Stupid Purchases and Sneezing

Stupid Purchases and Sneezing

Stupid Purchases and Sneezing

Bought something (else?) stupid today. Got this silly scrolling message display thing from Maplin. I'm going to use it to display inspirational messages to Team Sinclair. It's a big day tomorrow, drive down to Oxford and start work. And I think I'm coming down with a cold.

 

Last Day of Semester

It is the last day of the semester today. All of the students are packing up their stuff and handing in their course work prior to jetting off home to a land of free food and easy washing....

But no rest for me, on Sunday I'm off to Oxford to mentor Team Sinclair in our Microsoft coding challenge. This is going to be very exciting, in that we will be writing code and building an application in a very short time. In the mean time I've got to make sure that all the student projects are in and everyone has some kind of happy ending.

 

It's the little things...

I've found that it is the little things in life which give the greatest pleasure. Whilst buying a network cable today I was asked the question "How long do you want it?". It gave me great pleasure to reply "Oh, I want to keep it...". I think that the phrase is "Unbearably witty...."

 

Project Power

The student projects are due in this week. This means that each student has to produce a pretty weighty report for us to read and mark. And today we also had some presentations by the CSE students. Which were excellent by the way. I'm constantly surprised and impressed by the way that our students grow during the three years they spend on the course. From nervous flowers to presenters confidently espousing the virtues of web services, secure channels, back end databases and the like.

Team Sinclair is growing as well. We have only ever met physically for a few hours, around three weeks ago. But the power of the internet has meant that the team has been in contact most every night and great things are being achieved. The final coding marathon starts on Sunday, I'll let you know how it goes.

 

...and we're back...

And so back to blogging. The last few days could not be described as having been particularly pleasant, but I have been greatly buoyed up by the good wishes and support of those around me. Thanks folks. And on with the motley.

I got my copy of Steel Battalion on Friday. This is the whizzy XBOX game with the very fat controller. Myself and number one son have been struggling with the thing to try and use it to control our Vertical Tank (VT). It really is great fun and quite involving. I took the whole thing into the department for our final Admissions Afternoon Experience (tm) on Saturday last week, I think those that had a go on it were quite impressed. It looks lovely on the large screen using the video projector....

And on Sunday I got my guitar down from the wall, took it round to Ian's and then spent the afternoon acting like my kind of rock star (i.e. drinking beer and playing pool). I seem to have forgotten the three chords that I used to know. Ho hum. Ian keeps a guitar in his office as a form of workplace therapy. I'm not sure if I dare do that, but it might make me look slightly more cool I suppose.

My Imagine Cup Team, otherwise known as "Team Sinclair", are rattling on a pace. Between them they are working on database design, mapping, knowledge based systems, web services, stored procedures and clustering algorithms. Me, I'm getting the T shirts printed.....