Omega Sektor Closes

CompSoc's first gaming trip of the year was a tour of Omega Sektor, followed by 10 hours of gaming. About 30 members showed up and everyone had a great time - clearly the long hours I put into getting sponsorship for CompSoc were definitely a good investment of my time.

...the next day, Omega Sektor closed their doors and declared that they were in administration (leaving behind a large pile of Kit-Kats in the internet cafe area).

Apparently giving free LAN parties to large groups of students isn't a good business model eh? One to remember kids.

Now, what do I do with a hundred CompSoc t-shirts with the Omega Sektor logo nicely plastered onto them? Ideas?

In brief

New Tie-Dye Quartet website is looking beautiful and almost ready to go online.

The time difference between Britain and America is rubbish. Americans should stop being so damn lazy and get up at 8am GMT like the rest of us.

Have started swimming every day, either before, after or between lectures. All my muscles ache constantly.

On a diet, please don't bother leaving your opinions on the matter. Apparently I'm spectacularly good at losing weight though, might not need to be doing this for long.

I hate 9am lectures.

Am now playing squash once a week. Felt slightly guilty at playing 'how nastily can you return the tentative serves from the girls who've never played before' with the other guys at the training session.

First CompSoc trip to Omega Sektor was a success, had about 30 people show up to beat me at Warcraft III DOTA, COD4 and other such games.

I hate 9am lectures.

Gig 8.30pm tomorrow. Guitarist is meeting drummer 3pm tomorrow. I'm sure it'll be fine.

I'm excessively busy. Seriously. I bought TF2 a week ago and I haven't even had a chance to play it yet.

Freshers' Fair '08

Today was the chaos that is Freshers' Fair, where hundreds of impressionable new students see the Guild Hall in daylight (and free of vomit and alcohol) for the first time, and cyncical final year students try every tactic they learned in their Business Studies lectures (which, let's face it, had to come in useful somewhere) to con the freshers out of their student loans.

I was on joint duty for CompSoc and LMS (Live Music Society), so it seemed logical to have the two stalls placed next to one another with Guitar Hero inbetween them. Unfortunately this rather impacted on my work ethic at times, but at least I looked rock 'n' roll:



Actually, it turned out to be a great idea, though it drew a lot more geeks over than it did musicians.

We got about 50 members for each society, which wasn't quite as good as I hoped, but we should get a bunch more over the next couple of weeks for each society. Now if you don't mind, I'm off to practise Guitar Hero III religiously for the next 50 hours straight. There was a chap there who could beat me at Dragonforce, and that just won't do.

We also sold a few more Tie-Dye Quartet albums, which was nice. Might need to print more if this keeps up ;)

Microsoft Student Technology Day

I've resumed my duties as a Microsoft Student Partner for this year, and the second treat* was an expenses-paid trip down to London for me and some friends for a series of technology talks from a few folks from Microsoft, including the CEO himself, Steve Ballmer.

The whole shindig was in Festival Hall, and started off with the CEO of Huddle.net giving some advice on how to start and run your own little start-up company, drawing on his experiences from starting Huddle. There were some really useful tips about how to deal with venture capitalists, how to get funding in general and how to get help and support from various groups, one of which I can personally vouch for - Minibar London.

Next up was 'The Science Behind Live Search'. Unfortunately, we didn't actually get to see much science, but saw lots of cool usage trend graphs - bit scary to see how much you're monitored as you search away. Also interesting to note that 40% of searches end in failure, 50% of searches are just repeats of something that person has looked for before and that enough people actually use Live Search to be able to gather reliable statistics like these ;)



The third talk was the reason I turned up - Artificial Intelligence by Microsoft Research. Given that my final year project's going to have a bunch of that stuff in it, it was great to see it explained, and the various formulae put into context. Cool presentation too - mostly based around computer games.



Next was Steve Ballmer...and if you've never seen him present then:

a) Find a YouTube video
b) Find a YouTube video

Seriously, the guy is hilarious. 'Exuberant' doesn't come close to describing his style. He also had some very interesting stuff to say about the future of technology, and really knew his stuff well.

We rounded off the day with a presentation from my old colleague Paolo, who got to show off the trendy Surface, which even has a programmable API and emulator that'll be released to the public soon. Sweet.

Edit: Found a video of a bit of Paolo's talk:



Get in touch if you want any more detail on the above, or some contacts to talk about this stuff with :)

--

*_{The first treat was a nice shoulder bag filled with goodies and software...and four RJ11-RJ11 adapters. Note that that reads 'adapter' not 'extension'. If anyone can think of a use for a RJ11-RJ11 adapter, let me know.}

Omega Sektor Sponsorship

I headed out today to meet with some folks from Omega Sektor about partnering up a bit with my lovely Aston CompSoc. It seemed a fairly logical union, as we've got a bunch of geeks and they've got a hell of a lot of gaming PCs and consoles.

They gave me a quick tour of the place before we talked, and I was far more impressed than I thought I'd be. They're building a Wii area downstairs, with a bunch of large screens in cubicles for gaming fun. You know the only game that'll get played there is going to be Wii Tennis though.

There's also a giant-screen Wii (not sure how that works with the motion sensor), a PS2/PS3/XBox 360 console room and a whole bunch of rooms filled with gaming PCs, in varying formations for different team strategies - mostly shamelessly sponsored by big gaming companies that have little connection to the rooms.



After the usual kind of deal was agreed on (we promote their stuff, they give us free and discounted stuff and talk to our members), they even gave myself & a friend free run of the facilty 'till we got bored.

Great fun, highly recommended (and not just because they're now paying me to say that) - more details after our first CompSoc LAN there ;)

Sponsorship for CompSoc

I've recently been talking to some folks regarding corporate sponsorship for CompSoc (Aston Computing Society), to sit alongside our faculty affiliation. Wow.

_{To those who might be interested but can't be bothered reading the below:
Contact me if you know someone who might be interested in making a sponsorship offer.}

I still remember back when the society consisted of little more than Will & myself sitting in a pub and sketching some ideas for posters to put up. Putting them up on 60 floors of halls of residence, seven floors at University and three floors of the Guild was a long afternoon's work, and recovering from said work with a small tipple at the bar took us late into the evening.

Having spread the word, we invited everyone who'd shown an interest (or who had the fortune to see a poster) along to an initial meet-up in one of the lecture theatres. Not having any speeches prepared, we decided to kick things off with some XBox games - and soon found that the people who'd turned up were true geeks, with duct tape, creative wiring and balancing acts that would have given a Health & Safety executive a heart attack soon coming into play to get the games working.

I ended that first meeting with an oration that will be remembered for generations to come, and weeks later, we hosted our first LAN party - a rather dismal affair in possibly the least suitable room at University. The spirit was there though:


_{The first LAN}

Skip forward a few months and we had paid members (it's so easy to bully geeks out of money), equipment, LAN parties and even a committee of sorts (led by my fine self, of course). It was time for a new year, a lot more faces, and a lot more activities.


_{Committee - v1}

As I started my second year, fully signed up as a Microsoft Student Partner (aka slave), things really started to come together. Lots of people paid £10 and signed up at Freshers' Week, and then subsequently never talked to the society again. Perfect - lots of expensive equipment for the other folks to enjoy.


_{Secret of marketing to geeks: have a girl}

We went on adventures across the country, wrote three lines of code and thirty thousand lines of garbage on IRC and managed to play the odd game along the way too. The LANs were improving too everything worked, people arrived in their thousands and snack food reigned supreme as we stared wide-eyed at screens for all-night sessions.


_{'Wire tidies' never made it onto the shopping list}

In the year I've been away, things have gone from awesome to leet, and we're looking quite professional now. Professional enough to get interest from companies who want their branding all over us in fact. We're considering offers now, and if you know anyone else who might be interested, please tell them to get in touch, and we'll see what we think.


_{Looking good.}

Xx

Reading Half Marathon (aka: ouch)

So, yesterday was spent doing one of three things:

• Walking a few miles to collect/after returning the lovely rental car (Peugot 207)


• Sitting in a room, filled with geeks and gadgets, computers and consoles, eating junk food and playing games


• Driving aimlessly around the middle of England trying to get from one major city to another

I walked about 7 miles and got home at about half midnight.

Now, I'm not a morning person. So, waking up at half seven this morning to get myself showered and dressed for the Reading Half Marathon, I wasn't in the best state. Walking another three miles to get to the start line didn't help, and walking a couple more to sort out various registration things also hindered me a bit.

The Half Marathon (13 and a bit miles) started at 10:05. I was walking from one place to another from 8:15am until...10:05. Nice. It was also a surprise to me that there was no water at the start, so I ran the first three miles feeling very dehydrated. The crowds at the sides were fun, as were some of the novelty runners (Elvis had a mp3 player and some speakers) and the various bands about.

Over the 13 miles I discovered many things, and thought about many others. Most of the thoughts were something to do with "ouch", but that was fine as it was always a new place on my body - some of which I wasn't even aware could hurt previously to today.

One thing I thought about and never managed to think of a reasonable explanation for was the disbursement of crowds along the various pavements. Obviously some bunching near pubs and bands is to be expected but why, on identically residential streets, were there long gaps with barely any crowd, and then a large gathered crowd. Was this co-ordinated? Herd mentality? One to look into.

My key takeaway from the Marathon, the one thing I truly learned, was that the Government needs to give some more jobs to the unemployed. 'Morale workers' we could call them. These chaps would wander around the street giving support to various people walking past. "You're doing fine, it's 4pm, work's almost over". "Brilliant trousers there sir! Love it". That kind of thing. People would be a lot happier if we had these guys to cheer them on as they went about their day to day life, and it would be a lot more useful than simply giving them benefits.

As three hours in the bath didn't help, I'm going to try watching some more TV to soothe my aching limbs. It won't help, but I am becoming rapidly addicted to Lost. Just a pity that the TV's downstairs, and my legs aren't big fans of stairs at the moment. Think I'll polish my lovely new tin medal whilst I'm down there too.t

Oh and, did I mention the 3 mile walk back home? That's dedication. Dedication to acting like a student and refusing to either queue for a long time to get a shuttle bus, or pay for a taxi.

LAN!

Yesterday, Will and I headed off to Birmingham for Aston CompSoc's second birthday celebration - a LAN party. It's amazing to think that it's been two years since we sat in a pub and decided that Aston needed a computing society, and it's great to see how far things have come from those early days putting up posters around halls of residence offering people the chance to play some PlayStation games.

Still though, the biggest get-togethers and the most fun happen when it's time for LAN, and we thought we'd leave Reading, with it's 'professionals' and boring town centre and head up to Birmingham for some student fun.

As such, I headed off at 8am for a three mile walk to collect our rental car, and then drive us up to Birmingham. Unfortunately we neglected to take into account my complete and utter lack of any sense of direction. So, after a diversion towards Swindon, we continued up through smaller A roads all the way to Birmingham.

Despite all this, we were only an hour and a bit late - which was perfect as everyone was just finishing getting set up. As such, we avoided most of the: "Hey, you work for Microsoft...why can't I connect to the LAN?" type of questions.

There was much geeky fun & games, a Pac-Man birthday cake for CompSoc and even a pairs quiz. Will & I managed to double the score of any other team, being Kings amongst geeks, and won the grand prize of...some O'Reilly postcards and a craft magazine. They also offered us some MS t-shirts, but as I have 1,000 in my office, I declined.

Can't wait to get back to Uni and get properly involved with CompSoc and other such things next year...although I am having lots of fun here too :)

After all that, it was a 3 mile walk home from dropping the car off back at the rental place, at midnight. Not great when you consider what I did today...

On the road again

Sporadic blogging on my part is generally due to one of two reasons - either I'm doing very little of interest, or I'm doing a whole lot of fun stuff.

This week, I'm happy to say, has been the latter. I've been filling in for someone on the Inspiration Tour - a set of three hour presentations to students, with the aim of getting them enthused about technology in general, and showing off a heap of cool Microsoft stuff along the way. I was around to present on all the cool stuff in Silverlight - though I also gave a hand with XNA, and then with general questions on .NET and anything else which came up.

Yesterday I had the fun of presenting to a couple of hundred folks at my own University (Aston) which was great. I resisted drawing the New Aston Logo during a demo where I happen to say the line "obviously, you can see I'm not an artist in any way", as I was wearing my Microsoft hat, but it was very tempting. They've got the logo up outside the main building now too, and it looks simply horrible. I cried inside.

Things went pretty well there, people seemed to enjoy themselves and feedback scores were pretty high - with some nice comments left about me (apparently I 'captivate the audience', don't you know). However, they could have gone a lot better - because although I, and the other guy filling in, really knew our stuff, we hadn't presented it to students before - and I'd not really spent much time with the slide deck and demos I was using.


_{Some might question the merits of my 'standing in the centre of the audience' presenting style. But it gets results.}

Today, on the other hand, over at Brunel University, went superbly - everything was smooth and slick and polished and feedback scores were through the roof. The half hour for Q&A at the end over-ran and we managed to handle all the tricky and technical questions superbly, if I do say so myself. And if I don't say so myself, the feedback forms certainly do.

Newport tomorrow, for the same gig, and then I'm done with that forever - which is a bit dissapointing, but given that I'm writing this from the office, having just finished a 'day's work - I won't be sad to see the back of this and have enough time to keep up with my day job.

Oh and Friday? Off to Seattle for 10 days with work. Things might be a bit quiet around here whilst I'm out there, but I'm sure I'll spam you once I get back.

Xx

Old School

So that letter to BT I wrote apparently made a few of you giggle - though I meant it as a mostly formal and standard complaint to them, not a rant. However, that led me to think that some of you might find it amusing if I did post up a few rants I've had from time to time. I can't actually find most of them at the moment (and many are lost in the archives of Imperial Conflict) but here's one from my old webspace.

In this, someone has dared to write in the student's newspaper (which I have clearly marked my territory when it comes to technology related articles) about my beloved CompSoc (over which I am supreme ruler and king - seriously, read the constitution, I am).

Here's the letter I sent to the Aston Times having seen the article.
Here's the article itself, with one or two annotations by myself. NSFW.

Also, whilst browsing through my old space, I found The Game - a HTML adventure I knocked up for anyone who ever used to play those old text based Adventure-style games in the old days. It's not easy, it's not finished and it's not fun, but it is funny ;) Don't use your back button.

LAN

Was absolutely awesome! Sleep patterns have been a tiny bit messed up since then, which is why I've only just woken up, but that's only to be expected.

I finished lectures on the Friday at 4pm, and straight from there went to organising things for lan - getting the monitors, t-shirts, forms etc. Rich was also a complete workhorse, he started driving people in the minibus at 3pm and wasn't back till about 8!

We had 5 challenges running for the lan:
1) Soldat knockout tournament
2) N time challenge (episode 13)
3) Plasma Pong knockout tournament
4) Twister - 2 scoring games each
5) Tron knockout tournament

And gave out six prizes:
1) Remote control car from Microsoft (really nice one)
2) Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Poker Set from Game
3) Courtney Love's diaries from XTaster - via Terra, who didn't want them in the first place but managed to win them back!
4/5) 10 day passes to WoW (heh)
6) A CD I'd found in the building

So, not all as high quality as you might have imagined. The gaming was great, we had UT2k4, BF2, Bloodmasters, Singstar, Guitar Hero, Smash Bro's and a bunch of other games all going, along with the tournaments. I brought my new DDR game too, but we never got around the playing that.

Great fun, and I'll link up the pictures as soon as they're hosted! :)

LAN This Friday!

Can't wait! For those of you who are coming, make sure you read the following asap, and in full.

LAN Notes

Better go prepare that presentation for Fujitsu now, off to Reading tomorrow to stay with Will, and then got my assessment day in Bracknell the day after.

LAN!

w00t - time for another CompSoc LAN methinks. And, whatever I think goes when it comes to CompSoc, given that I generally end up doing most of the work. I've decided to make the next LAN coincide with winter-een-mas, so that we can celebrate the festive season properly. It also happens to pretty conveniently occur after all our exams are out of the way too - which is when we'll need a bit of mayhem and fun.



Going to see if I can convince the uni to let us have a two nighter this time, starting around 8pm on Friday the 26th of January, and finishing some time very early on the Sunday morning, with a roomful of bleary eyed gamers stumbling onto the minibus. Microsoft have generously offered to give us a bit of sponsorship as usual - they'll be donating a rather cool prize, and might be helping out with the food budget too. In return I'll be running a Microsoft-themed competition as part of the usual prize tournament, along with a couple of other things I've got up my sleeve. I'll also get everyone brainwashed for the Vista Launch Event too, so that I'm not speaking to a lecture theatre full of thin air when launch day comes.

If you're at Aston, then there's no excuses not to come along, and if you're not, then follow the link above to find out some more information on winter-een-mas and see if there's any events near you to celebrate the holiday!

Xx

CompSoc down

Yeah yeah, I know the Aston CompSoc webby is borked, don't go whining at me or Stef though, looks like Tim's server has upped and died. He's pretty good at data security though so I doubt we'll have lost any/much data - it'll get fixed whenever I manage to get hold of him.

As a fairly well known deity once said (wrote) - Sorry for the inconvenience.

Update: Apparently Tim had a bit of hardware failure (wink wink nudge nudge) - webby will be back up when he can get his er, server, up again. Ahem.

XNA Launch

A bit late posting this one I know - but in my defence, I didn't have a blog before! So anyway, last Wednesday, a few of us (Dean, Max, Terra, Yam & myself) went off to Warwick uni to see Microsoft's latest release - XNA. Actually, let me correct that - Max, Dean and Yam went to see XNA, Terra came along for the free stuff and I went there in the (admittedly unlikely) hope that Peter Molyneux would ask me to marry him.

We left nice and early, and got to the building in Warwick with minimal casualties (Terra sustained a minor head wound) - and the first thing I noticed was...there was a *massive* wall inside the building that appeared to be completely dedicated to Deep Purple. Now, anyone that has had the misfortune to mention Deep Purple to me will know that I can reel off the odd fact about them, but in addition to a plethora of album titles and members of the band I recognized on this wall, I'll admit there was the odd phrase or name that I couldn't quite place. I'm completely baffled as to precisely why Warwick opted to build this monument to the classic rock legends - but kudos to them all the same.

After breakfast and playing around on the 360 pods dotted around the room, Andy Sithers opened up the event with a brief overview - during which we found out that we'd all be getting $400 worth of XNA Creator's Club memberships, and that 5 of the 150 or so people at the event would be going home with a brand new XBox 360 and games. Seriously, you've got to love Microsoft events - so many freebies, I ended up with about 4 t-shirts and a very thick book on .NET.

Chris Satchel and Mitch Walker, who'd flown over from Seattle for the event were up next, and they gave us a really good insight into how XNA worked, and why it had been developed. The entire audience was completely hooked by the end of these two talks, which made the rest of the day (until the deity that is Peter Molyneux anyway) a bit redundant. From watching these two guys present and code, and seeing some of the demos everyone firmly believed that they could go home and write Mario, or at least Space Invaders within a couple of hours (it's actually a fair bit harder than that, but is honestly so much easier with XNA than coding direct through C+).

Next up was Nick Burton from Rare, and given that I've applied for a placement with those guys, I shouldn't badmouth him, but great speaker though he is, I think he went far too much into graphics considering the audience he had, and I'm sure most of us were pretty lost when he started getting excited about implementations of shader languages using XNA. Still though, he got his point across - you really can get extremely close to the machine using XNA, it doesn't take away any of the functionality of native code.

Had a kickass buffet lunch after this, and met up with some of the other MSPs who'd attended the event, chatted to them for a while - and then wandered over to find the MSP bosses - Stu Leddy and Matt Duffin. I brought my little group along too, to get me some brownie points for signing them up to the Imagine Cup, and managed to con them out of some cube t-shirts for us all.

Next up was Rob Miles, a lecturer, whose presentation on 'teaching with XNA' was pretty fun, but a bit redundant for the student percentage of the audience - a pity really, as the student percentage was well over 75 that day. And finally...Peter Molyneux. For those of you who didn't spend your childhood cooped up in a small dark room, with only your Amiga powerbox for heat and your TV for light - this is the man who founded Bullfrog Studios (Populous, Syndicate, Theme Park), and then sold it and founded Lionhead Studios (Black & White, Fable). He actually got Populous up on screen and told us the story of how it was coded, which was a real treat, and then gave a really high-quality overview of how XNA would allow creativity to flow much more freely in games now, and also a good few tips on how to get into the industry.

The event finished up with some more goodies being given away, before we flew off home. Lots of fun was had by all, and I'll be knocking something up in XNA when I'm done working on my Imagine Cup entries for you all to play with.

Xx