Old Clothes

The funny thing is (ho ho) that we had planned to take today and tomorrow as holiday. We were going to drive out somewhere nice and eat sandwiches whilst sitting on a piece of cloth on the ground. But mother nature had other plans.

It is pretty much impossible to drive out of Hull at the moment. And very hard to get back again. So we stayed at home and did some tidying up. I went through my wardrobe in search of space to hang all these free shirts I keep picking up at conferences. I'm always very surprised by the lack of taste that I've shown in the past with respect to clothes. Things that seemed perfectly sensible at the time of purchase are now, with the benefit of my 20x20 fashion hindsight, quite beyond the pale. Still, at least the new stuff looks good on me........

Rain

It rained today. That is pretty much all it did. Rained. We heard the rain over our meetings, and the view out of the window into the car park was not encouraging. After lunch, meetings over, I decided to go home early. This turned out to be a good call. On the way to the car park the water was a good six inches deep, easily covering my shoes and forcing me to drive home with bare feet. And what a drive. Getting of the campus was not good, with the road out of the university looking more like a river. Many of the streets were impassible, but fortunately myself and number one wife got back home safely.

This is the worst I've ever seen. Many people in Hull have been flooded out. Buildings on the university campus have basements full of water. The folks across the road had what looked like a stream running down the side of their house. I've not taken any pictures, but you can see loads here.

Visit St. Custard's

These pages don't do the Nigel Molesworth books proper justice. But they are worth a look.

The Value of a Degree

Earlier this week there was a big feature on the UK MSN homepage about the value of a university degree. The central thrust of the feature was that a degree does not prepare you for the real world and leaves you only with an enormous debt and a huge hangover.

The article contained a link to a discussion where folks told tales of woe and how their hard earned qualification has not landed them the job of their dreams.

The way I see it (if you really want to know) is that if you decide you want some thing (such as the "job of your dreams") then you should plan a campaign which will get you it. A degree can be a useful part of such a campaign. But it is not the only one. You should find every other possible way to get there. Try to land some work experience in the area. Do things that broaden you out and make you more "interesting" to people working in the field.

If you want to be a games programmer, by all means do a degree in it, but also start writing little games and putting them on your games programming blog. Start contributing to forums about the field, asking and answering sensible questions. Get a job in the business, even if it is just working in a games shop. It all helps make you into a more enticing prospect.

Getting a degree and then expecting to be snapped up because of your evident brilliance will not work. In fact I don't think it ever did. When I did mine, all those years ago, when history was current affairs etc etc I remember being told that a degree is not a job ticket, but merely a licence to hunt....

Motorola Game Development Challenge

If you have nothing better to do this summer (and who doesn't) you might fancy having a go at the MotoDev game development challenge. You can write your game in Java, or even user C# and managed code to enter in the Windows category. Closing date is in the middle of August.

If you want some ideas about how to get started, you can always have a look at my articles on Smartphone programming with Cheese on MSDN.

Johnny Dollar

I've always loved radio drama. It is amazing the atmosphere they can conjure up. And you can draw your own scenery in your head. If you want something well cool to listen to you should seek out and download some Johnny Dollar. Johnny the "freelance insurance investigator with the action packed expense account" had a series of radio adventures in the forties, fifties and sixties. Cracking stuff.

Vendgance

Who would have thought it, eh?

Fancied a bar of chocolate this afternoon. But it was not to be.

Back in One Piece

Got back from Reading today and parked up the mini-bus, despite the fact that I had to do some tricky reversing and the driving mirror was in the glove compartment.

Thanks to Microsoft for setting it all up, a good time was had by all.

Slide 7 Rocks

Today is Slide 7 day. Slide (Students Learn Innovative Developer Expertise - or something - we picked the name because the domain name was available) is run by Microsoft the Academic team at Microsoft UK in Reading. They put on sessions about professional development and get a bunch of students to turn up. This year it was all about connected applications.

Our posse on the way into the Mother Ship....

I took a minibus full of folks from Hull to join the hundred or so others that had made their way from all over the country for the show.

And the show was good. There was a slight dip in quality after lunch, when I did my bit on Web Services, but the rest of the material was top notch. There were sessions on Web 2.0 (where we discussed the question of what Web 2.0 actually is), ASP, Windows Live and Orcas. And then a great talk at the end on Sliverlight.

People, you should find out more about Silverlight. You should also sign up for Popfly since this is mucho funo. I've been playing a bit with my Popfly account and it makes it dangerously easy to develop impressive applications.

My Audience (most of the students were next door, but we manage to make more noise than them...)

Mingling at the BBQ

At the end we had a BBQ and a great time was had by all. There will probably be a Slide 8, you should get your name down for it if there is...

Ed Dunhill, the Microsoft bod who made it all happen (Kudos Ed) is going to post all the slides and other material on his blog.

Then, after a five hour rumble up the motorway it was home in time for bed.

Rob is on the road again. Slide 7 beckons...

Rob is on the road again. Slide 7 beckons...
Originally uploaded by RobMiles.

Forgotten Joke

Just remembered a joke that I meant to use in the session on Thursday:

"What's ET short for?"
"Because he only has little legs"

Profound Question

This has been bothering me. No, really. If the sun shines on a lump of red hot metal does it make the metal warmer?

Amsterdam Gets XNA

Had great fun today doing a session about XNA for DevDays. The audience were wonderful, and I took some happy snaps:

on the right...

...in the middle...

...and on the left

Thanks for paying attention people, and I hope you use XNA to get to some interesting places.

Before my talk we had a session from Dave Mitchell of Microsoft. He was able to tell us that the XNA Creators Club memberships are going to be part of Microsoft Academic Alliance. This is the best news. Now we can put a bunch of machines in our labs for people to write for and it won't cost us extra on top of our AA subscription. That news alone was worth going to Amsterdam for. If you are a member of a university faculty you owe it to yourself (and your students) to follow this up and get your hands on one of the best bargains in education at the moment).

Dave at the start of his presentation

Earlier today I went to a presentation by Scott Guthrie about Silverlight. This is a fantastic technology that lets you make very impressive user experience. It lets you put .NET powered behaviour into web pages and also gives you the Windows Presentation Foundation to drive your user interfaces. Excellent.

Scot talking about multiple language support in Sliverlight.

I've had a really good time in Amsterdam. I went out for a meal last night and took even more pictures:

Standard Canal picture

Artistic cake

There are some more on my Flickr site.

DevDays 2007

This morning found me boarding a plane for Amsterdam. I'm giving a session on XNA development tomorrow. Rather cleverly I didn't check in any luggage, so no waiting at conveyor belts for me. Rather less cleverly I'd also put my highly explosive shampoo and deodorant in my carry on bag. I managed to avoid the cavity search, but now I'm going to have to learn the Dutch for "Lynx Effect". Not that I seem to need it......

These two lovelies were wandering round the show accompanied by a bloke with a camera and printer strapped to him who was taking photos and printing them out for free. Very nice. Although the reason I look so pleased is that I'm clutching a copy of the Microsoft Mobile Developers Handbook. I wrote Chapter 13, which is about mobile graphics. I was stood in the bookshop reading my own printed words when the girls turned up. I resisted the temptation to hold up the pages and shout "Look, I wrote this!", since I figured they might not be that impressed.  But I settled for a picture.

DevDays is neat. It is based in Amsterdam at the conference centre there. I'll grab some pictures from inside the conference tomorrow. For today, here are some external shots.

Outside the Conference Centre

Authentic Dutch bike rider

On the way to the Netherlands

On the way to the Netherlands
Originally uploaded by RobMiles.

Adobe Steal another Half Hour

There goes another chunk of my life. Because the Adobe updater kicked in during a print this means that it broke the print operation and locked the file in the spool queue of the printer, which meant that I had to uninstall the printer, reboot and then reinstall it again.

Now, who do I send that bill to?

Adobe Steal another Half an Hour of My Life

As I get older, I realise that time is becoming more precious to me. The number of hours left to me is not so huge that I can just squander them on wasted effort. Or have them taken from me.

Adobe Reader has just stolen half an hour of my time. All I wanted to do was read a document and then print it. Without being asked it went on line, found some updates, downloaded 30 MBytes of stuff, spent fifteen minutes installing this, rebooted my machine and then spent another five minutes rattling the disk drive.

Net loss to me, half an hour of my time.

Now, the Adobe reader is a program that lets me read documents. That's all. It does not control a heart-lung machine, fly a plane or operate a nuclear reactor. What can be so wrong with it that it requires 30 MBytes (more space than the original Windows 95 installer) to sort out? I know that the program is free, and so I probably can't complain. But this kind of behaviour means that I would be unlikely to pay for it anyway.

And now I've wasted another ten minutes moaning about the 30 minutes I lost. Bah.

Babies and Petrol

Why not use babies to sell petrol. Indeed.

Frame Fame

I think I'm turning into some kind of media person. Or something. If you get hold of a copy of this month's Windows Vista magazine you will find a picture of me and my photo frame. The frame, an Imate Momento, is actually proving very useful. It uses WIFI to link to the shared photographs and displays them without any faffing about with memory cards and the like.

Wedding Daze

Confetti

Went to a wedding today. We went to the service and then the reception and then came home. Everything was great, even the weather. Number one wife was going out to the evening party, whilst I stayed at home and nursed the jetlag. Before she went out again I thought I'd print off a few of the photos I'd taken. Bad plan. The process went like this.

1. Upload pictures to computer. Select picture and press print.
2. HP printer drops out the print onto 6x4 as requested, but the ink cartridge has run out.
3. Insert new ink cartridge.
4. Printer refuses to do cartridge alignment.
5. Take out all paper. Reset printer. Put paper back in. Reset printer again. Printer does alignment.
6. Restart print.
7. Printer prints out picture on A4 paper, not 6x4.
8. Move lever on printer to get the right size. Print again.
9. One good print. Hurrah. Print two more. Works again. Hurrah.
10. Move on to next picture. Select print, ask for three copies. Go for cup of tea.
11. Come back and find that all three copies have groom's head cut off.
12. Examine the pictures carefully and note that all photographs are being cropped.
13. Spend ten minutes trying to figure out how to get the HP driver to print the actual size that I want.
14. Discover that this is impossible.
15. Select another picture with groom's head closer to the middle. Ask for three copies. Go watch some Dr Who.
16. Come back and find that the 6x4 paper has run out, so the printer has printed the three copies on A4.
17. Load some more 6x4 paper in and ask for three more copies.
18. One print comes out, with the picture diagonally across it as it has not loaded properly.  Printer then stops and flashes a red light.
19. Give single print to number one wife, and walk away from the computer/printer before I do it some serious damage.