Frozen Monday

I’m bored with winter. Particularly if I’m still scraping ice off the car each morning.

Low Quality Pictures Look Better

I spent all this money on posh cameras, and have been obsessing about things like dust on my sensor. Then I find myself using a low quality camera in my phone and an application from Hipstamatic to make it look even worse. And the result looks great. Very strange.

Final Summit Friday

Today was the last day of the Summit. It has gone by real quick. Amongst the final presentations was one by Satya Nadella who heads up the new Microsoft search team.

These are the people bringing you Bing. Personally I quite like Bing. I like the user interface, the pictures and the way it groups results. I don’t like the way that it doesn’t always find what I want though, which means moving over to Google for the more technical searches. Hopefully Bing will catch up in due course.

It was interesting to hear how Microsoft are trying to improve the “search experience” and are working on why we search, in a bid to improve the usefulness of the activity. The way I see it, they are changing Bing from “search” to a “research” engine. When you search for a place it will try to pull down travel and hotel details, along with pictures and links to official sites. Quite neat. This all needs some frightfully clever algorithms to recognise content, along with a fair amount of editorial input as well I would think. However, it is nice to see Microsoft not just trying to equal the competition, but to go beyond this and move the field on.

In the afternoon we had a final wander around Bellevue and then headed to a nearby place for tea.

..can you guess where?

After tea I’d booked seats to see Avatar again, at the local Imax cinema in 3D. Awesome.

MVP Summit Party

MVP Pool

Went out to the MVP party tonight at the Garage in Seattle. Free food and drink, along with pool and bowling. Worked for me.

..oh and cocktails.

Smashing Seattle Sunset

We are getting some lovely sunsets at the moment. I took this picture from our hotel window (lots of frantic setting up of tripod before the light faded). If it wasn’t for the crane this would be a perfect shot.

Hull Reunion

I met up with Phil, Andrew, Andy and James today for lunch. They are graduates from Hull (and three of them are also old hands at the Imagine Cup). They all now work for Microsoft on various development teams around the company. It was nice to see them, even though they made fun of my haircut. Or lack of it…

MVP Summit Sessions Again

I met another MVP in the lift today on the way to the sessions on the Microsoft campus. He asked me how I was getting on. “Fine” I said. “Yesterday they opened the top of my head and poured a whole bunch of stuff into it”. “Oh”, he replied. “With us they opened our heads and took a whole bunch out”.  Perhaps that will happen to me.today  Not sure what they will benefit from in my case though…

The weather is lovely again. Although we had some frost last night, the morning looks great.

Redmond Shuttle.

MVP Summit Product Sessions

I set off on the bus at 7:00 am this morning. I’m trying to keep to “sort of UK time” by getting up at stupidly early hours. Because we are in Bellevue the bus journey is very short, which is nice.

As usual they had MVP banners on the Microsoft campus, which was nice.

Went to the company store as well, and bought some tasteful clothing.

We really are having fantastic weather this week.

MVP Summit and Fish Throwing

This evening the MVP summit started with the opening keynote. Before the session started they were showing things about MVPs of note. And for some reason my name came up on the big screen.

As you all know I am very vain, and so I pulled out my camera and grabbed a picture. If you look very carefully at the middle screen you can see my name…

The session ended with some fish throwing. As well it should. Then we went on for some free food, including hand thrown salmon, and discussion with fellow MVPs.

The agenda looks very interesting.

Genuine Bonafide Monorail

Caught the monorail to the Space Needle today. The weather has been very kind to us. Then of course we went to the top.

Nice view.

Then we had some sweeties.

Bellevue Mist

The long range weather forecast for this week was rain. Thank heavens it was long range. And wrong. Today started really misty, in a fantastically photogenic way.

It must be like being up in the clouds in those buildings at the top.

We found this place that did great pancakes, and nearly failed to eat all of them. They had a great set of posters advertising upcoming events in Bellevue.

Hmmm. I’ve missed the bicycle conference.

Then we grabbed a car and went for a drive.

View over the lake

Highway and sky

Mountain, truck and sky

We went out to the mall and I bought another robot. A friend for Jason.

The summit proper starts tomorrow. I’m hoping to find out a bit more about Windows Phone 7 which was announced today. It looks really good. It is definitely going on the “want one” list.

Seattle Sunday

Imposing buildings

Went shopping today. I got number one wife a Lego Heart for Valentines day, and she got me this…

Managed to stay up long enough to take this picture from the hotel window. You can see the lights of Seattle on the horizon.

York Laptop Shopping

Went to York to do some shopping today. The weather was great for photographs. I took a quick bunch of the Minster and then stitched them together. The above isn’t perfect, there are some rather strange shadows here and there, but I’m still quite pleased with the result.

And we bought a laptop. We managed to get quite a powerful beast for dad with 4G of RAM, 500G hard disk and Windows 7 64 bit edition. All for less than 400 pounds. Which got me to thinking. This is the entry level price for the Apple iPad when it comes out in 60 days and 60 nights or so. Why would you want to buy something small and shiny when you could get something much more useful for less money?

I remember coming up with a similar argument against the iPhone when that came out. For the same money, I reasoned, you you could get a really nice little 3G SkypePhone, and an eePC.  (You still can).  Much more sensible. And yet the iPhone was a roaring success and I’m expecting the iPad to do just as well. People are going to use it and fall in love with it. A whole section of users (those who don’t really aspire to an all powerful computer) is going to appear and, having had what the iPhone offers, buy the same on a bigger platform.  And number one wife quite fancies one too. Case closed.

Hull Graduation Congregation

I did the warmup for today’s graduation day for students from our faculty. Thanks for being a great Congregation. It was a really good occasion and we had a lovely speech from our honorary graduate. I’m sorry that some of the pictures I took from the stage came out a bit more blurred than I would have liked, but you should be able to recognise yourself. There are much larger versions in Flickr. Click on the images to find your way to the pictures on there.

…to the right..

Left of stage

Right of stage.

Using Digital Photo Frames as Lamps

I was wondering the other day why nobody had thought of using digital photo frames as lights for macro photography. So I thought I’d find out for myself. I’ve got a couple of little frames (the ones that you can now pick up less than 20 quid in some places). So I made some images of single colours using Photoshop Elements and spent some time balancing the frames precariously over the two model cars I wanted to  photograph.

You can see how I arranged things here. I used one frame as the “sky” and the other to light the background.  You can just see the front of the cars peeking out from underneath the black frame at the front. I just used white paper as the background.

Once I had the frames lined up I put the camera on the tripod and fired it up. I was using a macro lens to focus onto my tiny cars and it was hard to keep everything sharp. I ended up using a really small aperture (F16 or so) to get as much depth of field as possible. At that aperture, with the camera set to 200 ASA, I was exposing for a couple of seconds or so.

I’m quite pleased with the results. The great thing about working like this is that changing the colour of the light is very easy, you just advance the frame to the next coloured image. On the picture frame I had, I could do this using the remote control for the frame, so I didn’t have to touch anything.

So,  as a light source the frames do work. The light you get is not that bright, but it is very even, which is nice. This is probably as effective as using a small light tent,  and it works best if you can get the frames really close to the items being photographed. I’m certainly going to try some more later.

Snow in Hull

We don’t get much snow in Hull, it is certainly very rare that it sticks around this long, and looks as good as this after three days or so.

Christmas Meal Out

It was our staff Christmas “do” today. We had a really nice (and I mean really nice) meal at The Boar’s Nest in Hull. This being a gathering of Computer Scientists the conversation was of course highly cerebral, with the principle focus of discussions being on the role of the Software Engineer in modern society and how best to prepare ourselves for further changes that Information Technology will bring in the future.

Along with who had the biggest plate.

I was very proud of the way that I braved the slippery streets of Hull and walked both to and from the restaurant.

This year you have been watching…..

Eye-Fi Review

Every now and then you come across something that must be powered by magic (or perhaps pixies), since there is obviously no other way you could make it work. Such a thing is the Eye-Fi SD memory card that also contains a WiFi adapter and a microcontroller. What it does is rather nice; it lets you transfer your pictures directly from your memory card into your computer without the tedious business of either plugging the camera into the computer or removing the card and reading it.

The Eye-Fi card looks like an ordinary 4G SD memory card and to the camera that is just what it is. However, when new photographs are taken and stored the card will wake up and try to send them over WiFi to a computer running the receiving software. I found that it just worked. There is an installation phase you have to go through where you plug the card (via a reader that is included) into your computer and tell it the name of your network and any security keys but once you have done that the pictures just appear on you computer as though by magic. Or pixies.

I don’t think the WiFi range is quite as good as a “proper” adapter, but it worked fine around our house. You also have to be careful not to turn the camera off (or let the camera turn itself off) before the card has finished sending pictures, but apart from that it works a treat. You can set up multiple WiFi networks and you can also configure it to only transfer pictures that you have marked as protected, so that you can use the camera to select which pictures get sent. It worked fine in both cameras I tried. It will definitely have an effect on battery life, but I didn’t notice anything untoward when I was playing with it.

I got the cheapest version, at 49 pounds, which just lets me transfer pictures to a waiting computer. More advanced (and expensive) versions of the card have a feature which lets you upload your snaps directly to Flickr, Facebook, Picassa or other photo sharing sites. This should be possible with the cheaper one, if you pay a ten dollars a year subscription, but at the moment this only works if you are US or Canada based.  There is also an option to have your pictures Geotagged as you upload them. This uses the location of the WiFi access point to transfer them. For a moment I thought they had managed to shoehorn a GPS system into the card, now that would have been very impressive...

Of course the device isn’t really magic. You can even take a look inside if you want to see how it does its stuff. However, it is very useful. Proper, professional, cameras can be fitted with WiFi adapters, but these cost an awful lot of money. I’m very tempted to splash out on the professional version of the card which also lets you transfer raw files as well as jpegs from your camera, which would be very nice. Maybe next year. As far as the card itself is concerned, I strongly recommend it.

Xmas Bash

Another Xmas Bash today. Pizza, pop, sweeties, Lego Rock Band, Buzz Quiz, Band Hero and Wii stuff.

You set up all these attractions and all people want to do is the word search…

Mind you, there were some good prizes…

…some very intensive Team Fortress 2 sessions..

.. with some Lego Rock Band..

..and sweeties.

Thanks to everyone who came. It was a real blast. There are some more pictures on Flick, click on any image to find your way to my account. If you have any pictures of your own tag them HullXmasBash2009.

London Trip

Went to London today and one of my favourite places ever, the Science Museum.

Always a bit scary when you find stuff you used to use in a museum.

These too (scarily enough)

But not one of these….

Where it all started, with Mr Babbage..

Indeed.