Birthday Animal Crossing

Last week I found out that my age entitles me to a discount on my haircut. The last time this happened was when I was eight years old. I hope I didn’t upset the hairdresser though. Having asked for my age and informed me of the money I could save she probably expected me to be pleased, rather than baffled. In the end I left a rather large tip, exactly equal to the discount that I could have had. Anyone who has met me will know that I’m not one for spending much on hair styling, so this won’t really free up a lot of funds, but it still feels odd to be offered a saving just because I am now “officially old”.

And today it was my birthday. And the great thing about it was that I got given toys, among them some “Despicable Me” models and a copy of “Animal Crossing New Leaf”. I remember the first time I played Animal Crossing on the Gamecube. After playing it for two weeks I eventually had to force myself to stop because it was just taking up too much time. I fared a little better with the Nintendo DS versions, at least I could carry them around with me and play now and then. And now we have the latest version. This one is different because you not only get to take part in the community, you also get to run it when, for reasons that are not really adequately explained, you are elected Mayor as soon as you arrive in your new town.

As part of enrolment you have to tell your assistant when you were born. And she gets ever so excited if you arrive on your birthday, take it from me. I’ve not really spent that much time in the town of “Cheesy” yet, but it looks like the usual fun and games just getting along with all the folks who live in the neighbourhood, doing stuff and making friends.

If you like the previous versions of the game you’ll love this one. If you’ve not played the game before, but are hankering for somewhere to go that is just plain nicer than anywhere else, full of folks who are quirky but not nasty and lots of things to do, then it might well be for you.

DecalGirl: A Model of an Internet Business

This is one of my designs for my Surface RT. I just like the colours.

While I was at the Imagine Cup I was admiring the rather nice skin that Ben Riga had on his Surface device. Turns out that it is supplied by Decalgirl. Ben showed me the web site and within no time I was wasting hours trying to find the perfect skins for my devices. Then I found out that you can upload your own artwork and I then lost even more of my life finding suitable pictures and uploading them to their skin design pages. Thanks Ben.

Anyhoo, the skins arrive in a couple of weeks and I’m looking forward to seeing how they have turned out. But for me the reason for mentioning the company is that I reckon that they are just about the perfect web trading operation. Their site has a snazzy design and is quick to use. Within seconds of arriving on the home page for the first time I’m offered the chance to sign up to get a discount on my first order. Then, when I don’t buy anything for a while I get a follow up email with an even better discount. When I left my partially completed order on the system for a few days I got an email reminding me my order is still out there and giving me a chance to finalize it. Then I get regular emails detailing the progress of the order and I’m sure that I’ll get more over time as new designs appear. And all done in a way that leaves me thinking that I’m not being badgered to buy stuff, but helped along with my purchases. Very, very well done.

If you are involved in ecommerce and want to see it done well (and by the by find some awesome skins for your various devices) then they are well worth a look.

Difficultifier is “People’s Choice” at Hacked

Hacked presentations, an augmented reality remote controlled quadcopter game. Amazing.

This afternoon we had the judging and the presentations at Hacked.. After working tirelessly through the night on my solution nipping back to the hotel for a shower and a few hour’s sleep I had to get everything working for the 12 o’clock deadline. Of course I’d made one of the standard project mistakes, I’d tried to add lots of extra features without getting the core behaviours working, and so it was time for a few hours of frantic fiddling to get something working that could be shown off. At the very last minute things came together and I was in a position to put on a reasonable show.

There were lots (and I mean lots) of presentations. That we finished before midnight is a testament to the skills of the presenters and the backstage staff who kept everything ticking along rapidly. Each team had precisely ninety seconds to present, which was fortunate for me because I had precisely ninety seconds of content. The good news is that everything worked. The great news is that I managed to win “People’s Choice” award. This is voted for by those taking part at the contest and I was very, very pleased to win it.

Anyone who won a prize got to spend some time in the VIP box at Indigo while waiting to have their picture taken. Very posh. Then I had to zoom off to catch my train back to Hull and real life.

Hacked was wonderful. It must have cost a small fortune. The venue was amazing, the food was great (and free) and the organisers worked really hard to make sure that the delegates (who had not paid to attend) had a splendid time. When they hit a problem at the event (for example some issues with the WiFi) they escalated their response until everybody was sorted out.

I really, really, hope that there is another one, and I really really hope that I can go along. I’ve put some details on the project on my Difficultifier page.

Getting Started at Hacked

Today we started hacking. The venue is great. Loads of folks with different skills, free food and drink, great venue and, apart from some WiFi niggles, a wonderful place to write code and build gadgets.

We set up base camp, got some hardware out and started hacking.

I’m kind of ashamed to admit it, but I didn’t work overnight. After around midnight I tend to fall apart. I’d make a lousy vampire.

Anyhoo, made some good progress and I’ve nearly figured out what I’m going to do.

Heading for Hacked

I’ve spend a big chunk of the last couple of days agonising over what to take to Hacked, and what to build when I get there. In the end I’ve just bought loads of toys and bits and bobs. I’ve got a sort of idea what to build, but I’ve no idea how it is going to turn out.

Which is all part of the fun.

At Doncaster I spotted this mysterious door near the platform. Any idea what a “Fully Loaded Brute” is?

GHI Game–O

Sponsoring Kickstarter projects is kind of habit forming (OK, I’ve sponsored two other ones so far). Tonight I signed up for the GHI Electronics Game-O handheld console. This is not because I’m looking for a replacement for my trusty PlayStation Vita, but because I really fancy having a handheld console that I can program using C#.

The device is powered by the .NET Micro Framework and even contains some Gadgeteer ports so that it can be interfaced to all kinds of interesting hardware. I’ve a lot of respect for the makers, GHI Electronics, they’ve made some stunning little .NET Micro Framework and Gadgeteer boards and interfaces over the years (we use a lot of their hardware in our teaching) and I’m really looking forward to having a play with the device.

The project has reached it’s funding goal, but there is still time to get in there and get hold of one of these neat devices.

Think of the Audience

Some time back I wrote a blog post about the most important thing in a project. To save you the trouble of reading it again, I concluded that the biggest risk that any project can run is that you might not  be able to make it work.

I’ve been thinking about presentations in a similar light having seen a bunch over the last week at the Imagine Cup. So, what’s the most important thing in a presentation. Is it the script? The demos? Running to time? The jokes?

Actually I reckon it’s none of these things. The most important thing in any presentation is the audience. If you don’t build your presentation with them in mind then it will not go as well as it should.

Thinking about the audience begins at the start, when you worry about whether or not what you are going to say will make sense, has the appropriate level and the like. I reckon that the thing an audience likes the best is a story, so presentations that have some kind of narrative flow are going to go well.

During the presentation you should be watching the audience to make sure that what you say is going down well, and don’t be too afraid to change tack. Asking questions to confirm that you are going in the right direction is a good idea too. It builds your confidence and establishes a rapport.

If you are now thinking “Great, now I have to worry about watching the audience as well as everything else…” then I’m sorry about that, but I think it s something to keep in mind. For me the worst presentations are where the presenter just talks at the audience. You should try and make the presentation a conversation as much as you can. With very large numbers this can seem a bit daunting, but remember that an audience of 10,000 people is actually made up of 10,000 individual people.. If you think in terms of talking to just one of them, then that will help you manage this.

For me the best presentations I saw last week were those that engaged the audience from the start. So see if you can do the same when you stand up and start talking.

Night on the town..

Well, more of an evening really. It was a Seed works outing and David was kind enough to invite me along too. We went to the Taman Ria Tropicana which was a bit hard for me to find (although Darren managed it easily enough) but the food was excellent. Really good. On the way out I took a picture of the place across the road. David wondered why.

That’s why.

Going to Hacked

Next weekend we are off to Hacked. I’ve managed to get hold of a couple of tickets so myself and number one son will be taking our places with lots of other developers who want to make something silly/awesome/fun. I’ll be taking my lovely Lumia 920 along and targeting the Windows Phone platform, along with a bunch of gadgets and other things that we can use if mood takes us.

I’m really looking forward to this. The plan is to try and last through Saturday night. But I’ve booked a room in a nearby hotel just in case…..

Imagine Cup Memories

I often refer to the Imagine Cup as “Planet Imagine Cup”. For a few days the real world, time and space have no meaning. You are just in a little space with lots of projects to look at and a whole bunch of interesting folks to talk to. And strange things happen.

The first piece of weirdness was having my picture taken by the chap who wrote Tetris Note that is by the chap, not with him. The whole thing took place in the judging room, when one of the judges wanted his picture taken with me. There’s no accounting for taste. Anyhoo, the only other chap in the room was Alexey Pajitnov, who was kind enough to take the blue HTC device from my friend and snap the picture. I didn’t have the nerve to ask for one of my own, but I did have a chat with him, and told him how many hours I’d spent with my Mark 1 GameBoy and his ingenious game.

The second weird thing took place was when one of the judges, Bill Buxton, mentioned that he’d found a couple of entries in the competition intriguing, and had reached out to Bill Gates (who was something of an expert in the project areas) to let him know what was going on and get his input. Bill had responded with some comments and had made time to pass on details to a couple of experts in the field. Amazing.

Navigating Neatly with Nokia

   

This is one thing I found very useful while I was in St. Petersburg. The clever bit started when I downloaded all the maps for this part of the world before I left the UK. This meant that I had full navigation support without needing any form of networking connection. The map application lets me pin locations and also routes onto the start screen. The left hand screenshot shows the hotel pinned to the upper left and a route to the Errata gallery on the right. At any point in my travels I just had to hit that shortcut and I’d get a route to my destination. On the right you can see the route, along with my present position. If it looks like I;m going the long way round it’s because I’m on a bus. The whole thing worked splendidly and got me where I wanted to be.

Heading for Home

It may not have been particularly bright, but my goodness it felt early. Allowing for the fact that we are 3 hours ahead in St. Petersburg meant that I actually got up at a quarter to two in the morning UK time, so I could be outside ready for the bus to the airport. The good news is that we arrived in plenty of time for the flight.

This was the view from the plane as we came in to land, taken and processed on my lovely Lumia 920. I see that Nokia have now launched the Lumia 1020, which promises an even more amazing camera. Sign me up.

I’ve been in Russia just long enough to know that I’m sorry to leave it, and I’m going to come back for a proper look around in the future. Thanks to everyone for making the visit so memorable and so darned good.

Art and Imagine Cup Finals

Today I actually had time to take a look around St.Petersburg. We caught the Metro up down and took a look at the Hermitage Museum.

They it can take at least six hours to tour the museum properly, so we settled for just looking at the imposing building from the outside. One day I’m coming back for a proper tour.

On Monday one of the judges, Bill Buxton, had mentioned that there was a really good contemporary arts museum quite near to the hotel. He reckoned that Erarata was well worth a look. So, with a couple of hours to spare before I had to head off the the world finals I hopped on a bus and went over there. I didn’t have as much time as I would have liked, but there was some intriguing stuff on show. I’m not a great art critic, but I like seeing stuff that makes me think.

This is a singularly appropriate exhibit, given that we have the creator of Tetris, Alexey Pajitnov, judging at the competition.

I think this was my favourite exhibit. Not least because it made me think the hardest. I hope they don’t mind me posting a picture.

If (or more accurately when) I go back to St. Petersburg I’m going to set aside a goodly chunk of time to have a proper look round this lovely gallery. And I’ve just discovered they have a gallery in London too, which is going on my list. I managed to make it back to the hotel with just minutes to spare before the busses headed off to the theatre and the World Finals show.

I took a whole bunch of pictures at the world finals, but curiously the only one that I can find to put on the blog is the one of the UK team (that’s UNITED KINGDOM) winning top prize for the Innovation competition. You can find out all about the all the other results and more details of the WORLD BEATING TEAM FROM THE UNITED KINGDOM at the Imagine Cup site.

I’ll be posting more pictures telling some more Imagine Cup stories (and there are some amazing ones) when I’m somewhere with some power to charge up the Surface.

Update on 2013-07-14 14:13 by Rob

If you are still not sure about that picture, you might find the following helpful. I got it the comic book store in Seattle market.

Hands-On Judging

Today it was time for the judges to get “down and dirty” with the teams. Each team had a 15 minute conversation with each judge in turn, showing their application running and getting scores and feedback from the judge Of course, I’m not a judge, but I was determined to join in the fun. I made it my mission to take a look at every single entry in the competition by the end of the day, and I pretty much made it. Some teams I when they presented, others I met up with on the showcase floor.

I started off by “shadowing” a judge as they chatted with a team, but having nearly bitten my own tongue off several times (nobody is supposed to ask questions except the judge during the demo) I gave up on that and went off to chat to teams that were in-between judge sessions. This was great. Teams seemed only to happy to practice their pitch on me, and I love finding out more about their solutions. Once or twice I got shooed away by a “proper” judge wanting to talk with the team, but it was great to be able to meet everyone. One of my regrets in previous competitions is that I didn’t have time to see all the entries, just the ones that I was judging. However, with my “captain’s hat” I don’t judge this time, so I’m free to go and chat. So I did.

Once the hands-on rounds had finished it was up to the judges to enter their individual scores and then these were combined to get a final score for each team.

And then we found out who gets the prizes. The numbers were unequivocal, which was good (I had this private nightmare of everyone getting exactly the same score).

So, once we had done our work, it was time for some play. First up with a bus ride to boat that would take us to the Winter Palace.

This was a boat a bit like ours, zooming past.

Docking

Now, that’s what I call a palace.

We got a tour of the palace and a potted history of Peter the Great and his dynasty. If you think Shakespeare had some dramatic stories, some of the stuff that went on here proves that real life can also provide big time drama and intrigue. 

Gold statues and fountains.

This picture was taken at around 10:30 at night. Amazing

How it must have looked when Peter was in the house.

Not Judging Judging Day

We had a great day judging the presentations today. I’m not actually a judge this time, I’m the competition captain. This means that I’m involved in making the judging work, but I don’t get to write down any scores.

But I still get to watch lots of the presentations, just to make sure that the judging process is working the way that I think it should. Today I’ve seen a whole bunch of lovely projects. Tomorrow I’ll watch through some of the booth demonstrations and see how well the teams can show off what they’ve made. I’m thinking that they’ll do a pretty good job.

Of course I’m still wearing the Lego watch….

I made a very brief visit to the student showcase. Can you guess which country this team member is from.

Imagine Cup Briefing Day

Today is the day that the competition gets going. But first we have to tell everyone, competitors and judges, how everything works. For me this means sorting out presentation content and then getting to to the best bit, which is actually deliver the briefings. John and I had a great time telling folks how it all works, and then we went out to have our pictures taken with the teams. I did have time to take a few pictures, here they are.

This is the panorama from the front of the hotel. Impressive eh?

.. and this is a slightly tweaked version of part of the same view.

The front of the hotel has these flags all around it.

At the internet cafe they have loads of machines for folks to do their email and surf the web. This is what was on the screens when I walked past. Honest.

These are the student teams at the World Citizenship briefing. You can tell that this is a proper presentation to actual students because the seats at the front are all empty. They are a great bunch, poised to do some great things…

Update on 2013-07-08 16:58 by Rob

I said at the presentation I'd make the slide deck available. If you want to see it, you can download it here:

http://sdrv.ms/14Dy9Yp

Heading for St. Petersburg

If I ever go on Mastermind my specialist is going to be “Terminal Z at Frankfurt Airport”. Today I had around 8 hours to study the place and I feel I know pretty much all there is to know about it:

• It is very clean and tidy
• They have aeroplanes there
• …and a MacDonald's
• Eight hours is around seven hours too long to spend there

Anyhoo, the good news was that I managed to pass the time well enough, particularly after I found the seats with the power sockets to recharge the gadgets.

This is our plane, being prepped for the last part of the journey.

I met up with Simon and Ben, who had travelled over from the ‘states and were noticeably more wide-awake than I was, but I put that down to my 4:00 am start today. Anyhoo, we arrived in St. Petersburg at the appointed time and, after I was reunited with my “big case” in the luggage claim area (a particularly emotional time for me as I always fret about losing all my extra-tall clothes) we headed for the hotel.

The driver was in a hurry, and we found out why when we arrived at the bridge that links the island containing the hotel with the rest of St. Petersburg. Every night, at around 2:00 am, they open the bridge for a while to let ships go through. We arrived just in time to be among the first to cross the bridge when it re-opened, which was unfortunate in one sense, but did give us a chance to take a look around the place and take some snaps.

This is the bridge as it opened.

There was some pretty impressive artwork on the sides.

St. Petersburg by night.

I got to my room around 3:00 am and then spent a while unpacking my big case and putting everything away. The real stuff starts tomorrow. Can’t wait.

Cottingham Day in Good Weather

Today was that rarest of coincidences. We were in the country, the weather was great, and it was “Cottingham Day” in the village. They had all kinds of stuff going on, including some vintage cars that were parked all around the village. This is a close up of one of them. I so wanted a car like this when I was a bit younger. A “non-price” to anyone who tells me what kind of car it is, and for bonus kudos, the car it was based on.

I took a whole bunch of other pictures which I’m sure will appear on these pages over time. It was a great day

Moving House

Well, that could have gone a lot better.

My plan was to move my blog over from Squarespace 5 to Squarespace 6. I liked the new styles, I’d found a new layout I liked and all seemed OK. I’d checked that my content would move with the blog. I’ve even built the new site. You can see it here if you are interested. So I flipped the switch on my name server to point to the new blog.

And the fun started. Bits of the layout weren’t right. My content didn’t seem to be where it should be. And I started to miss the features in Squarespace 5.

So I’ve flipped the switch back again, and here we are. Back where we started. I’m going to have another go later, once I’ve done some proper testing. In the meantime, sorry about any interruptions to the service. I’m going to make very sure that everything is in the right place before I flick that switch again.

Tiny Camera

In preparation for the Imagine Cup World Finals in Russia I've got myself a tiny camera that I can carry round at all times. It seems to do a good job of the Union Building.