please, please, please stay happy. You have a lot to be happy about, more than you know. Just the fact that you have taken part in the competition and reached a point where someone will pay to send you half way round the world to see you strut your stuff is pretty amazing. Sydney is fantastic, the food and drink is free, and you are now on the radar of a lot of very interesting people.
One day one of whom might wake up with a need for someone who is smart, tech savvy and knows how to deliver presentations and products. And your Imagine Cup participation could suddenly change your life in a very big way.
Every Saturday night they have a huge firework display here. Which looked very nice indeed.
Cutting the ribbon to start things off….
And then firing off a whole bunch of streamers....
Once the briefings were over it was time for the opening ceremony.
I suggested that someone might like to walk over there and press the sign, but nobody did.
The view outside.
Just time for a quick walk around the block, and then an early night.
This was the view from our hotel room this morning. The Imagine cup World Finals are being held in the building on the left of the picture. And no, I didn’t add the rainbow on afterwards.
Today we are setting up the competition and briefing the judges.
This is the judging team for this year’s Software Development Challenge. A great crew of folks. We spent a big chunk of this afternoon making sure that everyone knows what to do, and that the way the judging works is right. I suppose you could call it a meeting, but it was a fun one, if such a thing is possible. Thanks for your help folks.
All the flags around the bay are Imagine Cup branded. Very impressive.
The competition rounds start tomorrow. Really looking forward to it.
This is football on display at Singapore Airport during our stopover
Since I can’t actually tell the difference between yesterday and today, this might as well be the same blog post. Except for this bit of course.
This is football on display at Singapore Airport during our stopover
It turns out that Sydney Australia is a very long way from Hull. In fact, to travel further than this you’d probably need a larger planet.
Spent a few hours gadget packing and a also threw a few clothes into a suitcase. We are heading off the the Imagine Cup World Finals in Sydney, so no more 3D printing for a while…
I got an email last night telling me that I’m an MVP (Microsoft Most Valuable Professional) for another year. Which is rather nice.
Now, here’s a little known fact that I only found out about a while back. If you are in Hull using Kingston Communications (or KC as they are more trendily known) for your broadband (like you have a choice) and you are stumping up for their “Pro” account, you can have a fixed IP address as part of the package.
This is really useful if you want to run services at home but don’t want to have to fiddle about with dynamic DNS services and stuff like that. I went online and asked them about it and I was fixed up with fixed in no time at all.
I’ve already had one go at printing text using the Ultimaker, when I used Autodesk 123D to print out my name. Next I thought I’d try making text that “stuck into” the surface. My theory was that it might look better than stuff that stuck out. And it sort of does, see above.
The biggest problem was persuading Autodesk 123D to let me put the text into a surface. I’ve figured out a way to do it now (and the program itself is growing on me as I’ve also found out how to dimension things after I’ve created them). Anyhoo, if you ever want to embed text into a surface (and so I don’t forget for next time), here is the sequence:
I’ve no idea if this is a bug or not meant to happen. It actually looks really good in the designer…
You can just export and print as usual. As you can see at the top, it doesn’t look too bad. Each character in the picture is about 1cm high. I’m going to experiment with larger text and different fonts.
South Holderness Technology College came to see us today. Emma organised everything excellently and I was first man in this morning, as I then had to zoom off to Doncaster for an Exam board. I was printing my tweets again, and everything worked splendidly. (This means that I am probably due a session where everything fails in the near future…)
They were a great audience, and I promised some references:
You can find out more about the Gadgeteer here: http://www.netmf.com/gadgeteer/
If you fancy buying some hardware you can get the kits from Cool Components.
If you want to make your own 3D printer like Una you can get a kit from Ultimaker.
Charlotte told me about a competitor to my Twitter printer (or perhaps my Twitter printer is a competitor for it). The LittlePrinter puts things onto paper, and will have a mobile client that you use to configure it. However, everything is pushed from a cloud based server which is supported by the hardware supplier. When they go bust you lose everything, and it is hard to see how they can make money once they have got the profit on the hardware. That has already happened to my Chumby and my Nabaztag rabbit. My plans for my Twitter printer include a web configuration page so that the user can always control the device directly, rather than any kind of on-going requirement for support.
Rob Miles is technology author and educator who spent many years as a lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Hull. He is also a Microsoft Developer Technologies MVP. He is into technology, teaching and photography. He is the author of the World Famous C# Yellow Book and almost as handsome as he thinks he is.
