Heading Home from Singapore

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Bangkok Airport

Bangkok airport, although it could really be any one of them.

Of the last five days I’ve spent three of them travelling. Today it was time to go home, which meant another day or so sitting in a metal tube. Kudos to KLM for moving me to a seat which I could actually fit into for the 12 hour flight from Bangkok…

On the way out I thought I’d play a game by posting pictures of departure lounges and getting folks to spot where in the world I was. Of course some of the sharper people out there just went straight for the GPS data that my phone puts in each image and told me, to the nearest foot or so, where I was when the picture was taken. Most impressive, if a bit scary….

Anyhoo, all the flights and connections were on time and worked, and I even got my luggage home too.

Back at work tomorrow.

Singapore Imagine Cup Finals

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winners

These are the winners, congratulations to the four team members from NYP-School of IT who are about to get covered in celebration bunting…

I was lucky enough to be invited to help judge the 2012 Singapore Imagine Cup Final presentations today. Yesterday a series of sessions had taken the teams down from 16 to 4 and today we had to pick the winner from these. For the teams in the room it must have been especially nerve wracking because the finalists were announced just before they had to present and had a scant 10 minutes to prepare for their session. Not that it showed.

Every team delivered a very professional result which brought home to me just how much the standard has improved in the competition. All the presentations were what I would call “world standard”, in that they were the equal of ones I have seen at the World Final level.

However, there was a standout winner and so congratulations to Eustace Zheng Xiangwen, Nur Nadiah Binte Zailani, Koh Kai Wei and Mong Xunheng (hope I got your names right) who made up Team AlphaWaves. Their system, the Dementia Assistance and Recall Engine (DARE) provides support to sufferers of one of the nastiest things that can happen to a person. I wish them the best of luck in the world finals in Australia later this year.

If you want to find out more about the competition and get some tips about preparation for the next rounds I’ll be hosting a Live Meeting on Wednesday 18th of April at 16:30 GMT.  You can sign up here for the meeting.

After the finals I had a quick look around Singapore and then we headed off for a really posh meal. Thanks for inviting me folks, it has been great. My only regret is that I’m in town for such a short time.

I’ve not bought many souvenirs, but that’s because I’m definitely coming back some day…

Campfire Fun and Games

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Campfire Audience

A great audience to die in front of…

Did my keynote session today at Campfire. It was great fun, once I’d got over my nerves and lack of sleep.Pretty much everything worked as it should, apart from my “bomb proof” Kinect driver wrappers blowing up. Oh well. I said I’d put some resources up here for you to take a look at:

Slides and (mostly working) code from the presentations today - here
C# Yellow Book, Windows Phone Blue book and other free stuff - here
.NET Micro Framework embedded development - here
Gadgeteer embedded development -  here
Three Thing Game student madness – here
Windows Phone development - here
Dreamspark, free software for students - here
Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio – here
Kinect For Windows SDK – here

I think that is everything, if you remember something I forgot, let me know and I’ll add it. Once the presentations were over I went for a wander round the city. After some fun and games on the transit I managed to get all the way down to the bay. I took loads of pictures which I’ll play with properly when I get home. In the meantime here are just a couple.

harbour1

Lovely

boat Crop

A boat on a building? And why not.

More tomorrow, I’m off to bed now…

Flying to Singapore–Day 2

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DSCF7464

A rather expensive sticker...

This was a bit nerve wracking. I was transferring planes in Jokarta (another airport that looks very like all the airports I’ve been to on this journey) and the chap at the desk asked if I’d paid my “airport transfer fee”. ‘No’ I said nervously, ‘How much is it?’. Turns out that the sticker above costs 150,000 rupees. This was seriously scary. I had visions of having to sell the house just so I could get onto a flight to Singapore. ‘How much is that in US dollars?’ I asked eventually. Turns out that it is 20, which I can just about raise without selling anything major. After that things went swimmingly. and I got to my room in the Fairmont Hotel in time to go straight to bed. Session starts at 10:30 tomorrow morning. Can’t wait.