The Power is Now Mine - or is it?

Went up town to Maplin and had a look at their sale stuff. They have a set of tools for opening security screws - you know, the ones which prevent you from taking the back off anything interesting/potentially fatal. Well, just think of all the devices I could take a look inside if I had those - so I bought a kit. It was only a fiver, and for all that power I thought it was a good deal.

The keys to the castle?

The only problem is that I can't find anything the keys actually fit. Ho hum. I'm wondering if it is some kind of a scam where they make lots of strangely shaped bits of metal, shove them in a case and flog them to suckers (i.e. me). I'm kind of hoping that I will find these things really useful at some later date when I have to open up something that has just gone bang.

Please note that I'm the kind of idiot that regards the label "no user serviceable parts inside" as a challenge and that, being a devout coward, I am extremely careful what I fiddle with - and I never open up things like TVs and computer monitors....

 

The Truth is Simple

Found out what the pink star is for. Mark tells me that it has been added by the cleaners so that they know which sub-master key to use on my office. I'm on ME, so I get a pink star. Most other folks are on MD and so they get yellow.

Now all I need to do is find out what the big red mark is for and I can sleep at nights.

 

Paranoia Runs Riot

Stranger than truth. Yesterday I write about a global conspiracy involving squirrels. Today I find that someone has stuck a coloured star on my door handle at work.

Exhibit A

This is kind of worrying. If I have a star on my door I expect it to be in a "Topping the Bill at the Palladium" kind of way, rather than this. I wonder if I am being singled out for special treatment because I know the truth. I am kind of relieved when I find that just about all the other doors in the place have been similarly marked. But why is mine the only pink one?

 

Evil Squirrels

I've always thought that squirrels are evil. We have a couple outside our house and we sit in the kitchen and watch them run around the garden. And sometimes they stop and stare at us. And they are definitely plotting something. The interesting thing is that lots of other people seem to think squirrels are evil too. If you type "evil squirrels" into Google you get a huge number of hits on pages which echo this sentiment. Some of them are quite scary (and not necessarily in an "about squirrels" kind of way). Google even have their own category for these links. Perhaps all this is really a plot against the squirrels who are really the Jedi Knights of our time, shunned by society, fighting injustice and burying nuts. I call this my "Dark Side Squirrel Meta-Conspiracy Theory". Perhaps I ought to get out a bit more and stop reading newspapers.....

At least they have good taste in beer.

 

Meeting Madness, and then some fun

Staff meeting this morning. I appreciate the need for the meetings. And everything which was discussed needed to be discussed. But after a day of marking yesterday the last thing I wanted was a meeting.

What a meeting can do to you.

After the meeting had some fun though. Peter and I are doing the Virtual Machine module from our .NET MSc in the coming semester (i.e. next week) and so we had a chat about the form of the labs for the course. We had some really neat ideas and we have ended up deciding to try and get bits of .NET working on a 6502 microprocessor. (for those of you of a non-technical disposition I'm sorry - but I find the idea quite exiting).

In other good news, the results from the first round of the Imagine Cup are in. In this part of the competition students had to complete a quiz of 30 questions. The top 150 or so will make it into the next round. After all the entries have been counted up it turns out that Hull came fifth in the country. This is a really good result, and kudos to all those who took part. It means that there is a very good chance that we will see some of our students taking part in the finals, which are later this year. After coming third in the world last year, we are looking for great things again this time....

If you don't know about the Imagine Cup, take a look here.

 

Exam marking and Dalek vision

Controversy rages about how Daleks can not see the colour red (see here for more on this). Nick (whoa - that makes four readers) has been in touch saying that if you can't see red it must come up as black, based on physics. I'm inclined to agree with this, except that another way of regarding it is that you could just see straight through it, in that if you use x-rays to look at something you won't "see" all the stuff the x-rays pass through. Except that this makes hiding behind a red post box even more stupid. Ho hum. Was massively cheered by Derek, who also remembers reading the same information in his Dalek annual. So at least I'm not going mad then.

Spent the entire day marking. Ugh. I used a red pen. As far as Daleks are concerned I might as well have done nothing. So how do Daleks mark their exams? Do Daleks have exams? What subjects are they in? I'm going for a lie down now...

 

One more day of freedom

It seems that the more time you spend away from work, the less happy you are to go back to it. It's not that I don't enjoy my job, it is just that not doing it is nice too....

Anyhoo, today is my last day of around two weeks of holiday. Got an email from another blog reader (that makes 3). Jon tells me that there is a rather good freeware game based on Babylon 5 which you can get. If you are interested, take a look here. Number one son has been playing the game and rather likes the look of it. I don't think it actually includes the spacestation itself, but it is set firmly in the B5 universe.