Open for Open Day

Just done an Open Day talk. Thanks for coming folks. Around a third of the people there had not been to Hull before. Hope you like the place. The campus was looking super splendid in the sun.

Wore my new glasses to give the talk. These are varifocals. This means that the front row were just a blur as far as I could tell. So if you were trying to get my attention at any point I'm sorry if I didn't spot it.

Anyway, if you did come by, thanks for being a good audience.

War of the Worlds. And why not.

Went to see War of the Worlds tonight. It is a Stephen Spielberg film with Tom Cruise. There, I've just about said it all. If you are after a moving and complex narrative where characters develop amongst sparkling dialogue, with a sprinkling of romance and comedy, then you can leave the building now.

If you are after exploding buildings, gung ho action and plenty of screaming, then you might want to take a look. Two things I didn't like. Firstly the name on the tin is wrong. It is not a war. It is 100 minutes of being ground underfoot by the nasty aliens followed by a sudden happy ending (hope this isn't giving too much away folks). When I go abroad I make sure I've had all my injections. You'd think that when they go to another world the invaders would have done the same.

The second thing I didn't like was Tom's "daughter". She has obviously been to the old "Dr. Who assistant" school of acting, and took her role of not doing what dad said, gettiing into trouble as a result, screaming loudly, very loudly, and being rescued, extremely seriously. Rather tiresome I thought. Makes you appreciate Billy Piper in the new Dr. Who.

As an action film summer blockbuster "The War of the Worlds" is OK. But deep it is not. And nothing like as good as the book or the Jeff Wayne musical version (which quite literally rocks).

A Good Day at Work

You know you've had a good day at work when you can't remember what you were doing. As far as I can recall I was preparing delegate lists for Slide5, updating web sites, counting session preferences, sorting out presentation timings, designing and printing CD label artwork and some other stuff I forgot.

A great day.

The Wild Bunch of HETA

The Wild Bunch
Originally uploaded by RobMiles.

Just done a talk at HETA. Took along the Media Centre, wrote some C# with the audience and took a picture and blogged during the session. You were a good bunch. I'm sorry I called you all idiots. Only the ones who actually thought that bricks are intelligent are the idiots. And I'm glad you liked the dog.

Will Code for Beer

Asahi Beer. Never drunk any myself. Seen lots of bottles of it though. And the labels. Some years ago I wrote a system (in embedded C) which controls the laser date marking systems at the Asahi Brewery in Japan. My software controls a device which moves metal disks in front of the marking laser. Thing is, the disks run out of characters after a while and so they need to be changed, along with the controlling software.

So tonight I was re-discovering the joys of code that I wrote quite a few years ago. Quite fun using a program which displays 24 lines of 80 characters on my 17 inch monitor. Whoa. Those letters are big. And it is surprising how all the keyboard shortcuts came back to me. Did the changes, blew the EPROMS and sent them off. If a few weeks they should be in the machines in Japan. And my software will be marking beer for another five years or so.

Not my favourite embedded job though. One day I'll tell you all about my toilet flushing program.....