Goldfrapp –Tales of Us

I used to like buying old style vinyl records. There was something rather nice about going into the record store and coming out with a  twelve inch slab of plastic in a large sleeve. Of course that’s not how we consume our music these days.

I got this album for “free” because I’ve got my phone tied in with the Xbox Music “All you can eat for ten pounds a month” deal. Nothing physical moved anywhere. And I haven’t got a nice album sleeve to look at. But the music is splendid.

I’ve always liked Goldfrapp. No two of their records sound the same. If you like ambient, tuneful, stuff you’ll love it.

Hornsea Mere on Sunday

After lunch the weather was lovely, so we thought it might be nice to go out to Hornsea Mere for a walk and take some photographs. So we did.

New students, if you are looking for a nice place to go with mum and dad when they drop round to see you, then I can recommend it. The coffee shop has had an overhaul and does a really nice line in scones and cream. It is around 25 minutes from Cottingham, you can feed the ducks and then go and have a look at the seaside.

You can even hire a boat and splash about a bit.

Breaking Games

When number one wife (she calls me “husband zero”) got her iPhone a while back one of the first things we got for it was Scrabble. The implementation was slick and it worked a treat. She played a lot.

She doesn’t play as much now. Not because her word powers have diminished, but because the game has “upgraded” itself to the point where it has become a pain to play. Before she can fire up a quick game of digital word wrangling she now has to fight past loads of login screens offering a chance for her to take on players from all over the world. She doesn’t want to do that. She wants to do what she has always done, which is play a quick game of Scrabble against the computer.

I hate it when things upgrade themselves to the point of uselessness. The game also acquired a cheery little sidekick who would tell you after each move the one you should have made and how many points you have lost as a result of not being as clever as it is. This turns out not to be particularly motivating. We managed to turn that off. And avoid all the different new board and tile designs which are now available (and will be for sale soon I have no doubt).

But as for the forced login, that one I’ve been unable to get rid of. The menu system seems to be designed to make you feel unsociable and isolationist, just because you want a quiet game of Scrabble. Ugh.

Learning from My Mistakes

Today was the first foray into the labs with the new First Year group. A splendid bunch of folks. Last year I blogged about the sneaky thing we did with the sample program. It worked so well that we did it again this year. But of course there is always something more….

At the end of the lab we have a silly test, with one or two sensible questions. It’s there get everyone used to the test environment and it works quite well. One sensible question asks you to identify the problem that broke the program. It’s a multiple choice question with lots of stupid possibilities, along with the answer “The program used a multiply operator instead of divide". Actually the mistake is that it used a multiply operator instead of a plus. It was originally a genuine mistake. But I’ve left it in because it us actually quite useful.

Quite a few people spotted this mistake in the question and came and told us about it. One or two didn’t bother because they assumed the knew what we meant. Please don’t ever do this. If you find what looks like a mistake in something to do with the course, and you just assume you know what has happened you might be heading for trouble. Please, please, please let us know if you see anything that looks wrong in stuff that we give you.

To refer to the post on Wednesday, we do an awful lot of planning. Because it is crucial. But we also know that stuff happens that we don’t think of, which can break our careful plans. So we need to be told if something might not be right so that we can fix it if required.

Oh, and thanks to all the students who turned up and worked hard. Everyone I saw was chugging through the exercises very nicely. The real teaching starts next week. It’s going to be fun..

Busy Thursday

The Thursday of the first week of the year is always a very busy day for me. This year I thought I’d find a way of making it even busier. This is how it panned out.

6:15 Get up and dressed, out of the house by 6:35 and heading for Radio Humberside to do the newspaper reviews. Vastly speed up my departure by forgetting to take my lunch or clean my teeth.

7:00 Arrive at the studio and start reading through the papers and making notes.

7:40 Do my thing. Talk about Moore’s Law and The Silk Road which I found in the papers. Mention that I’m looking forward to meeting the new First Year this morning. (It’s true).

8:05 Back at the office. Work to finish off scanning and packing all the “Tags of Fun”.

8:39 Tags done. Head to the union shop to pick up the prizes for the Welcome Party Quiz. Also buy toothbrush and toothpaste. Make sure they are not on the prize receipts so I don’t end up fiddling my expenses. Need to remember not to give the toothbrush away as a prize. Might send the wrong message to the recipient.

9:00 Back at the office. Now need to sort out the software to make the system work. Just have to add the behaviour to read the tag and authorise the drink purchase. Plug in the tag reader and open up Visual Studio.

9:45 Software working, now need to put everything into the box. Discover that the holes that I had designed into the case are too large, and the bolts don’t grip them. Ah well, there is always duct tape.

9:50 Open new toothbrush prior to cleaning teeth. Find I have bought one with soft bristles by mistake. I usually use a hard one, to match the water in Hull. Also notice that the toothbrush is pink. Oh well.

19:51 Clean teeth using a beaker of water in my office while hiding down the side of the glass office door, so people walking down the corridor don’t see me foaming at the mouth and call for medical assistance.

10:06 Give a quick talk to new the First Years Certificate Level students. Talk about the importance of building a brand while you study. Strongly plug http://www.robmiles.com/ (wooh). Also mention http://www.threethinggame.com/ and http://www.ratherusefulseminars.com/ (which seem to mysteriously link back to www.robmiles.com). David Parker suggests that I mention http://hullcompsciblogs.com/ too, as that brings together lots of Hull Computer Science blogs, and also contains a link to http://www.robmiles.com/

10:20 Back in the office. Finish of the Welcome Party Quiz questions. Feel slightly guilty about a couple of the questions, but leave them in anyway.

12:00 Start to distribute the “Tags Of Fun” to the supervisors. Everybody is pleased to have them, but slightly confused as to that they are for.

12:15 Go buy lunch. Egg and bacon sandwich. Works for me. Also strawberry flavoured milk.

12:25 Send out an email to all staff explaining how the “Tags Of Fun” work.

12:50 Get an email from Yiannis suggesting that there might be people at the party who won’t have tags.

12:55 Update software and program thirty “blank” tags.

13:30 Print answer sheets for the quiz. Then write some course bits and bobs.

14:30 Meet new supervisees. Great folks.

15:00 Start preparing for the Welcome Party.

16:15 Party Opens. We have Wii U, 10 seat Xbox 30 from Platform Expos, a guitar game with real guitars from Brian, multiplayer games from FreeSide and an Occulus Rift from Hive. And free drinks and sandwiches.

Multi-player action

Discussions

17:45 Do quiz. Seems OK.

18:30 Announce winners.

These folks came first, and are looking quite cool about it. Or it might just be general depression about the quality of their prize (I spent all the money on RFID tags…)

These folks came second (actually they got the same score as the other team,  but in this situation the team withe fewer members wins out)

These folk made third place. I told them to really work those Jaffa cakes (not a phrase you hear much in polite conversation).

19:30 Clear up and tear down. Very surprised (and pleased) to find that the bar staff really like the “Tagomatic”. Much easier than dealing with paper tickets that have to be handed out and checked. One says “Of course, we’d should expect you do make something like that. You are Computer Science after all.” Feel v. pleased about that.

19:55 Get in car to drive home. Start playing “The Long Way Home” from Breakfast in America. Loudly.

20:05 Roll into drive exactly as “Lord is it Mine” finishes. Spooky.

21:00 Write blog.