Saturday Shopping

You must know by now that on Saturday I go up town. Major change of style today as they've moved Dixons in Hull. Dixons sells technical toys and is therefore a must visit on my "tour of the city". The fact that it is now in a different place caused chaos with my shopping route, it will probably take a few months to sort out a new "optimum traversal". The good news is that it is now a much bigger store with a wider range of goodies. I'm tempted by a flat screen telly, but they'll have to halve in price before I'm going to get one (and they will).

Still carrying the tiny camera everywhere and searching for good photographic material. Here is the BHS shop in Hull, of all things.

 

Friday Meetings

Folks are still making progress on their projects, although we have some nasty bugs going round which have put people out of action for a while. We get this every year around now. I think it happens at most universities. The students arrive from the four corners of the earth (even though reliable research indicates that there may not be any actual corners) and operate a kind of "bug exchange scheme" in the first few weeks of the semester. They share various kinds of coughs and sneezes and then pass the most potent ones onto their lecturers. Perhaps we should get danger money....

Anyhoo, in the evening I got on with "the program which cannot be named". Here's a screenshot:

It doesn't look much different.....

 

Back to nearly normal, with blurry pictures

After all the running around yesterday it was nice to be back to some kind of normal. I'm still playing with my tiny toy camera; it comes with quite a nice little image processing program which you can use to make the pictures look even more artistic:

Walking into the office

Driving home again.

Well, I quite like them. At this rate I'll be too scared to attach the camera to the plane as planned. Please note that I took the driving picture whilst the car was stuck in the traffic waiting for Ye Olde Levele Crossing (est. 1890) - to open.

 

Microsoft come to see us

The guys from Microsoft were once more on campus. This time they are driving the Microsoft 100% Inspiration Tour around the country. This is quite a bit more focused than previous visits, in that this time we get lectures and practical sessions aimed at specific topics. The audiences were slightly smaller than previously (although the lab was packed) but everyone there was interested in deploying the software and got to take away disks full of software and resources to do this (and a free T shirt!). If you are at a university which is not Hull (shame on you) and you get a visit from these guys they are well worth a look. If you are from Hull - too late - you've missed your chance (but you can pull down the presentations and the labs from the web site above).

Gavin from Microsoft on his knees in front of our students...

I've been playing with my fifteen quid camera. I've found out one thing. If you use it as a webcam it forgets all its pictures - which is kind of a shame if you've taken a bunch (like I had). However, I'm going to try and put a cheap picture on the blog every day from now on. The good news is that I don't need to trim these pictures because they are already tiny, the better news is that they look quite good. Today's offering - my signed picture of Gollum. More tomorrow..

 

Alarums and Excursions and Eating at the Blue Bicycle

Today has passed off without incident apart from the fire alarm and the complete evacuation of our building. That was kind of fun. We'd just set up "base camp" in the nearest pub (at times like this the survival instinct just takes over) and were digging in for the long haul when we found out that the alarm was over and we could go back to work. Drat and double drat. Still, made for an interesting half an hour or so. It is the first time in a while that I've been outside a pub waiting for it to open in the morning. Honest.

The "program which cannot be named" is now working quite well, and starting to look very cool. And I might even name it some time.

Then over to York for a meal at a restaurant called "The Blue Bicycle". Kind of French themed, and built on the site of a brothel (coincidence, surely). Gavin from Microsoft was there and we bounced around some thoughts looking for the "next big idea". The food was lovely. Beautifully presented and delicious. If you are in the mood for posh nosh, and reckon you can stretch to the prices, I'd strongly advise it. They even have their own web site. And the toilet has lots of pictures of Marilyn Monroe in it (that is - the gents does. I can't speak for the ladies...).

 

Having Conversations with Objects, and a Blast from the Past

First Year Java seems to be going OK. Expanded on the final piece of assessed work today in the lecture. My voice is back to 95 percent so I think everyone heard. We are making an "object" which will play the silly game of Battleships. In this situation it is useful to think in terms of having a conversation with the object. Each thing you say to it is a call to a method in it, we have ones for "start the new game", "I want to attack a square", "which square do you want to attack", "do you give in?" and so on.

One of the scary things was that some of the students thought that it was quite OK for the computer to hold their board as well. This is like telling your opponent where all your ships are and expecting him/her not to use that information. If I was writing a Battleships program I'm pretty sure that I'd make mine cheat if it could....... This kind of thing is another reason why you shouldn't play those "on-line casino" games which pop up on some web pages.

Oh, and if you are not sure what the game of Battleships is all about you can find out more here.

In the evening Richard came round. It was nice to see him, he left the area some time back and is headed for the 'states in a few weeks. He's the bloke who sold us the pinball table, so we fired up "La Machine" and spent a happy hour or so trying to get into the Twilight Zone. We agreed that the machine was "playing very tight" which is the Pinball Experts way of saying that we all got fairly miserable scores. In the middle of my best game I contrived to blow the fuse which controls the power to all the flippers and stuff, which caused that round to come to a premature end.

I needed 7 amp fuses, but we are making do with 6.3 amps until I can get some proper ones. This means that when a lot of stuff is happening the fuse can go pop - although this only seems to happen to me.... The other solution would be to put a 10 amp fuse in there, but this might mean I'll need a new Pinball Table if anything goes wrong.....

 

The Danger of Over Customisation

Went over to the parents today. Dad had lost some menu items in Outlook and found that it is hard to "Send and Receive" without the required buttons. When I got there I found that the menu bar had got dragged to the side of the screen. I've had this happen to me and it is very annoying. If you move the mouse in the wrong way the whole of your user interface can go with it and it can then take ages to put things back together. I suppose there is one person in a hundred who likes to re-arrange the design of their computer programs but for the other 99 of us this only causes problems. It is a bit like suddenly finding that your car steering wheel is now in the left hand back seat, with the pedals still at the front. Apparently there is an option somewhere to stop this from happening. I'd rather this was set on by default.