Good TV - ha!

There has been a lot of good stuff on our telly this weekend. But only because we bought the DVDs and put them on. The stuff you get for paying your licence fee seems to get worse and worse as time goes by. This may be me getting old I suppose, but if I see one more makeover show (except for "Queer Eye for a Straight Guy" of course) or one more reality TV thing, I may just junk the TV in the river and watch everything via the computer. And it was the last "Dick and Dom in Da Bungalo" for a while, which was rather sad. I suppose, with hindsight, that this program is probably worth the licence fee by itself.

 

Good Good Friday

Good Friday was, well, good. I spent some time recreational programming. Team Sinclair needed a stop watch to time presentations and I couldn't find a good one for the Smartphone. The one I did find which worked showed the time to three decimal places. As if I have that kind of reaction speeds! I've now nearly finished creating the perfect Smartphone stopwatch. The only problem at the moment is that the system ticker doesn't quite tick as fast as I would like, and the watch loses 5 seconds in 2 minutes. Ho hum. I'll post the finished program in Interesting Systems when I make it work.

This evening we bit the bullet and went for the last Babylon 5 episode in series 3. Super stuff. Now we have to wait a couple of weeks for the next boxed set to come out so we can find out what happens. One of the best cliff hanger endings that I've seen.

Back to Reality

I felt quite bad saying goodbye to the other members of Team Sinclair. It would be great if we could meet up again sometime, and you never know in this business. Anyhoo, au revior for now to George ("I have a suggestion") Tourkas, Si ("I'll put the exception handler in later") Matthews, Paul ("Mappoint's got stuck again") Cronin and Andy ("I'll write a stored procedure to do it") Sterland. Good luck guys. Although after this week, you'll need less of it.

And remember, when you get old like me you too will have the indignity of the youth of the day taking the mickey out of your taste in music. One of "the team" actually referred to "The Dan" as "elevator music". Huh. On the other hand, I don't see Rammstein being played in any lifts, ever.

And now a four hour drive back to Hull and reality.

In the evening we watched "Spirited Away". This is a quite magical cartoon film from Japan. All I can say is get to watch it. The ideas are way out, but the presentation and the charm are wonderful.

 

Here Comes the Judge(es)

Judgment day in the code marathon. Time to switch skills from coding to presenting. The first presentation rehearsal was a disaster. This is normal. The second had some good bits in it. The third came along and we could see where we were going. By the time we got to strut our stuff in front of the judges Team Sinclair really knew its business, even riding out a little system glitch as it went. I love watching teams develop and spark. And Team Sinclair is really beginning to spark well now. By the second judges presentation I really thought that they had nailed it.

And so to the celebration dinner. A really nice meal which was somewhat spoiled by the fact that our destiny would be decided at the end. We had a kind of agreement, in that we tried very hard not to talk about how we thought we did. My line was that we had got ourselves "in the zone" as it were, and now it is down to luck and how everyone else did on the day.

The team at the dinner. The tablecloth matched our jumpers (as did everyone else's). From the left; Paul Cronin, Rob Miles, Simon Matthews, Andy Sterland and George Tourkas.

We came third. There were two teams in the seven finalists who were judged better than us. So Rio will have to wait. The winning team had a student from Hull in it, which is very nice. The same student, Matt Steeples, also won a special award as the best competitor. Go Matt. Team Sinclair was quite cool about this, I think we all realised that on the day there was always a good chance that we would be beaten. But the other two must have been *real* good, 'cos what my team did on the day was awesome.

And so to the party. And what a party. Gavin had decided that retro was the way to go. So it was Table Football, Air Hocky, retro games machines and model robots all the way. There was even an ancient, but working, Spectrum.

Microsoft employee Gavin King dares to use a computer with a non-Windows operating system whilst Dave Chalmers looks on aghast.

Andy and I took on Gavin and Dave at Table Football and whupped them!

A back end of a Mini with a robot in it. What else?

The beer was free flowing and good and everyone wandered around in a post-programming haze. I hope all the competitors got as much out of the proceedings as I know that Team Sinclair have. As I said last year; the team don't know how much of an effect the last couple of days have had on them. But when they start putting together presentations, planning programs, designing services, they'll think back to these frantic times and pull something really useful out of their memories. And so, an early night - only one in the morning.... But my abiding memory of the evening has got to be Andy and the Chief of Microsoft Cambridge Research Labs. going at it hammer and tongs on the air hockey table. That and my first ever Tequila Slammer.

The robots are coming.

 

Just Turn Up the Pressure...

Day two of the Imagine Cup code marathon. Some slight evidence of pressure now, as the scope of the problem is starting to hit Andy, Cro, George and Si. That and the fact that some of our more "wow" components are beginning to misbehave.

George and Si hard at it.

The team and their wires.

I told the team that around Tuesday evening, with the final judging just hours away, something big would go and fail in a spectacular manner. I hate it when I'm right in a bad way. Just around 9:00 pm, (after Si had won the Project Gotham Racing championship and a rather nice remote controlled car - don't ask how I did), our highly expensive, one of a kind, unique, vital and crucial Pocket PC Phone Edition device failed completely. When we got it going again I thought that we had confronted our moment of truth. And then it failed again, this time losing its voice. Since one of our nicer features was the speech component, this was something of a problem. However, after some nifty dealing with another team we managed to swap our Smartphone (which we are not using) for a working XDA and around two am we staggered off to bed with great hopes for success in the morning.

 

Welcome to the machine......

Team Sinclair is a machine. One with human components. I''ve been forced to write these blog entries retrospectively, because spending waking time on anything other than working in the machine would seem like some kind of betrayal...Anyhoo, before breakfast I managed to take a few piccies.

This is the ceiling of my room, viewed from the bed. Not a place I'm going to spend much time in unfortunately. That Smoke Alarm flashes every eleven point four nine seconds (averaged over 200 readings).

This is the view from my room window.

And this is the view from the back of the room. Very posh, but If you go outside the views get even better.

The codeathon is taking place near Oxford in a complex based around an old mill and "The Old Swan" pub/restaurant near it. Where you have a water mill you usually have a river (at least on the more successful ones) and this place is no exception.

This is the few from the steps of the pub/restaurant where we had breakfast and our posh meals. Even in the country you can get white vans. This is the point at which I kind of lost touch with the outside world for a while, as along with the rest of the team we retreated into our own little universe which was Team Sinclair. Each team member has got a role which fits in nicely with the development and we are motoring along really rather well. I think that we now have a reputation as the most relaxed team in the cup, in that every time someone comes into the our room we are just sat working. Perhaps we are too relaxed. Maybe I should organise a fist fight or something. Or then again perhaps not.

In the evening we were forcibly dragged away from our keyboards to take part in a quiz. And great fun it was too. I think we managed to come third or so. Some of the questions were rather nice, in that they allowed me to air my huge range of knowledge: "How many times in the original Star Trek did Kirk say 'Beam me up Scotty'?" Answer, none surprisingly. Did lean something rather interesting/scary though. Apparently the sound of a duck quacking does not cause an echo. And nobody knows why.... Then it was back to work for more coding. We are trying to keep reasonable hours and so I left around midnight, with other components of the "Sinclair Machine" chugging on nicely into the darkness.

 

Shiny Renaults and Much Sneezing

Drove down to Oxford today to the venue for the Imagine Cup programming final. Got a proper cold now, so my sparking wit was somewhat masked by many tissues and large sneezes. But the set up is great, and the team have made great strides in creating the application. Managed to last to 11:10 pm before I had to stagger off to bed.

Everyone was quite impressed by the real Sinclair Spectrum that I managed to dig out and take along. Unfortunately, in an effort to improve the quality of the display I contrived to break the device itself by snapping off the keyboard ribbon connector. But it still managed to get wistful glances from Microsoft Techies who grew up with it.