Hornsea Sunday

Today was a nice day. And we had a birthday to celebrate. So it was off to Hornsea Mere for a baked potato. And cheese.

It was very windy. But there were a few brave folk out in yachts

Then we went onto the front for donuts (forget your Crispy Cremes, these are the real deal - and six for a pound). And of course amusements....

Winning big at penny falls (you can actually see the pennies falling)

One of my ambitions, which looks like it might end up being thwarted by big city developers, is to visit Coney Island in New York. Hornsea is a bit like this I think with some amazing attractions. Including the "New Super Palmist".

The machine went up and down my hand and then printed out a very accurate assessment of my character....

I think that pretty much sums me up.

If you live in Hull you really should go to Hornsea.

I can't think of a title for this one

For some time we've been having phone problems. It seems that calls weren't being recorded, messages weren't getting through etc etc. So today I bought some new technology to try and fix the problem. Rang the home number to test it.....

"What is the mass of Jupiter?"

Strange. Rang off and tried again.....

"What is the population of China?"

Checked the box. Turns out we had bought a question machine by mistake.

Virtual Reach Vigo RSS Reader

If you've got a Smartphone with a free internet connection you might like to take a look at what Virtual Reach can do for you. They provide a neat RSS feed reader for mobile devices and also some quite cute services that you can use to get local information as well. And all for free.

http://virtualreach.com/index.htm

Accidental Art

I've been playing with XNA for the new book (book news coming soon, along with another chapter). As part of this I investigated the use of layers and transparency and what happens if you draw lots of coloured things on top of each other. I ended up with this rather attractive arty looking display which I've made into a clock.

Having decided that the output looked nice, I then reckoned that from a software point of view the code could be a lot better organised. So I went in and tidied things up, re-factored classes, improved the scaling and made the movement of the layers more realistic. And of course the "proper" version looked rubbish.

I'll be making the clock available on verysillygames.com later on. And you can actually see the clock in action here. It is a bit jerky, but it gives you an idea of how it works.

Video: XNA Groovy Clock

When things just work

I love it when things just work. Yesterday I took the tiny tablet PC to a meeting where we spent a couple of hours discussing reports. I opened them all on the tiny tablet in Office 2007, added ink annotations and then when I got back to my office Groove just synchronised them back onto the main machine, where I updated the text, cleaned off all the ink and sent out the updated version in about ten minutes.

I did most of this without thinking, and it just worked. Of course I could have taken a notebook and pencil along instead and done pretty much the same I suppose, but it wouldn't have been half as much fun.....