Ride a Shiny Bus to a Competition Lifestyle

At 11:30 we were on the shiny bus and off to Reading to the Microsoft Imagine Cup Software Design Challenge Final(tm). Just me, Dave, Iain and most of the four winning teams. A very smooth ride down, enlivened by a really naff, but hugely enjoyable, film called "The Longest Yard". This is a remake of "The Mean Machine", a film about an American Football team made up of jailbirds who sign up so that they can beat up the guards but end up learning important life lessons and stuff like that. A hoot.

When we get to our posh hotel we just have time to down a couple of free drinks before being ushered into the dining room to eat a delicious meal (which was curry as the final winner of the UK competition gets to go to India to take on the world - I of course was the last person to spot the significance of this). Then a quiz which, much to our surprise, our table manged to win. After that it was one more free drink and then off to bed.

At least, that was the plan. In fact I spent another hour going through team presentations and then bed. But great fun.

Haberdasher to the stars

I'm still working on getting all the Imagine Cup teams sorted. The latest thing is sorting shirts and stuff so that everybody in the team looks spiffy. So from developing posters and desigining presentations I've now switched to choosing shirts.

Good job I'm multi faceted.

Sorry Software

There are some things which are guaranteed to drive me into a blinding rage. No really. And one of them is software which says it is sorry. I'm trying to get some tunes out of Napster and into my music player. Everything is right. Except that it won't work. It says "We are sorry, but we could not do this...". It then goes into an explanation which makes no sense and leads to no useful conclusion. I'm used to that bit.

But the way that software now feels the need to say how sorry it is when it fails drives me up the wall. It can't be sorry. It is a machine running a program. OK, a person wrote the program, but they are obviously an idiot (otherwise the program would work). Do I feel better when an idiot (who is probably paid more than me) tells me, via his broken software, that he is sorry. I think not.

Is this supposed to make me feel better? Are there people who do like it when the machine says that for reasons of its own which it is not going to divulge but may well be down to some incompetence somewhere down the line it is sorry that it can't do the required thing. Where are these people? Do they want to buy shares in my oil well, microwave oven that changes lead into gold and perpetual motion machine?

Next thing that will happen is that software will start shifting the blame. "I'm sorry I could not do that, but you did press the keys rather hard just now so I don't feel at all bad about this....".

I think I'll go and have a lie down.

Missing Day

Lost a day today. Very busy but I'm not sure just what happened. Most of it was spent mentoring our Imagine Cup student teams which have made it through to the UK final. Out of the 10 finalists from around the country there are 4 that I'm kind of involved with. Three teams are from Hull and the fourth contains a couple of our students.

This is great for the university, and says something about the quality of the people that we have here, but it has meant that instead of doing proper work I've been looking at posters, commenting on presentations and devising marketing strategies all day.

And loving it.

The Cloggs have gone

Well, after a frenzied round of bidding the cloggs have been sold. As with a lot of ebay sales, it all happened in around the last ten minutes. We are now looking at everything in the house with a view to it's saleability on ebay....

Embarrassed by Musical Socks

I was looking after a question-answer session during our open day today when somebone's mobile phone went off. A silly, reedy, ringtone which sounded like the drinking song.

Turned out to be my socks. I had been given a pair for christmas which play tunes and I'd triggered them when I crossed my legs. It is kind of hard to manage a serious discussion of academic prospects and student finance when your socks are making music.....

I don't remember ordering this...

Parked the car in bright sunshine. Wandered outside at half five after a busy day and found:

I don't remember ordering this.

Movie Mogul?

Whilst going upstairs just now I was seized by the idea of making a movie with the title "Undersea Chins from Space". I wonder if I have been working too hard.

Update: Actually I think it comes from playing "We Love Katamari" too much. Plenty of chins there. Oh yes.

Here Comes the Judge

Got to be a judge today. At Hull we have a Young Scientist of the Year competition and we were selecting the finalists. All of them had to give a stand up presentation and then handle some questions. A pretty scary ask for someone under 16. And they were all great. Made the judgely thing really hard for us, since I found out quite early that we weren't allowed to pick everyone.

In the end we narrowed it down to the three from each category who get to go to the final in a couple of weeks. Sometimes I worry about the future, what with global warming, bird flu, energy crisis, asteroid strikes etc etc. And then I see all these keen people who are really into science and I get a lot happier. I reckon that they'll be able to handle whatever is coming down the tracks.

Happy Day

Well, it was for me...

Sticky Thoughts and Roman Tragedies

Sometimes I get a thought and it sticks in my head and won't go away untill I've written it down in the blog. We were discussing paper sizes and I got to thinking about Caesar and his famous discussion about the dimensions of the posters they wanted to put around the colloseum, and how all that went horribly wrong when Caesar turned to his most trusted friend and said "A2 Brutus?".

Clog Buyers of the World Unite

Went round to see dad today. He is making his first forays into e-commerce, what with a new broadband connection and his first ebay auction lot.

Go on. You know you want them....

Skating on Thin Ice

For some reason we have ended up watching chunks of "Dancing on Ice", an ITV "light entertainment" progamme where "celebs" (shudder) are teamed up with hapless ice dancing professionals who then try to give them 20 years of experience of the craft into a few days, and then go out onto the cruel, hard, cold surface to be thrown about whilst razor sharp skates whizz past inches from their heads.

Like I said, light entertainment. Tonight David Seaman, a goalkeeper with some 25 years experience in professional football, was throwing his second partner up into the air with not entirely successful results.

This worries me. I'm sure that everyone is very professional and safety is taken pretty seriously. But where will it end? We will have celebs doing even more dangerous things with even less training? How about nuclear reactor dismantling? Or "pro-celeb traffic cone placement"? Or base jumping, where Danny from HearSay is given a parachute and a map of London landmarks and sent off with a film crew to persuade the public to vote for him.

Madness I tell you.

..and you pet iguana has been pining for you

Number one daughter is here to see us for the weekend. We picked her up from the station. I had this plan where we'd take her back to a completely different house in a totally different part of town and say things like "It's great to have you back. Your pet iguana has been pining for you."

Unfortunately we didn't get around to this. And we don't know anyone with an iguana who'd let us borrow their house.

But it is nice to see her.

Healthy Thinking and Wise Words

I had the makings of a horrible cold yesterday. I could feel the germs taking residence around various bits of my anatomy and digging in for the long haul.

Then today I feel fine. Very strange. I did have strong word yeserday with my body about how I couldn't afford to be ill just right now and so it must repel all borders, but I wasn't sure it would do any good. It seems to have worked though. Perhaps there is something in this mind over matter business after all.

Previously my experience with Mind over Matter has been restricted to an exchange with my father many years ago when I was going on to him at length about some horrible misfortune that I thought I had just suffered. "You see", he said, with the voice of one about to impart great wisdom (which I later learned was a warning sign) "It is all a question of 'Mind over Matter'".

"Why is that?" I asked, distracted from my moaning for a minute

"Well, I don't mind so it doesn't matter" he responded, and then retreated back behind his newspaper.

Thanks dad.

Finding the Happy Path

Had a whole bunch of students to see me over today. We are setting up our entries for the Imagine Cup, a Microsoft programming competition we've been quite good at in the past. I've had all kinds of ideas pitched to me and seen a whole bunch of people keen to take part. Great stuff. I love this part of my job.

One of the things that is required from entrants is a "Happy Path" program which demonstrates the gist of the idea. This is the system as it would appear with everything working as it should, a kind of technology demo. It was nice to see some of the first year teams, with not a lot of programming experience under their belts going "Oh yes, we're up for that" and setting to designing their applications.

The entries go in next week, then we have to wait and see what the judges think of them.

Three Tin Tea. And an apology

Had a three tin tea tonight. Tinned meat pie, tinned curried baked beans and tinned potatoes. And all opened with the old tin opener. I'm practicing for the new ice age/flood/drought/global warming/nuclear winter thingy which is apparently just around the corner.

And I feel I must apologize to my reader about the low tone of my post yesterday. It has occurred to me that everybody else blows their nose at appropriate times (probably on cute little embroidered handkerchiefs which they then have incinerated so that they always have nice new ones). As opposed to people like me who can never find a tissue when they need to.

Perhaps I have a talent for lowering the tone. We were talking in the tea room about mind control. As one does. Warren said that he had heard "they" (whoever "they" are) now have a machine that they can point at your head and it makes you happy. "That's nothing" I said. "I can make a whole bunch of people happy just by leaving a room". Nobody laughed. Instead they just pointed at the door......

Update: Actually, they did laugh really. But they did point at the door too. Oh well.

Snot Ettiquette

I was sitting in my office this afternoon talking with David when he said something mildly funny. The shock of this made me snort slightly and a huge lump of stuff flew out of my nose and landed on my shirt. I think I may have a bit of a cold coming on. I just continued as if nothing had happened, and hoped that David would not mention it. Which he didn't, being a polite sort.

Now, the question is, what is the correct procedure when this happens? (and I'm sure that it has happened to you all).

The Eternal Question

If you used some paint the colour of faded paint what colour would it go when it faded?

All you can eat in York

Went to York today for a little trip. Took the tiny camera:


This is the York city wall. Built quite a long time ago, but still in good nick.
Here's a tip, if you find yourself peckish in York, head for Jumbos in George Hudson street. It is just over the bridge, near Argos. They do a Chinese all you can eat menu for just under a fiver. The range of dishes is fantastic, as is the quality.