Yorkestra

Tonight we went to see number one daughter play in the York Concert Orchestra. I went because I have an innate love of culture and music and also because she said they were playing the Muppets theme music. Which they did, very well. There is nothing quite like an orchestra going at it with a good head of steam and they sounded great. I took the big camera and took some snaps during the noisier bits.

I will give an enormous prize to the first person to tell me what tune they are playing…

Steam vs Robot

I was a bit late back from the tip yesterday. I went up town and bought a steam engine. As you do. The model shop in the middle of town was having a 10% off sale, and I couldn’t resist getting a little Mamod steamroller. As it happens, number one son was at home for the weekend, and I’d put him on to building a .NET Micro Framework powered robot that I’d had sent to me. Long story.

Anyhoo, when we get them both working we are going to see which is more powerful, the age of steam or the age of robots…

Place your bets..

The Micro Framework robot is great, although we had (or at least number one son) had to assemble the tracks a link at a time. I think at the end of the day it will all come down to traction, so my money is on the robot at the moment.

Lofty Ambitions

I’m tidying up our loft at the moment. This turns out to be hard work. For the last fifteen years I’ve been putting things up there “In case I might need them some day”. This includes cardboard boxes, spare lengths of carpet, old curtains, floppy disk boxes and 10 year old computer magazines. Lots and lots of them. For the last month I’ve been making numerous trips to the tip each weekend. The chaps there now address me by my first name and I think I’m getting an invite to their next staff party. Although they seem curiously uninterested in what I’m throwing out.

I made another trip to the tip today and I now have half of the half of half of the loft clear. Of course, as soon as it is clear I’ll fill it up again, but this has got to count as progress in some way or other.

iPhone 3Gs

Of course I had to get the new iPhone. I feel kind of bad about this although, as I said to number one wife as I headed off to Carphone Warehouse “I don’t drink, gamble or chase women. I just get gadgets”. She may have muttered something under her breath about how much cheaper it would be if I did those things instead, but I can’t see what the problem is really. After all, I am letting her have my old iPhone…

Anyhoo, down to the shop, out with the proof of address and away we went. I was taking out a new contract, and so I had to have a new number. They actually try to charge you for “memorable” numbers. If you want repeating values, or sequences of digits in your phone number you can pay up to sixty quid for the privilege . I had this vision of a room full of “number miners” going through all possible permutations and shouting “strike” when they found a really good one. I suspect they use a computer program though. I didn’t pay extra for two reasons. Firstly I was spending enough as it was, and secondly I couldn’t see anything special about the more expensive ones anyway.

The new iPhone is very nice. The old one was nice too, but this one is nice faster. It has a compass, which means that it can orient the map relative to the way you are facing, which is massively useful. It looks pretty much exactly like the old one but the glass seems to shrug off fingerprints, which is nice.

I was quite looking forward to using the Voice Recognition feature, but unfortunately it turns out to be rubbish. Having experienced the wonder of Voice Command on Windows Mobile devices many years ago I was very keen to find out how the field had advanced on the iPhone. Turns out it has gone backwards. Voice Command used to let you do everything on your phone including play music albums by calling out their names. It never needed training and it always worked. Whereas the voice recognition on the iPhone does things like make phone calls when you want to listen to music, play music when you want to make calls and so on. I hope this is a difficultly with English accents or some other teething trouble, because at the moment it really is poor.

Overall I’m pleased with what I’ve got. I can’t see massive queues forming for this new device though, it is mostly evolutionary. When the new version of Windows Mobile comes out next year I reckon things are going to get even more interesting in the mobile space.

If it’s Thursday it must be Doncaster

After a journey north yesterday, today I headed south to Doncaster College . We were having the exam board for the Integrated Technology degree that is taught at Doncaster and validated by Hull.

We saw some very good work. At tip. If you live in Doncaster and want to do one of the best Integrated Technology degrees in the country, you have a wonderful place just on your doorstep. And you can do them part time, some of the best students were actually doing degree level project work as part of their jobs.