Plumb Job

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Earlier this morning I was wondering how I was going to spend all this new free time that I have now that the writing on the book is finished.

This afternoon I found out. I get to clean mouse droppings out of the summer house. The pesky little rodents had made their way back in over the winter and seemed to have held a particularly messy party in my gardening gloves.

Lovely.

Gone to the beach

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Most of the writing is now done. Just a few bits left to add. So we went to the seaside. I really like Hornsea. It has a faded charm that I find really attractive. Number one son and I took our cameras, and we were dead lucky because the light was lovely for photographs.

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Beach front

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Asset stripped

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Indoor amusements

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Windmills

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Hornsea Mere Tea Rooms. Fantastic.

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This pike is over 100 years old.

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I once got a hole in one here. Snag is, it was the wrong hole....

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Boats

Remember Me?

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Sometimes to solve a problem you have to go and live there. And that is where I've been these last few days. Living in a book. Although I've actually done quite a lot since the last post.

  • got a media pc
  • met some ducks and swans
  • been very jealous of my father in law
  • controlled a robot vacuum cleaner with the .NET Micro Framework
  • beat Ian at table football (twice)
  • seen Laura Viers live
  • gone to the seaside

I'll catch you all up with these things as soon as all the pictures have uploaded onto Flickr.

Roomba Magic

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I actually own a useful robot. Amazing. I've got some useless ones too, but this one actually does something that number one wife thinks is good. It does the vacuuming. You plonk it down in the middle of a room, give it a kick and off it trundles, bouncing off furniture and cleaning as it goes. And it does a creditable job. To be sure, we did have to clear a bit of junk off the floor to give it a free run, and it does take longer than I would, but the evidence in the dust collector is clear, it cleans.

We set it loose in the bedroom and it rumbled about for a while. When I caught up with it later it was coughing a bit, and upon inspection it had picked up a lot of dust (it had been wandering about underneath things), an umbrella cover and 20 pence. I emptied it all out, charged the battery and off it went again. The device itself is beautifully engineered. It bristles with sensors so that it really can follow a wall, detect and manage collisions with obstacles and avoid falling down stairs (it is especially good at that one). And it has a bunch of brushes and proper filters and stuff. It really is a vacuum.

The funny thing is that I didn't really select it for its cleaning prowess. I was more interested in the interfacing potential for the Micro Framework book that I'm presently writing. The robot exposes a software interface into which you can plug a computer. It works too. I've had C# programs in a Micro Framework telling the robot what to do, which is very nice.  But now number one wife wants it to clean the conservatory, so I'll have to get on with something else.

Laura Viers Sings

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Indeed she does. Very well. Number one son spotted that she was appearing in York, and so off we toddled. I took the big camera, but I might as well have not bothered. The lights were a bit low and even with the camera gain turned up to 11 it was hard to get any good photos.

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Laura in red (and that is a sock over the microphone)

She played mostly new stuff, which was alright by me. She does have an amazing voice and her band were absolutely top notch.

Media Friendly

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Number one son was supposed to be a restraining influence. He was supposed to drag me away from temptation and stop me doing things like buying Sony Media Centre PCs, even if they were half price. Unfortunately he was no good at all. So now I've got this Sony XL-201 thing lurking under the telly and I've thrown all the silver boxes out.

And it used to work very well. It was running XP and Media Centre 2005 but of course I wanted more. I wanted Vista. Well, today I got it. We left the machine upgrading while we went up town. When we got back all looked fine, which is bad. One of Robert's rules of computers is that "Everything useful requires payment in pain".

When things seem to work OK my heart tends to sink, because it means that the bits that are going to not work are going to be swines to fix. I'd much rather have a completely black screen and nothing happening, because I can attack that up front. With this variant of the hand of fate I have to find out what is going to be wrong before I can fix it.

Well, later today I found out what is wrong. Nothing too important, just that when you turn the TV on the computer crashes. The NVidia drivers just can't handle the fact that the TV is saying hello down its HDMI connection. They show their surprise by blue screening the box. As I am pitching this device to number one wife as the answer to all our problems, the media hub to end all hubs, the thing that only needs one remote control this is a bit of a sticking point.

We have tried various versions of the drivers and all have the problem to a different degree. By not turning anything off, ever, things work OK, but I don't see this as energy efficient. Actually, I see it as darned annoying. I have a Sony TV plugged into a Sony computer running drivers downloaded from the Sony site. And it crashes when you turn the TV on. Do they test this stuff? Do they ever turn it off? At the moment the best I can do is live with it until NVidia (for I suspect they are to blame) ship something a bit more resilient.

Then this evening we went round to see Ian. Everyone beat me at pool, which is bad. But I beat everyone at table football. Which is good.

And yes, I did churn out a bunch of book pages in the meantime.

Respect

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My father in law has style. He showed this by getting out some of his record collection:

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Ying Tong indeed

This is the sleeve from a Goons EP that he bought many moons ago. He still has the record too. Great stuff.

Then it was back onto the motorway for the journey home. On the way we passed a lorry loaded with stuff which the sign on the back referred to as "Equestrian Bedding". We think they mean straw.

Once more for the ducks

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I always know exactly what to do when you have a crashing deadline looming. You go on holiday for a couple of days. So we have. We've rumbled down to Bristol to meet up with the inlaws. And, as is our wont, we've gone to look at some ducks.

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But first some nice flowers

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..swan of those days

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Slimbridge Mission Control

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If the birds learn to read we are all in trouble

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There's a kingfisher in the middle of this. Yes, really.

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Lovely plumage

Then it was back to the ranch. I did get around to writing a few pages though...

In search of robot vacuums

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The .NET Micro Framework book is coming along OK. And I've managed, by means of some clever wangling, to get myself permission to buy a robot vacuum cleaner as part of the job.

The reasoning is that we need something to control with our Micro Framework device, and the Roomba vacuums from Irobot look fun. And you can control them via a serial port. So I've been digging up references and making plans. Should be fun.

PS3 Download Content Works

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So it was up with the lark (in a manner of speaking) and onto the PS3 to see if the games had arrived.  And they had. And they all work well.

Tekken is Tekken, looking much better now than it did in San Francisco. For the price it is very good value. It is obviously not a next-gen game, there are some graphical issues which mark it as a kind of PS2.5 release, but for the price it is darned fine value and should satisfy my need for a fighting game until something less demanding than Virtua Fighter comes along.

Flow is weird. You guide a strange creature around by tipping the gamepad in the desired direction. You eat food, you get bigger and other things try to eat you. Quite mesmeric for a while, but with an attention span like mine I'm not sure it will get a lot of play. Then again, for less than the price of a packet of cigarettes it is OK.

Lemmings is a blast of old school fun. I played this one a lot on the Amiga, and was worried that the absence of the mouse would make it tricky. However, the game has been slightly altered for gamepad navigation and I must admit it works well. And they still make that nice sound when they die.

Home Shopping with Sony

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After the excitement of the last couple of days it is back to real life with a trip up town. One of my favourite shops (sort of) used to be Dixons, which was one of the few remaining purveyors of gadgety type stuff in the teeming metropolis with is Hull city centre. However, that has now changed to "Currys Digital", which seems to have resulted in a huge influx of white goods. I'm not impressed. If I want to look at washing machines I'll go into our kitchen. And the gadget potential of a fridge freezer is somewhat limited in my opinion. The result of this was that I spent nothing. Number one son actually spent more than me. This might be a record.

Fortunately, those awfully nice Sony people have found a way of relieving me of funds even when I'm sitting in front of the telly. Using my shiny (but irritatingly dust attractive) PS3 I can go to the Sony Store and purchase games and stuff. So, for fifteen quid I got Flow, Tekken and Lemmings. They are all set to download overnight, I'll let you know what they are like tomorrow.

Imagine Cup UK Final

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So, after getting up bright and early we headed onto the coach for the trip to Reading and our moment of truth...

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"Team Pizza" with their bag. Seems about the right size.....

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Ready for the off

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Photo Op

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The Seedlings shaping up
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Is this a secret weapon?

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Team Roundtrack

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The "Pizza Eaters" doing some product placement

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Team "404 File not Found" and their poster

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Kevin from Microsoft gets things going

It was great to see James and Tom again. They were in last year's team and I went with them to Delhi for the world final. They now work for Content Master and had been given leave to come and tell us about the experience.

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James in full flow

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Tom watching....

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..is this what Tom is thinking?

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Nibbles

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The food was good, and they just kept delivering it.

Halfway through the day the top three teams were selected to give their presentations. Sadly my team, "The Irresponsible Pizza Eaters", were not in the top three, but kudos to them for quality and commitment. You rocked.

Team "404 File not found" were selected for special commendation and "The Seedlings", another Hull team, were one of the three finalists. So, at this stage in the competition we had one commended and one in the top three. Not bad.

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The Seedlings, preparing for the off

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The pitch.

After the presentations and considerable deliberation the judges revealed the winner. None of this drum rolls and long pauses rubbish. Just a simple slide:

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Hull Wins!

The Seedlings had prevailed. Huge congratulations to James Alexander, Michelle Goddard, Matthew Steel and Matthew Steeples. And also to their mentor from Black Marble, Rob Hogg. They all get to go to Seoul later this year to take on the world.

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Flying the flag

That makes 3 out of the 5 Microsoft Imagine Cup UK Software Design Challenge competitions have been won by teams from Hull. Go us!

There are some more pictures on my Flickr site.