Hot Driving

Did the usual things on Saturday. Went up town and bought a video game. Quite a good one though. I enjoyed Burnout for the XBOX and so when I had the chance for a cheap copy of Burnout 2 I jumped at it. I suppose it is more of the same, but the more is very good. The graphics of the tracks is now nigh on perfect and the cars still have that unrealistic controllability which means that you can get away with massive powerslides really easily. I spent a very happy afternoon battling my way through the leagues. It is one of the few games which actually makes me flinch when cars are coming towards me at speed. I always use the in car view - only wimps use the one which lets you see the whole car on the road - and the impression of speed and the impressive nature of the crashes makes the whole thing great fun. There is also a rather non PC "make the biggest crash you can" version of the game which has you speeding towards a junction intent on causing maximum damage. I enjoyed this immensely and now the kids are scared to let me drive them anywhere, which is a result of sorts.

Unfortunately all this hard driving meant that I didn't make it to the university open day, but it went very well by all accounts.

Found my picture in the Hull Daily Mail as a result of the University Challenge thing last week. Fame at last! Bought a couple of extra copies of the paper but I'm not sure what to do with them.

 

Yay for Projects and Celebrations

The student projects are coming along a pace. This includes the ones where we meet up on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, as well as the marathon Friday session. I'm now getting people coming back and telling me better ways to implement things, and finding and plugging holes in the specification. Lovely stuff. I'm going to have to find a way to showcase our project stuff when they are finished.

If you are in Hull, and at a loose end tomorrow (Saturday), we are having a 75th Anniversary Celebration on the University Campus. There will be all kinds of fun stuff going on (so I'm told) and a funfair on the university site. We are going to have our Hive visualization suite open for demonstrations which will be fun. The action kicks off at 14:00. Here's hoping for good weather. I'm going to try and pop along and take some photos.

 

It's Scary and it's Orange

"Screwed my courage to the sticking place" as Shakespeare puts it and told the First Year Java course the "Orange for a Head" joke. As I said at the time "You can divide your life into two portions - the part where you have not heard the joke and the part where you have....". The reaction was as expected, but I got to the door first.. And in case you are wondering what the joke is; you'll have to sign up on one of our courses to find out. It is only ever revealed during my lectures. Or you could ask a first year I suppose. Note - I've just typed "Orange for a head joke" into Google and got around ten versions of the joke. Mine is the best of course...

Things I Know: 001 of 800 Pepper is not the inverse of salt. The fact that the two always appear together does not indicate that the addition of one can be used to compensate for too much of the other. This is one of the first things that I learned when I was attempting to acquire culinary skills. I've never been able to understand how the two teamed up in the first place. Note: Kevin informs me that although this is not the case with Salt and Pepper it does work with Salt and Vinegar. However, this information is to be filed under the category "things that I have been told but don't particularly fancy trying.."

 

Stuff I know

Wednesday passed off without incident. We had another meeting about the Computer Suite and managed to sort out the timetabling in around 15 minutes. Everybody concerned is walking around in a daze wondering why it was so easy and just what we have forgotten to include....

I'm becoming slightly concerned about this "800 things I know" issue. I'm wondering if I should try to prove/disprove this once and for all by actually writing down 800 things that I definitely know (as opposed to things which other people have told me). I'll let you know how I get on, and maybe post them on the web.

 

The Price of being right - and the benefits

A wellwisher has just told me that I've had the apostrophe in my site name in the wrong place for ages, making me appear stupid and illiterate. He is presently being hunted down with dogs and will be dealt with in a suitable manner. I think that accordion lessons would probably be appropriate. (as in "Welcome to Heaven - here is your harp" and "Welcome to Hell - here is your accordion")

Note that I don't really mean this of course - but what's that barking noise in the distance....

And so to the "University Challenge". As part of the 75th Anniversary Celebrations for the University it was deemed a nice idea for a bunch of students and staff to engage in mental combat in the same manner as the celebrated quiz show. For some reason I ended up on the staff team (it is a long time since I could pass as a student). The event took place tonight. The chairman told me he had prepared 800 questions. I told him that I didn't think I actually knew as many things as that, so the situation looked a bit rocky at that point. Fortunately the other three members of the team (hi to Vanessa, Eric and Robert) seemed to know a lot more than 800 things, and so by the half way mark we were only 5 points behind. And thanks to a magnificent spurt just after the break, where we were able to show that we knew quite a lot about the 1960's (kind of an unfair advantage having been alive in that era when the competition wasn't I suppose) we managed to run out the winners by 25 points. Quite relieved about this, it occurred to me afterwards that we had a lot more to lose than the students. Anyway, a magnificent victory and ginger pops all round.

 

Fun Monday

And so, after the early risings and big drivings of Sunday it is back in harness for Monday. Lots of lectures and labs, just the way to start the week. The first year lectures are going well. It is funny how each time you do a lecture about the same material you can come up with something new. We are doing blocks and I came up with something to you could do with the word blocks and the addition of an extra vowel. I'm not saying I come up with something good each time. Just something new....

And I've just discovered/decided that the Spoonerism for .NET (dot net) is not debt. Which is as good as any reason for using it I suppose.

Been hammering the pinball machine in search of new records. Very difficult. It seems the difference between total success and total failure is very small. I dread to think how many goes I've spent on the thing, but at least it keeps it exercised...

 

Hobbit Hunting

We went hobbit hunting today. This involves getting up at 5:15 am and driving down to Milton Keynes (an invented place near London) to attend CollectorMania 4. Although I am a gadget person (oops - nearly put freak there..) I've never been one for so-called "collectable's".These seem to be things designed and made simply to deprive you of your hard earned cash. Like children - only shinier. And as for autographed items from the stars themselves, pah, most of these are signed in a machine which was probably made in Milton Keynes. I only really went because number one daughter had an urge for hobbit signatures, and how can I deny this.

The event itself was held in a shopping centre in Milton Keynes. I've no idea whether this actually was in the centre of the city/town, in that the place doesn't seem to have a centre at all, just a bunch of roundabouts and gridded roads which lead you in a different direction from the last one whilst looking exactly the same. However, I suppose the name "thecentre:MK" might be a clue here. Which is a bit of a shame....

So we end up in "thecentre:MK" looking for a bunch of characters from Middle Earth. Seems appropriate. Just us and several thousand other people who got there earlier and have pre-booked all the places. You had to queue to get a ticket which let you go and queue again, only later. If you were unlucky - like us, you ended up queuing for tickets for queues which might not actually exist if our hobbit got bored of the signings and went home early.

Anyhoo, we were lucky in that we did get to meet up with Gollum, or at least Andy Serkis, the man who brought him to life. We queued for tickets to queue for him, and found we were actually queuing for him (if you see what I mean). And so we got autographed pictures. And shook hands with Andy (I feel I can call him that now) who is a really nice chap. And I, to my eternal shame, asked him to say "My Precioussss" into the camera. Something which, to his eternal credit, he did with aplomb. Meantime daughter goes off and by a combination of deviousness, luck and good contacts manages to get the pictures she wanted.

The only snag was that we had to do a lot of waiting around. In a shopping centre. The bigger problem was that they had loads of stalls there selling bits and bobs which were rather nice. They had a whole shed full of stuff that I would have really liked (perhaps I am one for collectables after all). The Robbie the Robot they had was priced a bit on the high side, but I did manage to talk myself into getting a remote controlled Dalek. It is now standing in our front room guarding the fireplace. I'm not actually counting the days to the next event; but if they have one - I'll be there.

Just half an hour earlier....