Two Doctors!

Up bright and early to get to the Collectormania event in Milton Keynes, a made up city around three hours from Hull. They have stars of TV and screen signing things and you can get your picture taken with them. Yay! (by the way, I'm fully aware that this may seem a bit sad and geekish, but I'm too old to change - or even care what you might think). I met two Star Treck "doctors", Gates MacFadden and Robert Picardo. I also took some pictures but I'm too tired to tidy them up and post them. That will have to wait until tomorrow.  Now I'm going to watch some telly and stagger off to bed, tired but happy.

The Nightfly

Went shopping today. Major find. Around 20 years ago I bought about the best record ever, "The Nightfly" by Donald Fagan (he of Steely Dan fame). With it being a long time ago the record was a 12 inch vinyl thingy which is now up in the loft (along with the turntable that used to play it). I never got around to buying the CD version. Shame on me. Today I didn't buy the CD version again. Instead I bought a DVD type version which has the original album plus Dolby and DTS remixes. Wonderful. There are one or two classic albums which have been given this treatment and believe me, it is wonderful.

If you've never heard of Donald Fagan (or Steely Dan) I envy you. Because you've got the stuff to look forward to. Get to hear some if you can. Just good stuff with clever lyrics.

Last Blog of the Day

I'm determined to keep my blogging record up to one per day (at least). I've been invigilating today. Two hours sat watching students suffer in an exam. You might find this surprising, but it is quite stressful for the examiner as well. It was all I could do to stop myself from shouting "Right! Now Lets Go Crazy!" when the exam finished. Perhaps I'll do that just before I retire.

The exams were Indian history and Advertising (not the same paper - but it sounds like fun). Everyone seemed to write loads of stuff. Now some lucky lecturer has 100 or so papers to mark. My big exams (i.e. the ones for my modules) start next week. At the moment I'm marking the practical stuff. I'm writing a little program for the Tablet PC which will let me pull out student listings and scribble on them. It then builds a web site for each student with the annotated programs and marks and stuff. Taken me a day and a half so far and it is looking quite good. I'll post the binary when I've got it to beta.

Just had an MSN message from Simon. He is one of my final year project students for next year (I'm just finishing marking last years reports and now we are planning the next ones). I'm hoping for great things, Simon was one of the Imagine Cup UK finalists from Hull. We are trying to hatch a little plan which involves Smartphones. Will be nice if we can get it to work.

And now I'm going to bed. From the land of blog to the land of nod (sorry - but it is a bit late..)

Vital Spoke Blogging Tip

Now, here's a tip for all Spoke bloggers out there. Just before you press the post button on your wonderful words of wisdom, higlight all the text in the window (use CTRL+A to do this) and copy it into the paste buffer (use CTL+C to do this). Then when your wonderful ISP drops the ball and the post doesn't get through, you can simply paste it into the window again without having to retype it all. (use CTRL+V for this).

Actually, there are cut and paste icons on the toolbar at the top, but I'm so old that I can remember the control sequences.

I've just lost a rather long and exciting post that I know I'm too tired to repeat just at the moment, but this tip is more than compensation. It was particularly annoying because I thought "Oh, I wonder if I've time to copy that.." just as the "Page not found" message popped up.

Ho hum. And now CTRL+A and CTRL+C just before I hit post....

The Importance of Knowing Where You Are. And Evil Pixie II

Sometimes I worry about myself. I've got Mappoint working on my Tablet PC. And I've just interfaced my GPS system to it so that it returns position information. I can now sit in my conservatory at my house (the only place I can get a fix on enough satellites) and look at an indicator on the tablet which tells me that I am sitting in my conservatory at my house. And this pleases me very much. Ho hum. The next thing I'm going to do is drive to work with the Tablet on so that I can track myself driving to work. But why you ask. Because.
Been trying to fix the splash screen on my Smartphone. I must be getting closer to the cause of the problem because the evil pixie is now actually resetting my whole computer when I try to debug the Smartphone program.......