Just what you want to see before a 12 hour flight....

Just what you want to see before a 12 hour flight....
Originally uploaded by RobMiles.

Pastey Faced

Someone actually asked me for a copy of Pastemaster. It is a text boilerplating tool that I wrote rather than mark exams.  I've written an installer,  improved it a bit and added it to my Lively Learning pages.

Pastemaster 2 Launched

Pasty Powerhouse...

I've developed a tool for assessment which has proved useful. It provides a means by which you can quickly and easily create pro-forma comments and mark values and then insert them into any document. The comments are entered into a number of categories and given marks (if you want to). Then, when you select them they are copied into the bottom area and the total calculated.  Pressing Clear gets rid of the comments and sets the total to 0. The comment text is automatically loaded into the paste buffer so that you can just paste it into any Windows application. The comments are remembered automatically, and there are 6 pages available.  You can download an installer for the program here.

Burn In

I've just abut got my magic message system to working on the big plasma.  It displays the time on the screen in a nicely muted shade of grey. I'd heard that plasma screens have problems with burn in, and I thought I had been careful to avoid that. So when we turned the display off to plug in our new PS/3 I was mortified to see the time etched on the screen......

Fortunately, when our shiny new PlayStation 3 was fired up, nobody could see the damage, which cheered me up a bit. We were playing Ridge Racer, which looked OK but no better than versions on other platforms (even the PSP version compared well...)

Underwhelmed

Now, we were using the composite output to drive the display. And Ridge Racer is not one of the better launch titles. But I have to say that the experience did very little for me and the rest of the bunch around the machine.

When we had the Wii running we would usually find a bunch of laughing people waiting to have a go. With the PS/3 nobody seemed that impressed, even when they found out what was running the show. I'm told that it can do great things, and I'm looking forward to seeing it run on a decent connection with a better game.

Actually the best part of it was when I turned the PS/3 off. And found that my burned in time display had been replaced by the Ridge Racer speedo...... 

Service with a Smile

Went to Doncaster today for an external exam board meeting. Meant I missed some meetings at Hull, which was nice. The way I see it, they should schedule every meeting I have to go to at exactly the same time, so that I can pick the one I want to attend, and then have a good excuse to avoid all the rest.

Anyhoo, I shot off down the motorway, looked at some student work, had some very constructive discussions (which is par for the course at Doncaster) and then it was time to eat. We usually have a working lunch of sandwiches just before the exam board. But not today. Today we ate in the training restaurant. Which was wonderful. We were surrounded by attentive, polite, friendly (if a little nervous) faces who did the whole "posh nosh" thing around us.

As they were still being trained they had not picked up any of the habits of waiters that I have had to deal with in the past. In other words they didn't hide, bring the wrong thing, look down their nose at me when I ask for the house white (or even worse, a glass of water) and treat me like an idiot.  The food was great, the service was great, and I didn't have to pay. That to me is perfection...