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....