TJRandell

Weapons of Mass Distraction

TJRandell — Sat, 26 Aug 2006 01:39:00 GMT

Ever since I got back from India I’ve been working on my dissertation... Of course everything that could possibly distract me has distracted me... I think that they should classify this kinda thing as distractionitus... and then someone could develop a cure that doesn’t involve sitting in a room all on your own without an internet connection!

Anyhow, of the distractions I’ve had here are a couple of the welcome ones!

Firstly, XNA Express, thankfully I subscribe to the blog of the one, the only AlfredTwo! Who just so happened to blog about it over a week ago! It certainly sounds like a ton of fun and it looks like there's great potential for having a few student programming competitions in the future. Oh to be a student again!

Secondly, after the Imagine Cup we made it onto Channel9 for the second or third time, cool! From the point of view of James and I it was interesting to see what answers we came up with after Andy had said exactly what we were thinking :)

Thirdly, Diane Curtis, who I met in India, has put some of her photos up on her Live Space, here, which include some featuring James and I. We're looking... well... like... James and I usually look.

Finally and most importantly (Please don't hate me for putting you down at the bottom) Mark Johnston, who looked after us throughout the Imagine Cup, has been writing some interesting stuff about his new job and uploading some India pics of his own.

A little hard work...

TJRandell — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 16:21:00 GMT

Well I think I’ll keep this entry brief as its back to the grind for me. With the Imagine Cup over; I’m left with two weeks to pull together my project dissertation and make it all shiny. The deadline’s the 31st of August but between now and then I need to find alternative accommodation near to my new place of work and move all of my stuff out of my current house. It’s certainly going to make for an interesting couple of weeks.

For those who might be interested I’m moving to the south of England to start work at a company called Content Masters who provide technical content to accompany the launch of new technologies for various IT industry players. It sounds like an interesting job, I’ve had a keen interest in education and promoting various technologies recently and the move to Content Masters seems to be the right step.

India

TJRandell — Mon, 14 Aug 2006 20:30:00 GMT

Well, it’s been some time since I blogged.

Shame on me!

I’ve just arrived back in the UK after the Imagine Cup 2006 finals in India. Unfortunately for Team Three Pair we didn’t get through to the final rounds. On the other hand we did have a really amazing week!

There are various things we’ve all learnt from our experience out in India, some technical and some not. One of the most interesting things I heard someone say was that you should “let India happen to you.” That much is certainly very true. If you go out there with certain expectations you are bound to be disappointed in one way or another. The thing that struck me most was the existence of extreme poverty and the way it co-exists so seamlessly with great wealth. One second you are in one of the most run-down, down-trodden areas you have ever seen, the next, looking at one of the most extravagant buildings you could hope to find. It certainly opened my eyes to the relative luxury enjoyed by us, the everyday folks, back here in the UK.

When we first arrived in India we were confronted by packs of roaming dogs, derelict buildings, people sleeping atop of buses, people sleeping on the pavements and cows which had fallen into open sewage works. It was a heart-wrenching and sobering experience which made me wonder what the rest of the week had in-store for us. As the night unfolded it turned out that the poverty we had seen in Delhi was everywhere, our trip to Agra certainly proved to be interesting, so much so that it had prompted one of the organizers to joke of an Xbox game based on it. Once I had gotten over the initial shock of seeing India’s median quality of life I was able to take everything in. I came to realise that my time there was an opportunity. An opportunity to take on board and understand just how much I take for granted in my everyday life and just how much I should be thankful for.

Aside from the personal realisations and cultural observations the trip has provided, It didn’t stop there. The competition itself was fantastic, despite being knocked out fairly early on, the experience was amazing. A mixture of fear, tiredness and adrenaline certainly makes for an interesting time.

Throughout the week there were various events planned for us which I thoroughly enjoyed; parties, restoration work and the Taj Mahal all added to the experience making it even better.

For those of us who didn’t go through from the early rounds it was a great chance to meet new people and catch up with those we’d met before. Everyone seemed to have a good time and the atmosphere made for a highly entertaining gig. If anyone’s out there who was in India and is now reading my random ramblings then please leave me a comment and say hi!

UTBots Return

TJRandell — Sun, 02 Apr 2006 21:53:00 GMT

Well this entry is being posted a little later than anticipated, sorry to anyone out there who may or may not have been interested.

On Wednesday 29th March, Andy and I, working with Darren McKie, organised and held another Unreal Tournament coding competition. For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, check out my previous blog entries.
This time round Darren came up with the brilliant idea of a challenge based competition. The challenge, to defeat his custom made ‘house-bot’.
Ripper, the bot, was left running on the competition server for a couple of weeks prior to the event and competitors were able to put their own bots in to the arena to practice for the big day. Darren was confident that his bot was good enough to fend off the others; so much so that he invited a ‘three of their bots versus one of his’ format. Would Ripper be as good as he claimed? Could the students create three bots that could work together and take him down? Only time would tell.

So, we set up, made sure people could connect to the server properly from the lab and away we went. There were less students taking part this time round, but that was only due to the imminent coursework deadlines that were looming over all those who hadn’t yet finished. Despite this the event went very smoothly, everyone worked well with Visual Studio C# Express, and some pretty good bots were thrown into the arena.

After much fun and games it became apparent that Darren had developed the superior bot. Ripper was lethal in combat, predicting the movements of its opponents and making sure that there was a minimal chance of being hit by enemy fire. The entrants had a good shot at it but in the end Ripper was just too good.
With the competition over and prizes dished out we had unfortunately reached the end of our final MSP coding competition. Next year, with any luck and a bit of help, someone will take on the UT Bots and use it just as we did, to make coding fun.
Who knows maybe next year someone will actually manage to beat Ripper :)

Imagine Cup UK Final 2006: From Hull and Back

TJRandell — Mon, 13 Mar 2006 01:27:00 GMT

WARNING: This Blog entry is rather long!

The Imagine Cup UK 2006 finals were held down in Reading on Friday 10th of March. In attendance teams Key Pair, ALPS, Helix, Lost Boys, Healf Conscious, Salveo, CheeseEaters, Medaware, Ariel and Three Pair. As I’ve mentioned previously Rob, Andy and I had spent a fair amount of time trying to get some really enthusiastic and dedicated students together from Hull. We felt more than a little delighted when we found out that of the ten finalists; four teams where from, or involved, students of Hull University.

On Thursday 9th March, at 11.30am, teams CheeseEaters, Medaware, Ariel and Three Pair, accompanied by mentors Rob Miles, David Grey and Ian Kelwick piled onto a coach and set off on the five hour journey down to Reading. Plenty of fun was had along the way and a great deal of Nintendo DS action took place.

We eventually arrived at the Hilton hotel in Reading where we quickly settled in and got ready for the evening event that had been organised for the finalists. As the night went on we were served some rather tasty curries, especially the Salmon, followed by some delicious desserts. After dinner we all had a few more drinks and took part in an ‘Australian’ quiz, it was great fun. At around 10.30pm, myself, and fellow team mates, Andy Sterland and James Lissiak, decided to call it a night and returned to Andy’s room to go over our presentations again. Firstly we needed to iron out a few issues with the two minute version; this was a major priority, if we couldn’t articulate the problem we wouldn’t be getting very far. By 11.30pm we were confident that the material we had was good enough to successfully deliver our point. We then did some more work on the ten minute version, just in case we got any further. By 1am we were happy and ready for bed, we definitely needed some rest before the big day.

Friday 10th, 6.30am, I was the first of Team Three Pair to awake. A shave and a shower later and I was ready to get practicing the presentation again. Eventually all three members of the team were up and sat having breakfast, it was really daunting when the other teams came down wearing shirts and ties, they certainly looked very professional.

So after much fun the day before; it was now down to the real business, to compete and hopefully win the UK final. We all piled onto another coach and set off for Microsoft, Reading. Plenty of things took place during the day, I won’t go over it all; this entry is already pretty long as it is. Basically the events of importance were; the two minute poster presentations, the ten minute group presentation and the results of the competition.

The first stage of the competition was a presentation, to the judges, of our poster and our idea. The carefully prepared version we already had was scrapped roughly fifteen minutes before our session. I had been asked to go upstairs and do a video interview to express my feelings about the support we get at Hull, which never actually happened as the crew had to dash off to cover something else. When I eventually met back up with Andy and James they’d decided it was best to do the presentation in a more relaxed way. We were just going to deliver a more casual and to the point show, it was really important that we got across the impact that our application could have on people who really need it. We stood in front of our poster, the judges approached and we began.

Andy delivered a very passionate message, I love the way he throws himself into it, he deserves a great deal of respect, we all believe in our application very strongly but Andy really lets it show. I then started to go over my area of the project but had a sudden mental block at the very last second, James picked up on this and flawlessly covered as he went onto his own material, I really should get him a drink to say thanks for that. The judges had several questions, all very interesting; they certainly gave us something to think about. When it was over we were all really proud of ourselves and started wandering around again anxiously waiting for the announcement of the three teams that would be going on to do a ten minute presentation.

After a short presentation on something that, to my shame, I didn’t really pay much attention too because of nerves, the top three teams were announced.

Team Medaware of the University of Hull.

Team Ariel of the universities of Durham, Hull and Manchester.

Team Three Pair (That’s us!!!) of the University of Hull

It was amazing, whatever happened it would be a team from Hull going on to the World Final in India. Truly breath-taking stuff if you ask me.

So we were quickly whisked out of the room and taken off to our own areas where we had one hour and thirty minutes to prepare our ten minute presentation. We had a grand total of four ‘run through’ attempts. One was on our own and three were with Rob watching. During one of the attempts a film crew came in and filmed us laughing and making mistakes, they even asked us a few quick questions, it was getting serious now and my mind was turning to jelly. A few bangs of my head on a table later and I was back in action. Mark Johnston came and watched us go through it offering some really valuable encouragement, thanks go out to him; he really was great.

As we went on Rob had a few modifications he thought might help us out, we axed a hugely technical two minute section; it was boring. Unfortunately for James it was his section. So with only half an hour to go James had to learn some entirely new material, poor guy. Kudos to Rob though it certainly made the presentation more concise and less boring.

BANG!!!!

Time was up…. Unfortunately for us Andy had randomly chosen a card with the number one written on it…. This meant that we were up first, gulp!

We moved to the front of the presentation room, no spectators were in there yet, thank god! We were given a great last minute tip by Kevin McDaniel; if you go wrong, they don’t know you’ve done it unless you let them know. Genius!!! It is absolutely one of the most important things I have ever been told about presenting…. And before you think it; No imagining the crowd naked doesn’t help… especially at a programming related competition!
We started setting up and then I realized that I’m not very good at projecting my voice, what if people couldn’t hear me? I turned around to find a man stood there with three sound-packs Hurray!!! Perfect timing, one less thing to worry about!
All set, we waited as people filed back into the room, there was more than I remembered from before but rather oddly enough I wasn’t feeling too nervous now. Everyone seated; Mark introduced us and Andy kicked off the presentation, man he’s good at this stuff, it was at this point that panic hit me, what if I went wrong? What if I couldn’t speak?

BANG!!!

It was my turn to present, inside I was terrified but apparently on the outside I looked calm and collected, how odd…. I started talking, wham, I forgot to mention WinFX and XAML, oh well it was too late now; they were probably only buzz words anyway. A minute or two later I was done and handing over to James. With my fingers crossed I watched him as he started his new stuff; was he going to forget it all? Like hell he was! He played it cool and calm and did the team proud. Andy rounded the show off and we faced a few questions from the judges. That done we were asked to leave the room as the next team went in to do their thing.

The second we stepped out of the room we had a photographer taking our pictures, he was a nice guy and he stopped to tell us that he thought our application was a great idea; he knew what we were trying to do and had personal family experience of the problems we were addressing. This was really quite moving; to think that he really identified with us felt great. After a few pictures with our poster it was back to the film crew and more questions.
Finally we were let free to wait for the other two teams, I felt so relieved it was over; we sat down and relaxed until everyone had finished and the audience had left the room. During the thirty minute wait for the judges we got some feedback from mentors, audience members and friends, apparently they were impressed. Slowly people started heading back into the room and we were instructed to sit on the front row. The judges were ready to deliver their verdict, had we done enough? Who knows? It was anyone’s game, the other two teams had some really good ideas, was ours good enough?
Eventually after what felt like an eternity Matthew Bishop came to the stage, made a short speech and started announcing the third place team, it was Team Medaware, these guys are a great team of first year students who really did a top class job; they got a rather nice MP3 player and earned the University £750 for academic use.

This of course meant that it was all down to Team Ariel and us. Matthew held out for a while but finally announced the second place team, Team Ariel. They were a great bunch with a great idea and won a cool digital camera and some money for the Universities they each represented.

So we had won, my mouth had fallen open and I had spent a few seconds catching flies before I realised what had just happened, I was stunned and really didn’t have a clue what to say. We were called up to the stage, there was some vigorous hand shaking and we were presented with a framed certificate, an X-Box 360 Premium pack with Amped3, Project Gotham 3, Kameo, an extra wireless controller and finally a giant plane ticket. Wow, I can honestly say I have never felt so stunned or amazed in my entire life. From then on it was a whirlwind of activity, photos, more film crew questions, a champagne celebration with a big chocolate cake that we didn’t actually get to eat because we had interviews with the press. It was great!!!
As the event wound down and celebrations came to a close we said goodbye to the Microsoft staff and climbed aboard the coach again. We were all taken to TGI Fridays as a treat for doing so well, it was good to finally have a sit down and rest for a while. Of course what would we have done without the giant balloon hats we were made to wear and the song the entire place sang for us… Some days just get crazier and crazier! After a great laugh we all piled back onto the bus for the final time and headed off on the rather long journey home.

So, now that we’re back in Hull, what’s next? Firstly we need to thank Dr Paul Dark for the unbelievable support he has, and still is, giving us, we owe him more than a few drinks me thinks. This project would never have got this far without him.

For us though I believe the best way to describe our schedules for the foreseeable future is that they consist of meetings, meetings and one hell of a lot of hard work. But hey what does hard work matter? It’ll all be fun in the end, especially India!!!

Imagine a Cup....

TJRandell — Thu, 16 Feb 2006 04:20:00 GMT

Today Rob Miles, Andy Sterland and I held a little meeting/workshop for the students here at Hull. Our aim was to get more students interested in entering for one or more of the invitationals. Andy and I arrived very early and decided to have a little meeting/discussion of our own over at the pub, where we had a few snacks and went over the plans we've got for future MSP events/targets. After the pub we headed on over and set up for the session.
I have to admit we had only expected a few people to turn up as we hadn't heard much talk of anyone wanting to enter. We were pleasantly surprised when three people came wandering in. You might say, however, that we were over the moon when the room quickly filled up with eighteen students all wanting to know more. After an hour of chatting there had been a lot of interest shown for the SDC and Project Hoshimi; at the end one student even approached us to ask us whether we thought his idea for an SDC entry was any good. In both mine and Andy's opinions it certainly has a great deal of potential and it would be really good to see it fly.
We reminded the attendees to register for the competitions and most of them said that they had already registered on the website, as far as I know there were a further three registrations today and hopefully more to follow.

The thing that always seems to be a problem with this kind of event is getting people interested, getting people to want to join in, today was a really great sign of the enthusiasm here at Hull. Fifteen of the eighteen attendees where first years and the other three where second years, it's really encouraging to see that even in their first year, students are willing to get out there and take part in things, who knows maybe one of the teams will be jetting off to India.

Bots Bots Bots

TJRandell — Sun, 12 Feb 2006 22:39:00 GMT

We've been at it again here in Hull, on the 8th of February myself, Andy Sterland and James Lissiak held a competition in the games lab. This time entrants had to develop a Bot for the game Unreal Tournament using C# and Visual Studio Express. The day was a great success with loads of students and staff turning up to take part in and watch the fun.
There was pizza, drinks and prizes available for all and the day went relatively smoothly. There was however a tense half hour during which myself and Andy started to worry that things were going wrong; bots were being disconnected from the server for no apparant reason. Despite alot of stress testing over the week previous we had never seen this behaviour and had no explanation for it other than a change in the infrastructure of the network that we didn't know about. Just as we were going to move to our fallback plan the uni staff (Rob Miles, Darren McKie) came up with the answer, order was restored soon after. It turned out that the VirtualPC image we were using was setup with a RealTek adapter for its networking, this was resulting in replicated MAC and IP addresses and a rapid kick from the server for those clashing. A quick change of settings to shared(NAT) soon had the server populated with battle hungry Bots. It just goes to show that no matter how prepared you think you are, there's always something that can pop up and mess with your mind.

Two hours, and a million questions later the final rounds of the competition began. There were too many entrants for the server to handle them and so the first stage of the competition consisted of two ten minute rounds of 'Deathmatch' one with one half of the entrants and the other with the other half. The top four Bots from each of these rounds then went on into the final round.

The Final turned out to be a tense and extremely close match. with only one point between first, second and third place (18,17,16) check out http://www.hullmsp.org.uk/Events/UTBots.aspx for a list of the winners and a few photos.
The overall winner walked away with a Game Boy Micro and a King Kong game. If only I could have entered....

As the event ended and people + prizes started to leave the room we got some feedback on the event. Everyone said that they had enjoyed it and would come along to another, infact we've received several requests for various other events including some UTBot rematches. Time and workload allowing we're going to have to see what we can do.

Maybe if there's some rematches Andy, James and I will see how our test bots do against the number one :D

Rotor and Out

TJRandell — Thu, 01 Dec 2005 21:47:00 GMT

Finally after three months of attending the Maintaining Large Software Systems module of my course; I've finished. Handed in the ACW at 7am came home and went straight to bed, I've not been awake very long now, but I appear to have missed daylight.... It's like living in a world of enternal darkness.
Anyhow, we had to edit the SSCLI JScript compiler so that it took in a valid JScript and then converted it to an equivalent file. The process had to replace all for loops, forin loops and do while loops with the equivalent whiles and all switch statements and conditionals with the equivalent if-elses. The output file needed to compile on a limited JScript compiler which could only handle the while and if-elses.
It took quite some time but it eventually got done thanks to the wonders of Reflection and ToString()s or GetCorrectString() as they were renamed in the implementation.
I learnt tonnes of stuff throughout the whole thing, mostly technical stuff like the power of Reflection and how the JScript compiler works, having never done much with compilers that was a real benefit. However theres always more to life than just technical stuff, by doing this module I managed to get some real experience of the randomness of a customer. Every week something would change, every lecture a new method of possibly implementing it would arrise. Some people panicked, others complained. The whole way through the lecturer made it perfectly clear that he wasn't going to make us do it his way, we had to decide for ourselves he was just going to suggest possible routes. This point didnt always sink in with people and at one stage the lecturer threatened to teach us how to make a custard pie. The complete irrelevance was hillarious and it brought home the nature of the course, to make us think, do things ourselves and not to keep pestering people every five minutes, we wont be able to in the real world.

Express Launch Party

TJRandell — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 17:24:00 GMT

Ok, thanks to a tonne of work its taken me a while to get around to writing this entry.
On the 23rd November we held our Express Launch Party at Uni. Myself and Andy arrived nice and early, dropped the prizes off in Rob's office and headed down to the lab that we'd booked to hold the event in.

When we got there we started setting up, Andy set up his laptop and got our server running, then we moved on to the lab PCs. Mark Bell and the Systems team had been really good to us and had set up Virtual PC on the machines with an image we had provided containing a C# Express installation. As far as i know this is he first time the department has used Virtual PC in the lab environment. Unfortunately when we came to start the image, it was read-only, changing this settting had no effect as we did not have the rights to make the change. A quick visit to the systems team later and they brilliantly popped down to the lab and set about fixing the problem.We'd been prepared for a few problems and had four hours left before the start. Time went by, we set up more stuff, the projector, the slides, we even rewrote some of our 'getting started guide'.
About an hour before kick off people started arriving, we were doing it in the Games Masters Lab so the first people were mostly Masters students who either sat watching us dash around or carried on with some of their coursework. Finally at 13:55 we had finished all the preparation and most people had arrived, eager to start the coding. By 14:05 we had between 35-40 entrants and 4 lecturers all ready to start. Andy kicked off with a presentation and then a quick introduction to what coding needed doing. Simply put, entrants had to fill in a method in a dll which would perform an evaluation of a game board and return an int with a value representing the potential of winning by capturing a given square. They then had to upload the dll to the server where it would be entered in numerous games with all of the other entrants. Players could then watch their entry fight it out, make modifications to their code and then upload their new entry, replacing the old one.
As people started coding we came across a few problems but nothing that wasn't ironed out within a few minutes. Everyone got going, some individually, some as a team, even the lecturers were huddled at the side discussing possible strategies. The whole thing was going really smoothly.
Throughtout the event a few pizzas arrived and everyone got to have a few breaks to eat and drink. Towards the end we kicked off the "Challenge Rob" portion of the competition, students who thought their implementation was good were able to challenge Rob Miles', it was a great laugh people gathered around to watch as Rob's AI walked all over nearly all of the challengers.
At 16:00 we called an end to programming and everyone had to upload their attempts. The tournament board was cleared and then the entries were set off playing against each other, everyone was gathered around the screen as over a ten minute period their attempts faught to win them a prize.
In the end a Masters student, David Waby, walked away with the top prize of Office 2003 Pro it was a real close thing though as his code and the second place entrants were virtually the same. There were a few other small prizes up for grabs, for the person who came last, a genuine Rob Miles purchased printer cartridge, one that he himself had bought but couldn't remember what printer he'd bought it for. This went to a guy who simply put a while true in his dll. Of course as each game had a time limit his entry simply sat there and timed out, that guy is now the proud owner of the mystery cartridge.
At the end of the event everyone said that they had had a great time, they even said theyd come back and do it all again. As people were starting to leave it meant there was only two things left for me to do. Hand out Imagine Cup leaflets and tidy the lab up.
An hour later we left, tired but more than happy, we'd had a great day as had everyone at the event, it had been a bigger success than we had ever imagined. One thing I will definitely take away from this is a respect for those who organise events on a regular basis, I take my hat off to those people they are indeed people to be admired.

The Road to Harrogate

TJRandell — Thu, 24 Nov 2005 05:51:00 GMT

Having sorted out a roadtrip to Harrogate to attend the Microsoft Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005 and Biztalk 2006 launch event. Myself and Andy arrived at the front entrance to the uni at 9am. It was quite pleasing to see that people were actually so eager to be there they had arrived earlier than we'd suggested. We had hired a 17 seater mini-bus, driven by none other than Rob Miles, there were 14 of us in total going, I'm sorta glad there weren't more there wasn't really the room.

Very soon everyone had arrived, had their names ticked off the list and we were all piling into the bus.
About two hours later we arrived in Harrogate, found the conference centre and promptly headed down into the green car-park as directed by our maps. However, the poor events staff had probably never dreamt that anyone would turn up in such a giant tank of a vehicle and unfortunately we nearly ended up turning the bus into an open-top, damn low car-park entrances. After a few laps around the block looking for a space, still in the bus of course, we eventually got directed to a nice spot directly outside the main entrance. They must have known we were students and that we wouldn't want to walk far.
We went in, had our passes scanned and very soon we were all stood in a large room surrounded by a free lunch and lots of Microsoft Partner stands. I was quite interested in the SAP stand but it didnt seem to have anyone or anything on it.
The event kicked off about 1pm; after the keynote it was time to head off to Chalk and Talk 2. I have to say the stuff covered in this session was pretty impressive. VSTO was good but I especially liked the ClickOnce deployment, I am seriously going to consider using that in my final semester project.

My second session was on SQL Server 2005 and although I don't know much about SQL Server It was blatantly clear why the new version is so good.

The third session, Visual Studio 2005, was definitely a good one, more talk of 'ClickOnce' and VSTO, a brillaint discussion of Team System. Coverage of testing, FX -Cop and NUnit stylee, it all looked great.

The fourth and final session covered some nice looking stuff, but having no experience in it to start with, I was a little lost at times.

The event finished, we headed out to the main hall, had a nice glass of wine and a chat with David Grey, then wandered through to the amin entrance where we were given a voucher for a complimentary copy of Visual Studio and SQL Server 2005.

Thank You!!

We all piled back into the bus, retraced our steps back, in the dark, to Hull and dropped everyone off at Uni. Pleased to be home they all wandered off to no doubt warm themselves by a fire somewhere.

For myself, Andy, Rob and Dave Waby, the night was still young. We headed of in the direction of Tesco on a mission to acquire a vast quantity of soft-ddrinks for the next days AI event. Half an hour later we were back at Uni hoisting 108 cans of drink, 2 tins of celebrations chocolates and numerous bags of snacks up to Robs office for storage until the next morning.
After saying good-night to Rob we headed home, tired and hungry Andy and I set off to the pizza shop, not to eat, but to place an order for 30 pizzas also for the next days event, the guys at the store are great, they even opened up early to do the order.
Returning home we had a final night discussion of the next days targets, I needed to finalize the Getting started guide, Andy needed to tidy up some of the software we were going to be using. Andy opted to go to bed and get up early, I opted to stay up later and get up later. So at 3am I finally dragged myself from my PC and into my bed. My only thought before I fell asleep; 'God, please don't let me sleep through my alarm!'

Let's do the time warp!

TJRandell — Thu, 24 Nov 2005 04:32:00 GMT

Ok, so it's taken me a while to get round to writing this, but I've been pretty busy doing my MSc courseworks and preparing for the last two days of fun. So let's do the time warp thing and cram the past month or so of my life into a few brief paragraphs.
I'm currently doing the .NET Msc in Distributed Systems Development at the University of Hull and I'm enjoying it thoroughly. Hull is a very misunderstood city, anyone who is looking for a Uni where they can actually get out there and do things should really consider coming here.
Anyhow the past few days have been both hectic and fun, we've had a good old road trip shortly followed by a damn good event, both of which I shall blog about shortly.
First off though I figured I should really mention a few of the fun filled things that have gone on in the lead up to today.

The most important thing has to be that on 31st of October I attended the Microsoft Student Partner event in Reading. It was a great bash, plenty to see and do, and all with a Halloween theme. I met some really interesting people and generally had a great time.

Prior to the MSP event; myself and Andy Sterland had been working on a plan, an event to celebrate the release of Visual Studio Express Editions. It had been decided that we would run a competition where students had to create their own AIs which would battle it out in some way, shape or form. The format chosen; we set off on a journey of fun, fantasy and alot of late night thinking/coding sessions fuelled by many a can of Coke.

First off we set a date, 23rd November, we put together a site, started planning the implementation and two weeks before the day we released details of the event to the general Department of Computer Science community.

Time ticked on, people showed an interest, prizes got sorted. We were soon well on the way to completion. Somewhere along the way, during one of our 'Sit Downs', we discussed the possibility of getting a group of us from Hull and heading off to the Harrogate launch of Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005 and BizTalk 2006. Not wanting to make life boring we let one thing lead to another and soon Andy had sorted some much appreciated passes for the event, I'd gathered together some of the MSc students, and with the help of the department we had hired a minibus.

So, after much deliberation and many late nights we were soon there, the launch trip (22nd November) followed by
the AI event (23rd November). More on these events to follow!!