Zoo Keeper - Match those Hippos

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The Nintendo DS is a great toy. It actually takes gaming into a new place. Some of the games are just plain silly but they are not like much else and they are pretty compulsive. Like Zoo Keeper, now available for less than you think and great fun. The premise is very simple, swap animals around in a zoo grid to get lines of more than three and so trap them and put them back in their cages. (I'm not sure if this would work in real life, but the lion has a completely square head and so I don't think we are talking about super realism here).

Anyhoo, the game is great. Number on daughter has now taken ownership of my DS and has been matching hippos for the last hour. She says she blames me for her "touch screen cramp".

Number one son came back from Durham today to rehearse his Imagine Cup presentation for the final next week. Looking good.

Nissen Dorma and Buy a Table

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Took the old Nissan out today. First time in a while. I'd forgotten just how much power there is in the old warhorse. Took off like a rocket at the line and then wrapped it around the first lamp post on the corner. Not good. Fortunately I was playing Gran Turismo 4 on the Playstation and not messing around in real metal, plastic and rubber. I won a few races and took part in some enormous car wrecks. Lovely. Then I popped it back into the garage for a week or so.

One of my minor ambitions is to take a proper fast car out somewhere (rallying would be best I reckon) and just see how much of my racing experience maps accross in to the real world.

Then we went out to buy a fan (v. hot today) and came back with a table and four chairs. I don't think we have ever bought a table intentionally. It was, of course, the last one in the shop and suitably reduced in price.

One Man's Poison..

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Some time ago Max asked me for my honest opinion about Tablet PCs (this implies that I have a dishonest opinion as well - but we'll let that pass). Anyhoo, I gave him the good word, which is that slate Tablet PCs are great to rest a paper notepad on but pretty much useless in real life unless you are doctor doing ward rounds or a ticket officer on a train. Max is neither of these as far as I am aware.

"What you really want", I said with the voice of one imparting great wisdom, "is a convertable Tablet PC where you can twiddle the screen round to get the tablety writing goodness but also make it into a proper notebook so you can actually use it to get things done. And the best of these..." I continued, building nicely to a climax "... is the Toshiba Portege M200". Max listened, took notes and then went out and bought one.

This morning the phone went. It was Max. He was not happy. To say he was displeased with his M200 would be an understatement of gargantuan proportions for which no suitable analogy has presented itself yet. Apparently nothing works properly with the device. Nothing. Devices come and go like ships in the night. Programs crash for no reason. The docking station (a hugely impressive edifice of plastic, metal and thick cable) does not dock properly. If his office was on a higher level I really think he would have thrown it out of the window. And it was all my fault.

Hmmm. The funny thing is that I've been saving my reach out pennies to get myself just such a device. So I bought it off him. In the face of tales of woe, a screen backdrop of a lemon on the device and streams of invective about it which would make a stoker blush. I've got all the bits. Thing is fully loaded and just like new. Which it very nearly is.

There is nothing like getting a new computer to set you off on a stream of displacement activity of the highest order - although I did write some exam questions whilst I re-imaged the machine from the back up DVD. It is OK so far, and Max is very happy 'cos he can now go out and buy something made by Sony.

I wonder if he will ever ask my advice again.

Time for Toys

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I buy toys. Not season tickets for football teams which probably won't win. Not cigarettes that will probably kill me. Not alcohol which may well do the same. But toys. Got a new one today.

For some time I've been considering getting an external disk drive for my computer. I have no particular need for this I supppose, but I do have this ability to convince myself that I do. And I can kind of make a business case to myself because I do sometimes need to move files around.

So off down to PC World and look at what they had. The had a bunch of cute little disks that nearly hit the spot, and one rather interesting gadget from BNI. The Personal Media Drive is externally just like any other external disk drive. You plug it into your computer and chuck files at it.

But it has a couple of little extras. A socket to plug the telly into and a receiver for the remote control that comes with it. You see this little box of magic can hold videos, pictures and music (after all they are just files of data) but it can also play them. I copied a few files onto the disk and pretty soon we were watching Scrubs. It works wonderfully. If you are looking for a 40GB external drive you would be mildly bonkers not to get one of these. And PC World had it 30 quid off. Talk about fate.

Too Much Power

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I've replaced the batteries in my car key. The car alarm remote is now so powerful that when I used it on the way home tonight five cars in the carpark unlocked instantly. And two of them were not even the same make as mine. And one did not have remote locking.

The beam that comes out of the key is now so strong that I've managed to give my left hand a rather attractive tan simply by using pointing the remote at it for five seconds. And if it goes off in my trouser pocket the effect has to be seen to be believed.

Actually, none of this is true, it is simply written to make me feel better about spending eight pounds for a couple of batteries....

Lack of Displacement

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I've got to write a bunch of exam questions and resit courswork specifications to write. So of course I've knuckled down tidying my windows desktop, emptying my recycler bin and moving bits of paper around in my desk. I'm running out of displacement activities at the moment or, and this is more worrying, most of the displacement activities that I've found - for example tidying my office - look like harder work than actually doing the job in hand. Ah well, at least there's always writing blog entries.....

The World Has Gone Mad (again)

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The world has gone mad. Even madder than last time I noticed it had gone mad. I was watching the telly today when an advert came on which started with the line:

"Gosh Jennifer, that cat food looks like home made...."

This implies a number of very scary things:

  1. There are people out there who make their own cat food.
  2. There are people out there who can tell the difference between home made and shop bought cat food.
  3. There are people out there who stand around in kitchens discussing cat food.

This makes "professional chewing gum" and "the seven signs of aging" look like the work of marketing genius.

Sometimes I fear for the future.

Key Fear

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A moment of real terror today in the car park. Key remote failed to make the car doors open. With my car this is a problem. You might be able to use the metal key bit to open the doors but, unless you use the remote "blipper" the engine won't start. Actually that is not true, the engine starts and then stops a few seconds afterwards. Some kind of French torture I reckon. Anyhoo, with out the magic key you are magically stuffed. And it seemed I was without the magic key.

A tip: If you are not sure if an IR device is working, be it TV remote control or dodgy keyfob for old car, use the camera on your mobile phone. These can see IR signals. So I had a quick look and all seemed well.

After a little jiggling it all started to work again. Thank goodness. I think that it is time to buy some new batteries....

Sad Cars and Lumpy Petrol

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Last week we went down to a car showroom "just to sit in a new car". The current car is now of the opinion that we don't care about it any more (actually we do, the new versions of my car are almost - but not quite - as nice as the one I have) and so today the car engine went all lumpy on the way to work. Normally in my car you try to go faster and nothing much happens. Today if you tried to go faster it slowed down.

I hope it was due to dampness, and not my unfaithfulness with an '05 reg.

Science club

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Science club
Originally uploaded by RobMiles.

This is a picture I took during my Science Club presentation "Blogs and Spaces" and uploaded to the blog straight from the phone.

Thanks for being a good audience folks. I said during the presentation I'd put some links on my blog to the more interesting sites that I used. So here they are:

If you want to create a blog then you should go to: http://www.blogger.com/start
Blogger is a good blogging service, but it doesn't let you add pictures or other content to your blog.

If you want to upload, store and display pictures you should create an account at: http://www.flickr.com/. The free version has a limit on how many pictures you can upload each month, but it does let you upload from your mobile phone - if the phone supports MMS to email. You can also link your flickr account to your blogger blog, so that you can send pictures from flickr into your blog via email.

If you want to work with a bunch of friends on something, and share pictures and messages, then take a look at: http://spaces.msn.com/ This lets you upload pictures (also from your phone). You can customise your space and decide who you will allow to see it.

The spaces also work well with MSN Messenger, but you need to get the latest version 7 for best effect. You can get that at: http://www.imagine-msn.com/messenger/default2.aspx?locale=en-gb&tduid=3ce2af3515809d86a621ae2be12cb2db If you use messenger, you should get this anyway.

If you want to use tags to find your posts and look for other ones you then take a look at: http://www.technorati.com/

I hope all these pages are useful. And remember, have fun.

The Server with Class

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Gave my Class Server talk at Microsoft Reading today. Class server is a teaching and assessment environment from Microsoft which is really rather neat. I've been using it for a year or so and had some fun with it. And the students like it too.

I was presenting with Romola. She gave a serious and well paced introduction to the subject and then handed over to me. Cue a shed load of levity, bad jokes and fast paced software demonstrations from yours truly who then passed the audience, all breathless and disheveled, back to her to wrap up.

I think we make a good team.

By all accounts the audience seemed to agree, which is nice.