Girl Geek Dinners at Hull

Girl Geek Dinners started in London some time back. The idea is to give girls who are interested in technology an occasion where they can get together and chat about life, the universe and everything.

The idea has now spread all over the world. We even have them in Hull now. The department is sponsoring the next one which will be in mid-October. If you want to find out more, there is a Facebook group “Hull Girl Geek Dinners” which you can join. If you are at Hull you should also keep an eye out for the posters that will be going up soon.

HullCompSci Twitter Account

For any students at Hull who are interested in keeping up with what we are doing in the department we now have a Twitter feed. Keep up to date with the department at:

http://twitter.com/HullCompSci

Start of Semester

Everyone seems to have come back to Hull, which is nice. We have even had quite good weather today, which makes the whole thing even more pleasant. The corridor has been full of queues as people wait to register.

Being a new student seems to be a succession of standing in a queue to get a piece of paper that tells you to go to another queue and so on. As you go you accumulate lots of more bits of paper until at the end of the day you have a whole bag full. Then you sit through sessions where people tell you stuff that seems important but you probably aren’t taking in because you are concerned about being in the right place now and getting to the right place for the next session. And so on.

Don’t worry. It will all come right in the end.

Crazy Joke Book

While I was tidying up the bookcase I came across this little volume, that I bought a very long time ago:

Fantastic. Just the thing for the occasional blog post. My current favourite is:

WOMAN IN GREENGROCER’S: One pound of mixed nuts and not too many coconuts, please.

Fingerprint Removal for Beginners

I was doing some vacuuming today, as you do. The machine sucked up a couple of ball bearings (no idea where they came from) and proceeded to rattle like mad.

As an engineer, I knew how to fix this. I removed the little cover over the pipe and turned the vacuum upside down so that the bearings would fall out.Unfortunately, while doing this I left the machine plugged in. The biggest design flaw with our Dyson is that it is very easy to catch the power button and start it off. Which is just what I did next, with my finger still stuck inside it.

Apparently my screams were quite impressive. Number one wife even heard me, and she was downstairs on the telephone at the time. She snapped instantly into action “Rob’s just made a really strange noise” she said to the caller, and continued with her conversation.

When I got my digit out the end of the finger was all shiny, just as if it had been polished by thousands of strokes from a rotary brush. Which is not surprising really. It was also very warm. After I held it under the cold tap for a while it started to return to something like normal size and colour, and I think that no real damage has been done. I can still play the piano as badly as before I’m sure, and typing speeds seem unaffected.

The biggest worry is that it is one of the fingers that they check at US airports before letting you into the country. I wonder what they do if they discover that one of your fingers no longer has a print…