Blind Ambition

Hull city centre yesterday, looking pretty spry.

Spent some of today putting up blinds. The old “Stand on tiptoes holding a vacuum cleaner hose in one hand and an electric drill in the other whilst trying to make a hole in the inside of a window opening with neighbours outside watching and taking bets on whether I will end up in casualty or not” routine. I’d say “Great fun”, except that it probably wasn’t.

Hull Imagine Cup Success

The “Instinctive Input” team show off their certificates. If you look really closely you will see that they are all individually signed by Bill Gates. Well done folks.

We didn’t win, but one of the two teams we sent down to compete in the UK Imagine Cup Finals came a creditable third place. Many congratulations to the “Instinctive Input” team who took there eye tracking system down to Reading, hardware demonstration and all, and managed to put on a great show by all accounts. 

Congratulations to the Outcry team as well, who also got a finalist place. I’m really pleased that Hull managed to get two teams into the UK finals for the Software Development Challenge, this must make Hull the most successful entrant in the UK competition.

The teams had a great time down at Microsoft UK Headquarters. They saw demos of the latest technology and presentations from UK Game Development houses. Great stuff. I’ll have some more pictures and team details next week.

For Hull the Imagine Cup story is not quite over though. Christophe and Daniel found out earlier this week that they have made it through to the next round of the Game Development competition.

Ash Landed

I took this on the way back from my First Year Lecture. I heard someone say “He’ll be putting that on Flickr next”. Correct.

I’m supposed to be going out to give a session at Tech-Days in Portugal next week. You can find our more about it (in Portuguese of  course) here. That was before the volcano blew its stack. At the moment things are a bit “not up in the air” but we will have to see. I’ve got all the slides and demos ready and the robot is set to travel. I really hope that the cloud clears and I can make it over to Lisbon, I suppose we can’t really argue with mother nature at this level.

XNA Article in Micro Mart Magazine

Micro-Mart, a weekly UK magazine about computing has a really good item about XNA and Indie game development in it this week. Starts at page 92. Well worth a read (as is the whole magazine actually).

Of course I’m only really telling you about it it because I’m actually mentioned (and even quoted) in the article.

Windows Phone 7 Presentation Now on Channel 9

 
Matthijs Hoekstra from Microsoft Netherlands has put my DevDays Netherlands session from a couple of weeks back up on Channel 9. You can find it here.

Note to self. A black T shirt under a white polo shirt might be a fashion statement, but it isn’t a statement that you really want to make.