Can you find yourself here? (a bigger version is in the pictures section)
Went up to Scarborough today to do the degree thing. What a day. Magnificent weather and a great bunch of students. Very nice.
Sun, sea, sand, sky and Scarborough
At least when you get up early you get some nice pictures. A full size image is in my pictures directory.
Went up town first thing this morning to do a paper review thing for the local BBC station. Oh the things I do in my continuous quest for fame and fortune. It seemed to go OK, even though I'd only prepared three items and the presenter asked me, live on air, for my fourth one. Ho hum. At least it got me into the office early.
I did a degree ceremony today. By "did" I mean acted as graduand's marshal. This involves telling everyone what to do at the start and then getting the students who have not got their degrees yet (called graduands) down to the stage so that they can go and get their degrees and become graduates.
It is great fun. We use City Hall and, although it can get a bit hot, there is always a fantastic atmosphere in amongst the nervousness.
Today things went OK. Except for one thing. I lost Laura. One of the jobs that I have to do is "slot in" people who register late. This means that they don't have a seat in the main hall, and so they sit down the front, next to me, and it is my job to put them in line in the right place so that they can get their degrees along with all the rest. Laura was one of the students I was due to slot in during the presentations. Things were going well as I fetched down the row into which Laura was due to be placed so I asked her to stand up and get ready to go. Unfortunately I then made a fatal mistake. I looked the other way to see how the queue was going. When I looked back Laura had melted into a sea of students wearing gowns.
Now, put a gown and hat on a bunch of people and they all look rather similar. Add to that my atrocious memory for faces and you have trouble. So I had to start asking people "Are you Laura?" to try and find the right person.
Unfortunately, people who are coming down for their degrees are not actually in a fit state to answer such questions. They are usually concentrating on remembering who they are so that they can walk across the stage at the right time, worrying about curtsying, and generally being a bag of nerves.
I've actually done the graduation thing as a student myself, and all this is quite normal. So when a graduand has someone towering over them asking "Are you Laura?" they immediately think "I'm not sure? Should I be? Why does he want to know?". Panic ensues. Two of the blokes in the queue told me that yes, they were Laura. This baffled me, and we were just entering a downward spiral of confusion when I spotted her and ushered her into the right place. Just in time. I don't think anyone noticed. And Laura went across the stage just fine.
When I first got a mobile phone that would work on the internet at first I was very impressed. Then I was annoyed. The problem was not that the phone didn't work very well, it was the cost. Getting hold of a few emails would not be cheap, and as for web pages and downloads, they were out of the question.
And so it has remained over the years. Until now. T-Mobile, one of the phone operators in the UK, has just launched a new service which is just what I want. For an extra 7.50per month on top of a mobile contract I can now have unlimited network access. I can get my email, surf the web and talk to web services as much as I like. So I can cancel my old contract, switch networks, have unlimited internet and pay around the same each month. Wonderful.
Better yet, when you sign up you can get a new phone (always nice). For an extra ten pounds I managed to get hold of a thing called a Vario. It is a Windows Mobile 5.0 device made by Imate so I can use the lovely email synchronisation, write C# graphics games and, because it has a little slide out keyboard, actually do useful things with my network connection.
This is a simply wonderful deal on a lovely phone. You really should check it out if you are in a position to move your contract. Unlimited network access on the move is really liberating and will lead to me finding los of new ways to use the internet and my phone. Great stuff.
I'm going to start building models of birds out of chocolates. The first thing I'm going to make is a Malteser falcon.
If Stelios opened a safari park would it be called "Easy Tiger"?
Thank you, and good night.
I'm going to claim I was going for an artistic effect...
I was down in City Hall again today doing my degree warmup thing. Warmup is a bit of an understatement, it was like an oven in there during the afternoon. I took a picture of "my lot" in the audience. Unfortunately I forgot to hold the camera still. I know I wasn't shaking from the cold....
Note to self. Get longer lens for camera..
This morning we went up to Bempton Cliffs to see if we we could see any puffins. We could.
A good place to eat a "Whitby Kipper". And a nice fish mobile too. But I think they would taste a bit woody.
Last time we went to Whitby it rained. All the time. But we still enjoyed it. So this time we went in the dry. Even better.
Whitby Bay looking good.
I think the captain was just showing off for us.
After we went to Whitby we stopped off at Robin Hoods Bay. No idea why it is called that, but it is a wonderful place.
A view of the bay
This season blue is the new black for fishing nets
So much for Bliss....
We are having a weekend away. This weekend. So the car has been loaded with essentials and some beer (or is beer an essential?) and we have scooted off to Flamborough, a village on the coast about an hour's drive from our house. Arrived just in time to wander down to North Landing and take some pictures. The evening was very kind to us. The sea was like a mill pond and I got some rather nice shots.
You can't beat a sunset by the sea...
Did the final Ace lecture today. Another splendid bunch of students and a good time had by all.
Danni warms up the audience...
Digby the digital dog drives them wild.
I don't know. You spend forty minutes showing off amazing technology, telling wonderfull jokes and so on. Then Digby comes on and kicks a ball and the crowd goes wild!
Anyway, it was great fun. I've put a little page together for those of you what want to have a go at the programming side of things. You can get the program I was writing from here. And you can find out about starting to program here.
..and this is stage 2. All I need to do now is figure out where the text I typed has gone, and we are in busines.
, a fancy photo sharing thing.I'm getting my new mobile phone geared up so that I can post to the blog from anywhere. This is stage one....
It is just too hot and sticky to post blogs at the moment. My room here is like an oven and even the fan (which was cheap from Tesco and sounds like a Jumbo Jet in an echo chamber) doesn't make things much better.
So I'm not going to post tonight. Except that I just have. So this whole blog thing has just not worked at all today.
I hate this weather.
Did my first Webcast tonight. Never done one before. You feel a bit stupid sitting in a room talking down a phone to a whole bunch of people you can't see, but you get used to it after a while. It is a bit scary though. There is a technique for dealing with presentations where you imagine the audience naked. In this case, they might actually have been - a horrible thought.
I'd very carefully scripted everything so that I knew just what to do and when to do it. So off I went. Just about everything worked, although I did have to speed up a bit at the end to get to the finish without missing anything. And I did tell my favourite joke as well, just as I promised. But of course I couldn't hear anybody laugh (so no change there). If you want to watch too, take a look here.
Ace audience
Another day, another ACE talk. Another great audience. I've no idea how Danni does it, but she gets in premium students each time. Anyway, today Digby sort of behaved himself, and of course got more applause than anyone else. I'm thinking about giving him his own blog on this site, but I'm not sure he needs the extra exposure..
Blurry Digby
I'm in the process of saying goodbye to an old friend. I've had a mobile phone with Orange since a long time ago, when black and white screens were cool. But now I'm leaving them and shacking up with T-Mobile. I gave Orange a chance, I spoke to their "Customer Retention" team (which sounds really scary) but at the end of the day they can't offer me what I want.
What I want is unlimited use of the internet on my mobile phone for 7.50 a month. I want to be able to use my mobile to browse the internet, check my email and download the odd file without worrying about the cost (which up until now has been horrendous). T-Mobile will let me do this. Orange won't. The nearest I can get with Orange (and this is a tip folks) is that if I use a Pay As You Go connection I can pay a pound for as much internet as I want for a single day. This is great for trips away and the odd demonstration. But I want the mobile internet as part of my life. So it is goodbye to Orange for a while.
I'm pretty sure that eventually Orange will have to come up with something similar, but I don't particularly want to wait. I've got a taste for mobile email and that means using the internet a lot. And I want it now. So it is goodbye to my Orange contract and hello for a year with T-Mobile.
Taken fresh this morning.
Today I got my new Lego mail order catalogue though the post. (You think this is strange for some reason? Shame on you.) Anyhoo, I found the description for set 7880 "Duplo Big Pirate Ship" to be really funny. At the end it says "Includes four pirates and a monkey." For some reason that I can't explain I just find this amusing.
What a great audience looks like.
I did another talk to a bunch of students from local schools today. The place was packed and it was a bit warm, but the whole thing went really well and the audience were great. For the first time I put Digby (my robot dog) on a black cloth. He loved it, he could find the ball and then fail to kick it really well.
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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