Telly History

The telly in the kitchen has failed. It sort of works, but the picture comes and goes, along with the sound, in a way that we are pretty sure is not how the program maker intended. Antiques Roadshow with strobe effects. I think not.

So it was off down to the big shops to get a replacement. Two things struck me. Glass tellys are now so passe. If you want to buy a cheap, glass, TV you are sent into a sort of ghetto area of the store. They put them next to the Video Cassette recorders. Nuff said.

The second thing that struck me was how cheap these things are. When I was a youngster a TV was a pretty substantial investment. Even my first little black and white portable, which allowed me to watch Nationwide and Tomorrows World in glorious greyscale, was such an expense that I had to take out a three month loan to pay for it.

Nowadays a little telly costs around the price of a video game, certainly less than some boxed sets of DVDs. Strange.

Anyhoo, we selected a cheap little number from a company I've not heard too many bad things about and toddled home to plug it in.

No Fun

I am now very old. So old that I can go on about the good old days. Summers were warmer. Beer was cheaper. The music was more tuneful. (or at least it had one). And April 1st was a fun day. The papers were full of stunts and spoofs. People put effort into being funny and there were some very good pranks. Nowadays there is nothing. I went through the paper and found very little of note. The funny bits were actually more boring than the real news. There was something close to an attempt at humour on the local radio, but it was more likely to start a riot than actually make anyone laugh. In fact the best stuff was nerdy coding stuff you can find here.

I'm wondering if the world is becomming a more serious place, or if I am losing my sense of humour. Perhaps in these strife ridden, energy strapped, over mortgaged, days there is just less to laugh at. I mean, apart from the wonderful Thin Ice and the new season of Green Wing there is pretty much nothing out there on telly.

Oh well, I think I'll listen to some Goons tapes...

Kicking out Andy, and other acts of rudeness

Kicked Andy out of my office today. Didn't quite shout, but I was quite brusque. There was no problem as such, except that if he had come another pace into the room he would have seen the three laptops that we were going to present him and the other Imagine Cup team members with later in the day. I'm not sure whether he would have put two and two together, but I kicked him out anyway. I felt rather bad about this at the time, but since he ended the day up a rather nice HP laptop I reckon that he will forgive me.

Then, at the quiz night somebody asked me for their grades for the programming work. I didn't actually mark that one, so I said that I couldn't help - perhaps more forcefully than I should have.

I must be careful when I feel a bit tired that I don't actually upset people any more than I do when I'm wide awake. It has been a somewhat exhausting week. Hopefully I will be back on fully polite form for Monday.

Marking Time

I've been marking again today. It is great fun to take a look at the kind of stuff that the students come up with. Sometimes the code is neat, other times it can be scary. Having said that, these are first year coders, some of whom have not programmed before - so getting the code to work is good enough for me at the moment. Style will come later.

Diners and Meetings

After the fun and frivolity of last night it was up with the lark so that we could be on the way to Doncaster at 6:45. Just to get to a meeting. The good news was that we rolled up at the diner for breakfast just as it was opening.



Then it was on to Doncaster where we had a good meeting (one were we actually sorted things out and made some plans) and then back to Hull.


This one is for you Rory, if you ever make it this far off the beaten track....