Building the Future

We had an admissions Open Day today. As is our won't on such occasions, we put on a hearty buffet and sat around with candidates and their parents eating sandwiches and chewing the fat.

One of the parents made the point that he thought Computer Scientists were an enviable bunch because we are "building the future". I nodded and smiled, and managed to avoid mentioning the half a day I spent a while back trying to get Aero Glass running on Vista, so my windows would have semi-transparent borders.

"It is an awesome responsibility" I managed to reply eventually. And then changed the subject.

Eight Hours Driving

Well, we were on the road at 6:00 am, over the Humber Bridge at 6:20 and in our first traffic jam at 6:35. Fortunately we managed to get around this road closure (I felt sorry for the big trucks that had no chance of turning round) and make it with a few minutes to spare.

It was nice to see some people that we haven't seen in a while, the circumstances were not the happiest, but the weather was kind to us, there were lots of flowers, and the service was a celebration of a good life lived to the full, which is how it should be.

And then it was time to get back into the car for another four hour drive back to the homestead.

Best Laid Plans

We had to be somewhere else today. Not a particularly happy somewhere else, in that we are attending a funeral, but a somewhere else nonetheless.

Unfortunately the weather had other ideas. We set off as planned for our overnight stop and we turned the radio to the traffic news, as you do. At the Humber Bridge we stopped to have another listen. The RDS system that automatically flips between travel news on different stations was having a field day. We didn't manage to hear the end of four different reports. And all of them were telling us that today was a bad day to travel. Basically, all the roads between where we were and where we wanted to be were full/broken.

So we went home and had some fish and chips. It will mean an early start tomorrow to get where we want to be, but I don't think tonight was meant for traveling.

The Earth in Your Pocket

Where I work. All it took was the search term you see.

If you have a Windows Mobile device, and are lucky enough to be on an "all you can eat" GPRS tariff, you really should get a copy of Virtual Earth Mobile. It is a free download from here. It lets you search for places anywhere in the world and then display them in map or aerial photo view. What is really impressive for me is that the search facility works really well. I banged in my home address and it took me straight to a view of our house. With my car in the drive.

Performance over GPRS is a tad slow, but the pictures are worth waiting for. It will also do route planning and connect to a GPS device (although I've not tried that). And all for free. How can you go wrong?

Inside a Wii Controller

I was sitting waiting for an ebay auction to nearly finish so that I can pile in with a last minute bid when I wondered to myself if there was anything about the inside of the Wii remote controller out there on the interweb. Turns out there is.

Very interesting, and lovely pictures.