Orchid Power

The orchids in the kitchen have gone mad. Each Sunday we listen to, but don't understand, the local gardening program, and a recurring theme is how hard orchids are to grow. We just leave ours on the kitchen window sill and wait.

Which seems to work quite well..

.NET Micro Framework Demo Fun

What with the TechEd presentations less than a week away, today seemed a sensible time to start working on the code we are going to demo. We had a good idea of what we wanted to do, so today Dave Baker and I starting putting the final code together.

I've not played with the Micro Framework for a while. It has all been XNA for me for the last few months. But going back to it again I've re-discovered how neat it is. Dave had made a little application and needed to connect it to a pretend serial port so that we could demonstrate the emulation features. So in a couple of hours I've been able to build a custom emulator, put all the components that we need into it, map the emulator behaviour directly onto the real hardware and wrap it all around Dave's program. And it works. And you can flick an option and target the device and debug the code.

I'm really looking forward to the sessions now. If you are at TechEd come and see us. Sessions 201 and 301. If you are any good at poker you stand a chance of bagging an Embedded Fusion board at the first session. If you have hot breath you might win a board at the second.

We will also be running a little competition where we are going to give away the Micro Framework book that I co-wrote. First prize is a copy of the book. Second prize is two copies.....

200 Wrong Answers

At around half way through the semester we have some tests for our students. I'm doing a whole bunch of courses this year (including teaching Visual Basic - which has been interesting) and so I have to invent the quizzes. Each test has 25 questions with one correct and four incorrect answers.

That makes 200 wrong answers to be invented. Plus the sample tests as well. You might think that inventing wrong answers is easy, but actually it is a bit tricky. You have to have ones that kind of make sense, but are not right. If they are too right they are confusing, and if they are too wrong they are too easy.

Wonderful fun.

Test picture post

This is a test

Update on Tuesday, October 30, 2007 at 01:35PM by Rob

Name the game for bonus points.....

Bridge Pictures

I took these pictures a while back, but I came across them earlier today and I thought they were worth putting out here. I must remember that this time of year is very good for sunsets.