A New Heirloom and Imagine that Success II

You know how some families have lots of old masters and valuables handed down from generation to generation. You see such people on TV shows looking amazed when a guy in a bow tie says their old painting is worth 100K ("But Sothebys said 200K"). Well, we have none of that in our neck of the woods. The nearest thing to an heirloom in our house is the pinball machine I suppose. But today I took a step towards changing that. I'm in the process of making a shrewd investment (sounds a lot posher than buying a computer game) which I think will end up turning into a valuable collectable. I've not got it yet, but I think that in the long term (which probably means that my kids will see the benefit) it will make us all rich-ish. Now, I'm not going to tell you what it is just yet, otherwise you'll all rush out and get one. But when it arrives I'll tell all.

Been thinking again about Thunderbirds, a TV puppet show which was a big part of my childhood. I liked nearly everything about it except one thing. They put great big numbers on the side of each craft. Thunderbird one had a dirty great big one on the size, and ditto all the way up to five. That always puzzled me. It is fair enough to number them for reference, but I don't think that any of the Tracy family is so stupid as to forget which is Thunderbird One.

The funniest thing about the numbering concerned the second film <enter nerd mode> which was called "Thunderbird 6". The plot was along the lines what kind of craft number 6 would be. When the film came out on video the chap who drew the artwork on the box obviously was not an connoisseur of the programme and so the expensively drawn letters read "Thunderbirds 6", which kind of made a mockery of the whole thing. And the sixth craft was obviously the Mole anyway. <exit nerd mode>

Hull has had some more success in the Microsoft Imagine Cup competition. Last year our team made it all the way to the world finals. This year is shaping up nicely too. Four students have passed both the knowledge test and the programming assignment and will be heading down to Reading (rhymes that!) for the "bunker" programming assignment later this year. As there are only 32 or so in the finals, drawn from universities all over the country, I reckon they've done Hull pretty well. Well done folks. I'm going down as a mentor, so I'll keep you posted as to how they get on.

 

Reference Friday

Spent the afternoon writing references. One of our students from a couple of years back was in town and she wanted some for applications for further study. Fortunately I never throw anything like this away, so it was out with the archive, update with experience and on to the headed notepaper. I hope it all works out OK.

Rolls Royce are mad. I've just found out that for the new Thunderbirds movie they refused to let them use the Rolls Royce trademark. This means that the wonderful FAB 1 now looks like this:

Ugh. It looks like the car from "Who Framed Roger Rabbit". Although I suppose I'll get used to it. And it probably can talk. Oh, and if you are old enough you could try the Thunderbirds drinking game.

 

Paperback writer

Met up with a book publisher today. She seemed quite interested in some ideas for books which David and myself have about .NET, C# and writing programs for Smartphones. I think we might try and put something together. I didn't mention my novel though: "A tale of one man's struggle against injustice, intolerance and empty inkjet cartridges. Against the background of life in one of our leading universities, this genre busting story tells of a man wrestling with his inner demons whilst searching for true happiness and the perfect programming language". Hmmm.

 

Great Achievments

Some days at work are just, well, work. I sit in my office and write material for lab work and stuff and venture out for the odd lecture (and I do mean odd). Other days are just a blur of meetings and trying to achieve other stuff. Today was a day like that. Been grappling with problems related to network connection policy, degree programme content and all sorts of other bits and bobs. All this is in between sorting out final year project problems. Great stuff.

 

Ford Racing

I like the Ford Racing game for the XBOX. Many of the cars that I'm hammering around the tracks don't look much like Ford cars that I've seen, but they seem to go OK. Being American the emphasis on powerful engines and rear wheel drive means that going round corners (or not) can be an issue, but on easy mode I've managed to win quite a few races and pick up some trophies and unlock extra cars. The driving is nothing like as real as Gran Turismo for the Playstation or as scary as Burnout 2. But I love driving games, and I don't regret buying this one.

 

Hand in Day

Hand in day for the Dress Shop coursework. For the last few weeks the first year students have been labouring mightily to produce a program to manage a dress shop. Just about everyone has worked really hard and I'm looking forward to seeing the results. However, I'm a bit worried that I might have scarred some people for life with this one. I'm concerned that they might walk into Top Shop and start asking things like "And just how to you manage the properties of those skirts over there?".

Some of the students are a bit upset that they don't seem to have learnt everything about programming in the five months or so that they've been studying the subject. I've got some even worse news here.

 

User Interfaces and Ovens

We had to use the timer on our oven for the first time today. That means I had around 45 seconds to figure out how to set the thing before running out of the house....

If I was writing a program to allow a user to control an oven timer I'd probably let them set the start time for the cooking and then the end time. This turns out to be the wrong way to do it. I tried for a while to see how to set the start time on my oven, but I couldn't. Instead all could set was the end time and the duration of the cooking process. Which turns out to be the right way to do it. Most of the time you are cooking something you are usually interested in preparing a meal for a particular time and you know how long it will take to cook. Therefore the time the oven must be switched on is not immediately available to you. If you need to enter this time you have to do a calculation to figure out what it is. It makes sense for the oven to do this for you.

We teach User Interface design where we worry about this kind of thing. I reckon that this is a good example of a good user interface. Even though I didn't think of it.

One clever cooker

Oh, and for those of you that think that looking at cookers and thinking about user interfaces is a bit sad, was it not Shakespeare who said "Truly fortunate is he who can find beauty in all things"?

Actually, it probably wasn't Shakespeare who said that. The only thing that I'm fairly sure that Shakespeare said was "Anne Hathaway eh? That's what I'd heard, heh heh".