Mr Ten Percent

I've spent a lot of time over the last few weeks working with my final year project students and their reports.  They've been sending me drafts and I've been adding comments. This year has been great, because most of them have really engaged with the process, coming to regular meetings and responding very well to what I've said.  It has been nice to see the drafts improving in quality with each pass.

The actual hand in date is this Thursday, and I'm quite looking forward to seeing the finished results. If you are writing something it is very important that you go through this review phase, and you allow time to do it. I reckon that a properly written report can add ten percent to a project mark so it is worth the effort.

VAX T Shirt

Saw this T-shirt today. I really, really want one:

For some reason known only to Primark they've used a system diagram which includes PDP and VAX computers and all kinds of things that I used to manage (RD54 disks anyone) as the logo. I sooo want one of these in XL. I just hope they are not only kids sizes (and that you can still get them).

Update on Tuesday, April 29, 2008 at 09:40AM by Rob

Ha. Managed to get one. I happened to be up town early today (getting a copy of a certain video game now in its fourth incarnation) and so I nipped into Primark and found they still had some. In fact, bearing in mind they were only three pounds each, I got two.

Long Felt Want for Rock Band

I managed to get myself a copy of Rock Band for the PS3 (that is the one which works in the UK). All I had to do was travel to Seattle, got to Fry's, cart the thing back to my hotel room, unpack it and cram it into my suitcase (it just fitted) and then carry it back.

Easy.

(I left all the empty boxes in the hotel room. I feel a bit bad about this, they might think I've left them a copy of the game to play with, when all they find is a bunch of cardboard and packing.)

Anyhoo, I got the thing home and it is worth the effort. Particularly if you look at how much they are going to charge for the game upon UK release. I've worked my way through Easy mode on drums and I'm now moving on to Normal. It really does feel like drumming and we had a quick go at multi players and the impression of being in a band really is there.

The only slight snag is that the drumpads are a bit noisy when you hit them. So I've bought some felt which I'm going to use to damp the drums. I'm going to get a circle cutter and some foam and hope to make a proper job of damping them down a bit. In the meantime I'm going to use a time-honoured technique for making sure I can't hear the drum pads.

Turn the music up.

Final Friday Club

Today was the (sniff) final meeting of the Friday Afternoon Club. Talk about going out with a bang. We did Threads, and tried to crash Vista by starting off 1,000 at once. Of course it just kept going (but the CPU usage in Task Manager did max out quite dramatically).

I took a couple of pictures.

You can click on them for larger versions from Flickr. I really enjoyed the lecture and I hope that you lot did as well. See you for Software Engineering next semester.

Want One

Waaaaant onnnnnne!