Saturday, November 21, 2009 at 08:55PM 
Went to York today to do some shopping and meet number one daughter for lunch. I’m a sucker for coloured lights, and so I bought another set. I think I only get them so that I can take pictures of them before I hang them up.
Friday, November 20, 2009 at 04:47PM 
I really like Live Mesh. This is a Microsoft file synchronisation thingy where selected folders on your machine are reflected onto the Live Mesh storage out in the cloud, and also onto other machines that run the Live Mesh add-in. It runs quietly in the background and doesn’t seem to intrude much on normal life (unless you are daft enough to make changes to files on two different machine before connecting them both to the network – at which point you will have to resolve a bunch of conflicts).
I’ve got all my courseware for the current year stored on Live Mesh. You get up to 5G of space on the server behind the system and this is plenty for a year’s worth of PowerPoint slides and Word documents.
The really good news for me is that I now no longer care which machine I’m using. As long as I allow it a few minutes to “catch up” with the latest versions (if I’ve not used that particular machine for a while) then I can use any device. The net result of this is that I no longer carry the same laptop to and from work.
I guess I could have used an external drive for this, but I’m always afraid of dropping/losing/having stolen the device which holds the only copy of my stuff. Live Mesh means my data is held on multiple machines, as well as on the central server.
However, my bag is now much lighter and easier to carry, and this means that I’m missing out on some exercise and will probably gain some weight as a result.
But I reckon it is worth it.
Wednesday, November 18, 2009 at 08:38PM A first year student came to see me today with their solution to the Mine Sweeper problem. It was better than the one I wrote. And that’s why I love my job.
There is a connection between this picture and the traffic lights in Berlin.
Tuesday, November 17, 2009 at 08:02PM 
I was doing a tutorial this morning and I had just run the program when all the power in the building went off. The students present were most impressed, they had never seen a program that could turn off all the lights.
Fortunately (or unfortunately) it turned out that it wasn’t my code. The power came back on after five minutes or so, and later on we got an email saying that owing to problems at the local sub-station we would have to shut down the university and leave early as “any delay could cause catastrophic problems”.
I had this vision of people standing around a pair of glowing wires and someone playing the Scotty role and saying things like “I dinnae think she’ll take much more captain..”
Unfortunately it meant postponing my 4:15 VB lecture. Sorry about that folks, we were going to learn all kinds of interesting things about file paths too….
My kind of meeting.....