Normal (ish) Saturday.

Spent some of the afternoon fiddling with a recalcitrant computer with a penchant for overheating. I'm not terribly pleased with the solution (turn the clock speed down) but it is only temporary and at least it helped diagnose the problem.

 

This year Microsoft decided that I was a "Most Valued Professional for 2003". Very nice of them, and much appreciated. Not quite sure what I did to deserve this (in a good way) but I intend to try and do it again for next year. Anyhoo, one of the things that you get is a wad of "Microsoft bucks" to spend at the company store, which is a slick, online setup. I've bought a whole bunch of books about programming .NET and a copy of Encarta on DVD. I've got a kind of theory that Encarta plus Tablet PC is a really good idea, especially considering that you can run the product without the disk installed.

And that is how it is turning out. My tablet is now a kind of "super encyclopedia" which I can use anywhere. The book model works really well and the WIFI networking means that I can download updates to the content. But I haven't got to the best bit yet. I fired up the mapping part and opened up a view of Northern Europe, which shows Great Britain amongst other places. The best bit is that only four cities are displayed on the GB map, London, Birmingham, Edinburgh and Hull. And Hull is where I live. Ha. Eat your hearts out Leeds, Bradford, Manchester and Milton Keynes. A small victory, but significant I feel.

As for Encarta itself, great fun and very useful. The 360 degree views are super, although I'm not sure why they have a view of a wine cellar in France. Nice barrels though....

 

Spent today writing new material for .NET. I'm also tidying my office. I'm working at the rate of one full wastebasket per day. I reckon that by Christmas I might have the place looking reasonable. (anyone who has actually seen my office will agree with this). I was going to take a set of "before and after" pictures of the place, but then I was worried about anyone seeing them. I'm going to settle for an "after" photograph which will be available at the end of the year.

 

Fools Rush In Dept: Installed Office 2003 Beta 2 today. Thought I'd do a proper job and told it to overwrite the original installation. So far my faith has been justified; to the point where apart from the jazzy colour scheme (which I think is a bit retro and jars with the Windows XP colours) I'm having difficulty detecting what changes have been made. I'm looking forward to using the new Powerpoint, where you can have speaker notes and things on your laptop screen alongside the actual presentation on the VGA output. However, I think the other changes will appear by osmosis as I find new little bits and bobs. They say the main thrust of the changes centre around group working - so I'm presently working on getting a Windows Server 2003 machine of my own to play with at work. Sharepoint looks really interesting

 

Spent the day exam marking. Urgh. Some very inventive answers out there. Not right, just inventive. Note for anyone attempting an exam - making things up in an exam situation never works. Your ideas of what the answer might be are massively unlikely to happen to map on to the truth...

Had a ripping evening. Borrowed a bunch of CDs from the daughter and loaded them onto my jukebox. (all legal and above board). I'll let you know what I think of Rooney, Delta Goodrem, Turin Brakes, Michelle Branch, Mark Joseph, Let Go and the like later. Listening to Rooney at the moment. Not bad. Not as good as the Wallflowers though.

I'm getting bored with Kat the Pirate. She keeps getting her ship sunk underneath her and the islands are starting to look very similar. And if I have to fight one more skeleton.....

 

And so to cheap video games. Bought "Pirates : The Legend of Black Kat" for ten quid (english pounds) on Saturday. Think it was some kind of fall out from the very good movie of almost the same name (but not related in any way - except that you do get to fight skeletons). I wasn't expecting much. It is a first generation XBOX title which had indifferent reviews when it came out. However, it is actually quite fun in a throw away kind of way. The sea battles are quite nice (especially when you've upgraded your ship and got a few extra canons on board) and the land based hacking and slashing is not too bad. The game is not in the Tomb Raider category (unless you compare it with the later releases - ho ho) but it passed a few hours in a quite pleasant manner. It suffers from "glass wall syndrome" in that sometimes you can't go that way because the darned thing just picks you up and places you back somewhere else, and it is starting to get a bit samey: Find a map to an island. Go there and blow up the enemy town. Go ashore and fight something. Get another map to another island. Repeat.

However, and this is my point folks, for ten quid I could have gone to see two movies, bought a couple of packets of fags (which would be really stupid since I don't smoke) or four or so pints of beer. In terms of the entertainment offered compared to that lot a cheap video game like this is quite good value. I can probably unload it for a fiver to someone else, and so it could end up costing me even less. So, if you want a means to while away a bank holiday a cheap game is not such a bad idea.

 

Another day of visiting, drinking and eating. Managed to get in some croquet. If you have never played croquet you are missing out big time. A minute to learn. A lifetime to master. It is a game where you don't actually have to be made of pure evil to succeed, but it does help with the strategy side. I've been baffled for years by the fact that nobody has released a computer based croquet game. I see it as some kind of proof that computers are a force for good. Anyhoo, managed to win....