Perhaps I'm getting too old for this. Perhaps not. At least the fact that we british are messing around with our clocks again this weekend meant that the half five start didn't feel quite so painful, what with the extra hour in bed and all.
Anyhoo, it was off down the motorway to get autographs and stuff. Lots of things to do, and stuff to wish we could afford.
Jewel Staite does the business
..or we could have a new kitchen...
The Milton Keynes tree
Today we had Ed Dunhill and Ben Coley from Microsoft over to see us as part of the Microsoft Inspiration tour. These guys work hard. A five hour drive to Hull, a three hour presentation, and a five hour drive on to the next gig. Tough stuff.
Ed and Ben in the Large (lecture theatre)
Some of the students limbering up
Keeping your audience watching....
The talks, about SilverLight, XNA, Embedded Development and why everyone should enter the Imagine Cup this year, were excellent, despite some comings and goings from students who had to head for timetabled lectures.
If you are at a college or uni. and you haven't got these two coming round to visit, you are missing out. If you check on the web site, I think they have a few slots free next year.
If you were at the talk and want to find out more about the stuff they showed off the best place to look is in Ed's blog, which you can find here.
Some idiot Channel 4 program has just published a survey that makes out that Hull is the second worst place to live in Britain. This morning I thought I'd take a few pictures of the horrible place where I live.
The Spurn Point light ship as was. You can go round it if you like.
Princes Quay shopping centre
Posh boat
Awful place, isn't it.
Kewl bridge
Town Centre
Go Hull.
I love autumn. You get the most amazing light and colours.
As close to artistic as I'm ever going to get...
Frosty Sports Field
Loten looking good
It worked for me. Hull ComSoc had a lan party today. They had Halo 3, Quake, Wii Tennis, Guitar Hero, in fact all kinds of games. I took along my copy of Virtua Tennis for the PS/3 and played a few games, which was nice. I kept carefully away from all the games I was less good at (i.e. everything else) and managed to make sure I didn't lose. Wonderful. And you don't have "friendly fire" in tennis. I did take the camera though, and grabbed some snaps.
Halo 3 multiplayer semi final. Tight stuff.
A tense moment in the final
Mission Control
Hull Fair is one of the biggest fairs in Europe. Which attractions are there? All of them. We went tonight, and I took the medium sized camera. I conquered my fear of heights and parting with money to buy a seat on one of the two big wheels, and grab some overhead shots of the action.
Just a small part of the fair. You can see the Humber Bridge on the horizon.
More of the fair. We didn't get around to going on the other big wheel you can see in the distance.
My kind of game of chance, a prize every time..
Probably my favourite of the trip, although there are some other ones that I like on Flickr.
today it was the turn of the post grads to have their party. We had another, eerily similar quiz and more games. Great fun.
The winners
Second place
And finally third place.
We had all kinds of fun with the toys again, and everyone went away happy.
Book now for next year.....
Qn: "What is the combined age of the "Chuckle Brothers"?
Ans: - you'd know if you'd been at our First Year party...
We had a quiz, and Guitar Hero, and a PS3, and Wii Tennis, and 8 player Halo 3, and free drinks and food, and, and, and.....
And it was good.
Many thanks to Warren for bankrolling the operation and Adam, Simon, Dan, Zoe, Sam, Helen, Joan and Amanda for helping make things go with a swing (and apologies if I've missed anyone out). I took a camera (some of our students have got some amazing cameras - we must sort out a Flickr group for pictures) and took some happy snaps.
Full Swing
What half the room does when you shout "smile"
What the other half does..
These folks came first in the Quiz
These came second
And these won the, er, "special" prize
Big riffs. Sam found this amazing disco sound system that we ran Guitar Hero through. And dig those groovy lights on the pillars...
On the left we have Wii Tenis and PS3 Motorstorm, in the middle we have Guitar Hero and on the right, for your pleasure, we have 8 player Halo 3.
It was a great night. Hopefully more (and perhaps less grainy) pictures will surface. I'll put them on Flickr if they do..
In keeping with the much anticipated launch of Halo 3 real soon, tonight I saw a house with "Master Chief" windows.
This is an original, completely unretouched picture. And I've got the RAW file from the camera to prove it. Spooky eh?
Oh, and I've just discovered that Microsoft have decided not to release a version of the game where the Master Chief joins the navy. It was going to be called "Halo Sailor".
I got this last week at Hornsea Market. Actually works very well, and definitely not a shameless ripoff of another toy with a boys name. Oh no.
Today was a nice day. And we had a birthday to celebrate. So it was off to Hornsea Mere for a baked potato. And cheese.
It was very windy. But there were a few brave folk out in yachts
Then we went onto the front for donuts (forget your Crispy Cremes, these are the real deal - and six for a pound). And of course amusements....
Winning big at penny falls (you can actually see the pennies falling)
One of my ambitions, which looks like it might end up being thwarted by big city developers, is to visit Coney Island in New York. Hornsea is a bit like this I think with some amazing attractions. Including the "New Super Palmist".
The machine went up and down my hand and then printed out a very accurate assessment of my character....
I think that pretty much sums me up.
If you live in Hull you really should go to Hornsea.
One of the things that you get to do on holiday is read. But only if you've taken some books with you on holiday. Fortunately our cottage, as well as being wonderfully positioned and sparkly clean throughout, came with a few that had been left there over the years. One of them was a Readers Digest collection of condensed stories. This is where they take a six hundred page volume and boil it down to a couple of hundred pages. Oh, and they add pictures too...
A tale of daring do, and centre partings
"..and if I were you young man, I'd clean the other nostril too..."
He watched them together, all the time waiting for the trick chair to fold itself up again....
"I wonder if this rock will leave a mark on my trousers" he thought to himself while his girlfriend wondered why she seemed to have somebody else's legs.
And so I am back home. I love the way that as you get closer to Hull the roads get that bit quieter, and the traffic reports of jams around the rest of the country have less and less meaning. And now I have my nice fast broadband connection (rather than climbing a hill, holding the phone above my head and waiting for a single bar of signal to appear).
But the holiday was fun though. I bought a Ferrari for five pounds. It turned out to only have three wheels, but I have plans to stick the missing one back on. I saw some stunning art, had a conversation with a horse (although it was a bit one-sided) and met up with the oracle pig again. Who turns out to be called Esmerelda. I also read some exciting books, one even had pictures in. Of which more later.
Oh, and I took the camera.
What a pity that mobile tower isn't my carrier.....
We are becoming creatures of habit. Perhaps it's our age. Anyhoo, just like last year we went off to a place near Bridlington, Sewerby Park. It is a big country house, with lovely grounds, just by the side of the sea. There is a tiny zoo, pitch and putt golf and some wonderful walled gardens.If you live in the area you should/must go there. Just like last time they were doing Roman re-enactments. Just like last time I took my camera.
Any parent will be familiar with this domestic scene.
Add your own caption here
My money is on the blokes on the horses
They can do gardening here. Oh yes.
Butterfly
Boat
Bridlington bay
Tonight finds me on a boat on the way to Amsterdam. P & O do these wonderful little min-cruises, which for only slightly more than the cost of a return ticket to London will put you up for two nights on their luxury ferry and take you to Amsterdam for the day to boot (or should that be clog).
Anyhoo, we set sail tonight and, in spite of poor weather, spirits are high.
View of the estuary
Leaving port
We are to be up bright and early tomorrow (5:00 am)...
Went up town first thing today to do a paper review for Radio Humberside. We had a chat about the UK A-Level results, which are out today. Apparently everyone has done better than ever, and this is a national scandal. Although if everyone was doing worse, that would be a national scandal too. And if everything stayed exactly the same, that would be regarded as deeply suspicious because someone would obviously be fiddling the results....
I've seen modern A-Levels at first hand. I've know the amount of work that kids have to put in to get through them. All I would say is kudos to anyone who has got good grades, I hope they take you where you want to go.
Early morning Hull. Don't you wish you lived in a place that looked like this?
The BBC building
These are the last few pictures that I've just pulled off the camera. Korea seems an awfully long way away now, even though it is really less than a week.
On the way to the airport. Not sure what the red stuff is
Lottery burgers. Guess which one is for the Microsoft person....
My biggish camera can take pictures in RAW format. This means that rather than compressing and processing the image data when it takes a picture, the camera simply dumps the output of the photo sensor into a file. It results in rather large files (around 14Mb in my case) for each picture but it does represent the epitome of quality, as you get all the data from the picture. It also means that you can do things like white balance compensation (making sure that things don't look yellow, or blue or whatever) after taking the picture, rather than at the time.
I was taking pictures of Seoul at night, and unsure about the white balance, so I took a few RAW pictures as well. The bad news was that when I got home, I now had to convert them into proper images. Fuji, who made my camera, supply a truly horrid set of programs to do this. They don't work very well on Vista, and I've lost the disks, so I thought I was stuffed. Until I found this.
These folks have written an image decoder for Finepix cameras that does everything I want. It is free and it works. If you want to play with RAW images and get the maximum quality from your camera, you should download the program and have a play.
Raw Seoul
I feel rather bad about this. Rather than attend the World Fair part of the Imagine Cup awards I instead snuck out and took a trip round Seoul. I'd checked that I wouldn't be needed for anything, and it is rather unlikely that I will get to this wonderful city again in a long while, so it was into a taxi and off to the shopping district.
Taxis in Seoul are ace. They are very inexpensive and very efficient. Some of their drivers can speak English too, which is nice. And they have air conditioning, which is all important.
So, all we had was two bits of paper. One had the name of the shopping district written on it, and the other had the name of the hotel written on it. Both of them contained the only Korean language that we had on us. But at no point did this seem a problem. The sun was out, the people were friendly, and away we went. Of course I had both cameras, and of course I took loads of pictures. Most of them will be up on Flickr later, for now here are a few choice snaps.
We found this little market square area. This is the layout of the stalls.
Then we found ourselves in a video game arcade. This was tucked away in a side street. Even so there were plenty of machines.
Single player
This guy was seriously good
Draw your picture, take a call. That's multi-skilled...
The old and the new
Side street
After spending a few hours happily wandering around and steadily accumulating bits and bobs we found another taxi, gave the driver the other piece of paper and headed back to the hotel. I've got some pictures of the trip, which will appear later.
By the time we got back it was pretty dark, but the air was clear and so it was time to take some night views.
The view from the 11th floor
...and another.
Seoul is wonderful. If you get the chance to go, just go. And take me along too...
I've been thinking about this post. I'm wondering if it makes me seem more brave/stupid than I actually am. We did go off without much backup, but we had made sure that people back at the hotel knew where we were going and when we were due back. We also made sure that all the taxis that we took were proper ones, stayed in sight of each other and never strayed too far off the main streets. My impression is that Seoul is no more dangerous than any big city, but that is not a reason for taking undue chances.
Rob Miles is technology author and educator who spent many years as a lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Hull. He is also a Microsoft Developer Technologies MVP. He is into technology, teaching and photography. He is the author of the World Famous C# Yellow Book and almost as handsome as he thinks he is.
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