Time for a New Camera

If all goes to plan I shall be going away in a couple of weeks to America. Of course this means that I need to buy a new camera. The old one is very nice, but rather old, and I feel I deserve better. I have a big, special camera too, but I don't want to lug that around the 'states.

So today I did more damage to the overdraft in the quest for the perfect picture. The one I've got is a gem though. It is small, shiny, silver and takes super pictures. I've been wandering round the house in search of things to photograph:


IKEA Orchids

There are some more pictures on my Flickr account.

How to Make Your Life Difficult

There are a number of "Robert's Laws" that I have formulated over the years. Most of them have to do with computers:

• Any Given Computer is Too Slow
• Thinking About Saving Makes Your Program Crash

..but I do have some more general purpose ones:

• Every now and then, for no reason that you can ever figure out, something really horrible will happen to you.
• Every now and then, for no reason that you can ever figure out, something really nice will happen to you.
• An infallible way to make your life more difficult is to try and do someone a favour.

The last one sprang to mind today. Some time back, in agreement with rule two above, number one wife allowed me to buy a nice big LCD screen for my guvvy room. So we thought we'd offer the TV it replaced to a worthy home. In accordance with rule number three I offered it to a friend of mine without checking what number one wife had done with it. Result, a chum who has had the prospect of 28 inches of telly goodness snatched from under his nose. To make matters worse, it is the same chum whom I offered a telly last year, only to have the telly in question to toes up before I could deliver it. I hope Ian will keep speaking to me....

The View up the stairs

I've been taking pictures around the place again. This is the view up the staircase to my office. With a lovely blue sky right at the top.

Burn Baby Burn

I've been burning things again. Nothing dangerous or fire based, just EPROMS to go to Japan for a certain brewery. An EPROM (Eraseable, Programmable Read Only Memory) is a memory chip used to hold data, in this case my wonderfully wraught program code. They have a window in the top where you shine UV light to erase them and you have to use a special programmer to put stuff into them. The ones I'm using hold about the same amount of data as a 10 pixel wide column on your video screen (i.e not a lot).

Just look at those bits..

EPROMS are hard to work with, difficult to put into the circuit boards and completely superceeded by EEPROM stuff which doesn't need the window (but at least you can look at the chips in these babies). But people will pay me to make them. And soon the code in them will be hard at work putting date stamps on bottles of beer. I love the thought that, even as I write this text there is are programs of mine running in breweries all over the world, putting datestamps on bottles of beer.

I've also written code that flushes toilets. But that is a different story...

Back on the job

I've only been away for a long weekend, but things were pretty busy today. Dealt with loads of students who are writing project reports; marked a whole bunch of practical work; wrote some code for our reachout project and answered a slew of emails and forum posts.

It is great to be here(and I'm not being ironic).