Meeting the Woman in Black

Actually you really, and I mean REALLY, don’t want to meet the Woman in Black. We first saw the play around 20 years ago and today we took the kids to see it. Just as scary as last time. If you want to find out how a play with only two actors can scare you to death then get yourself down to London and see it live. Well worth the trip.

Kinect SDK Now Out

The Microsoft Kinect SDK is now available for download. I’ve had a quick squint and it looks really easy to use. And the body tracking is much, much, much faster than the Open NUI drivers I’ve been using up to now.  Go get it from here.

Engineers Don’t Tend to Fib

You’re Fired

I like The Apprentice. As entertainment it works well. As a lesson for any kind of life it is however a disaster. This was brought home to me last night when “LordAllan” fired someone because he had never known an engineer who could succeed in business.

Ugh. I think what “LordAllan” means is that engineers have more difficultly telling porkies than folks in other branches of business, particularly marketing. Telling whoppers about a financial product is a lot easier than lying about whether or not a bridge is strong enough. And in the marketing game you can blame “market forces” when the shares tank and everybody loses their money. Where as in engineering it is a bit tricky to blame gravity when everything collapses and a train plummets to the bottom of the ravine. Engineers are expected to do their sums and get it right, whereas other folks can get away with telling the version of the truth that will get the deal.  Ho hum.

Update on Tuesday, June 21, 2011 at 07:13PM by Rob

Having thought a bit more about this post I've decided that it is not the case that you have to be good at telling lies to succeed in business. Just that "LordAlan" thinks that you do.

And I'm sure that none of these comments are in any way influenced by the fact that I once bought an Amstrad amplifier and all the knobs dropped off...

Putting Plenty of Music in your Car

My car (see above) has a very good in music system. Very loud. Like lots of modern cars it has a USB socket into which you can plug a memory stick. I’ve been experimenting with the devices to see which work. I bought this amazingly tiny 16G one but it didn’t work. For some reason the car rejected it. However, if I take a 16G SD card and put it in a tiny reader this works a treat. So, if you want to drive around with several day’s worth of music in your car, you might want to try this. The other benefit is that SD cards tend to be somewhat cheaper than USB keys of the equivalent size.

Imagine That Judging

Did the exam board (portable worked very well as a tablet, I was able to flick up and down my notes very easily) and then shot back to Hull in time for an Imagine Cup Judging Live Meeting.

We are busy briefing all the judges for the Imagine Cup World Finals next month. We have 67 (yes, sixty-seven) teams to judge. Every year Microsoft say they are not going to have as many as last time. And then they end up with even more teams taking part. Which must say something for the popularity of the competition around the world.

The finals are in New York, and it looks like it is going to be an amazing event. Find out more, meet the teams taking part and see how the judging works at www.imaginecup.com