Sweet Fitness

First person to correctly guess what’s in the bag wins a bag of their own..

I’ve been told that a sensible amount of exercise is a brisk thirty minute walk each day. Turns out that Sugar Sugar Sweets is almost exactly fifteen minutes walk from my office. Result.

Thanks to SkyDrive Version History

Should you be stupid/unlucky enough to overwrite a file you have stored on SkyDrive you might like to know that you can bring back previous versions of your files by opening Version History. Open your folder in the browser via https://skydrive.live.com/ and right click the file name.

Select Version History from the menu that appears and then travel back in time to get the file that you want.  This saved my bacon tonight.

Cubelets at the Cafe Scientifique

Today I got to strut my stuff at the Hull branch of the Cafe Sceintifique. This is a really neat idea set up by Mark Lorch from our Chemistry Department.  At the end of each month he hosts a talk of scientific bent in the upstairs room at Nellie’s, a fantastic pub in Beverley.

Note to new (or any) students. One night get a train to Beverley and go for a drink there. The atmosphere is amazing, enhanced by the fact that the place is all lit by gas lights.

This is the programme for the rest of the year (and a bottle of very posh diet cola). Do you think I should tell them I’m not really a doctor?

Anyhoo, I’d given my talk the delightfully vague title of “Computing is fun. No really!”, which I reckoned gave me plenty of wiggle room about what to say. Once I’d agreed to turn up I was told of the house rules. No Powerpoint. In fact, no computer or screen. Just props. Fortunately I’d thought of that. And so I took along my cubelets. These are little cubes of computing that you can fit together to create physical programs and they turned out to be a super way to illustrate what computing is really all about. And they are fun too. If you want to find out more, take a look here.

This is my “slab” of cubelets, all fitted together. I’ve no idea what this arrangement does, but that is part of the fun. And after tonight I want to buy some more.

I did my thirty minute talk and then, once we’d all found another drink, we sat around and talked about things computing, the future, and my memories of going into Dixons and typing:

10 PRINT "Rob Rulez"
20 GOTO 10

- into the computers on display when the assistants weren’t looking. It was a really great night and the audience were splendid. I took a bunch of pictures, you can find all of them here.

Update on Thursday, September 26, 2013 at 04:05PM by Rob

I was talking during the evening about curious contraptions that I've now remembered are called "Rube Goldberg machines". This is the best one. Ever.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qybUFnY7Y8w

Some days need a health warning

Here’s a nice picture to cheer me up.

Some days are great. Some days just grate. Today was in the latter category. Nothing too much, just lots of things going wrong when they really shouldn’t. Like me managing to delete a file rather than copy it to a USB key. I didn’t know this was possible, what with the the recycle bin and all, but I managed to achieve this magical feat and flush a couple of hours of careful Powerpointing down the toilet. By the end of the day, as I pulled up at the traffic lights on the way home I realised that one more thing had gone wrong. My phone wasn’t in my pocket where it should be.

So it was time for a frantic U turn back to the office, where of course the phone wasn’t. At this point something nice did happen. I met up with a couple of early first years (we start next Monday) who were taking a look around the place so they know where things are before the madness of Fresher’s Week kicks in. I said hello and welcome, but I must have seemed a bit distracted as I was wondering where my lovely Lumia had got to.

Finally I found it, down the side of the car seat where it had dropped. And the really, really annoying thing is that of course if I’d thought to check the Bluetooth on the car (which was lit up on the dashboard as usual) then I’d never had any of the panic. It just goes to show that if you expect bad things to be happening, you can then go on to make them happen yourself.

Oh well.

Update on Wednesday, September 25, 2013 at 09:27AM by Rob

And then this morning I put on the wrong jacket and then spent a frantic five minutes looking for the wallet that wasn't in the pocket. I hope this is not an ongoing thing....

Another machine to wish for

My Surface Pro is now my computing weapon of choice. Very quick, hugely portable. I’ve taken to using it at work without the keyboard attached, plugged into my docking station. It does confuse folks who come into my office, to find me powering my desktop with what looks like a picture frame, but it works a treat.

The only things I don’t like are the 128G disk space and the 4G memory are a bit on the small side these days. Particularly when I’m running two Windows Phone emulators side by side (although they do both work). And the battery life could be a bit better.

Which is why I’m very pleased that Surface Pro 2 is now on the stocks. With an 8G ram version that has a 256G SSD. Where do I sign?

This does of course mean that towards the end of October there will probably be at least one Surface Pro 128 going on sale, I’m just not sure whether or not to leave the fancy skin on or not when I try to sell it.

Oh, and there are some nice fancy goodies coming along as well, including illuminated keyboards and a really neat docking station.