Happi Birthday Eli

I would like to wish a Happy Birthday to my niece Eli who turned four today.

This weekend

I came back to Bradford this weekend. Last night I went to Yeadon Tarn with my Parents. This is a walk we all enjoy doing. Last night we went there because all the rain we have had has made everywhere else all boggy and because I am wearing sandals because of my toenail., I can't really go there. Anyhoo, I took my newest digital camera out (a 6.0 megapixel Traveller unit with a 3X optical zoom from Aldi) and got some snaps.

When I get round to it, I will post all the digital photos up on the blog. In the mean time, you can look at them by clicking on my Flickr photostream

It’s good to touch the green green grass of Home

Yes, I am a Country & Western fanatic. Today I came home. It was difficult though as I seemed to have acquired a lot of stuff. We dropped a load off at Withernsea on Wednesday, then we came back to Chez Student for the rest off the stuff that was coming back to Chez Wakefield with me. Mum and Dad took an Estate car's worth of things home and I took a bag with wheels and a sports bag (both full) on the train and came back home. Useful things Young Person's Railcards; I was able to travel from Hull to Leeds for £9.50. Anyhoo I'm home now. It's strange using my new PC on a fast Internet connection. Mum's 8MB broadband is up and running and working like a drea.

Microsoft T-Shirt

Something I forgot to mention Yesterday, because I had blogged previously about Slide 7, I was given a free Microsoft T-shirt. I am in the middle of packing because I am going home. I have packed most of my things but have still got quite a bit to do. The next challenge then is fitting it all into the back of a Volvo V70 estate.

Microsoft Slide 7 Conference

Today I was down in Reading for Slide 7, which I have been looking forward to since I booked my place on it in May. We went down on Rob's magic bus last night, and stayed the night at Travelodge Reading M4 Eastbound. I had booked this for £15 for the night as they had a special offer. The room I got was fantastic. It was very large with a double bed and a bathroom. I made a mistake this morning however as I went down to the Moto service station which adjoined the Travelodge and spend £7.49 on a full English and about £3.12 on a cup of tea! I don't know how service stations can charge so much for breakfast. I realise prices are higher because of the long hours people have to work in Services, plus travelling for employees is more difficult than for most, plus the fact that it is a mere convenience, so I suppose I realise why they can charge so much.

Anyhoo, I went back to Travelodge's main reception to meet the others, and it was back on the Magic Bus for the conference. We arrived and had complementary tea, coffee and biscuits before starting the conference. The first talk was by Mark Quirk. This was an introduction to the day. His keynote contained information about Web 2.0, its applications, and a bit on the future of Web, such as going beyond the browser and Web 3.0. He showed us some samples of Web 2.0 in action. These included Windows Live! Maps and HMV's media player. After this talk, we took a comfort break, where there were more refreshments. I then went to the Introduction to ASP .NET by Ed Dunhill. This talk was good with demonstrations using Microsoft Expressions Blend. It was then time for Lunch, after which I went to Rob's talk. As usual Rob delivered the talk while cracking a joke on average every two minutes. He demonstrated how to create a web service using Visual Studio 2005 and created two small programs, one which would send a message and the other which would receive the message and display it on-screen. When this program worked, we all applauded wildly, apparently for no real reason other than so the noise would spill into the next theatre. Rob was demonstrating how web services could be used in mobile development (or not). When his talk had finished,Martin Parry came and talked about Windows Live! Services including Virtual Maps, Hotmail and Live Spaces, Microsoft's blogging and social networking service, similar to MySpace. After another comfort break, we all came together for the last talk which was on Microsoft Silverlight by Mark Johnston. This talk was one of the most interesting as we were given the chance to win a graphics tablet, plus Silverlight seems to me to be a cause for excitement in itself because it looks to be directly competing with Adobe Macromedia Flash. One of the things that Silverlight can do is to stream High-Definition Full-screen videos, something that Flash seems to be lacking in at the moment. One of the people there asked whether buttons in Silverlight applications would be able to get the focus using the tab key. This is something I am interested in as I want Silverlight to be accessible to the blind and partially sighted because from past experience, Flash is almost totally inaccessible to those people. At the moment, however Silverlight, cannot create applications whose buttons can get focus, although it should be implemented by the time Silverlight 1.0 comes out. If not, it will be available in Silverlight 1.1 which should follow shortly afterwards. While you can only write Silverlight 1.0 applications in JavaScript, Silverlight 1.1 will utilize the .NET Framework for development, so you can write Silverlight solutions in any .NET programming language, including Visual Basic, C# or C++, and more.

After the final talk, it was time for a barbecue tea, and after a quick competition to win some last minute goodies, completing the evaluation forms, and receiving a goodie bag in return, and the winning of the Microsoft T-shirts, it was time to board the Magic Bus and head back home.

A good day was had by all who attended, and I was able to talk to one of the Microsoft staff about going into access to computers for the Visually Impaired. It seems that I need to contact Redmond as Microsoft UK do not deal with that. I will make contact with Redmond over the summer.

I must say that the staff at Slide 7 were most helpful. When I pointed out that I was Visually Impaired and could I have a seat on the front rowm they were more than happy to oblige. I was also helped to the food and was given help to find a lunch bag. Just to say thank you to everyone at Microsoft UK Campus for the help I recieved today. If the conference is held next year I am definitely going down.

Windows 98 is potentially more advanced than Vista

Well I wouldn't go as far as that, however some aspects of handling of CD and DVD-ROMs seem to be better in 98, Me, 2000 and XP than they do in Vista, for example, if you are browsing the contents of a disc in Explorer in Win 98/Me/XP/2000 and you decide to eject the CD without first closing the Explorer window, Windows does that for you. In Vista, however the window stays open when the CD is ejected, making things potentially messy when you try to recommence browsing. I know it's silly to try and browse a CD which isn't there but wasn't it so much easier that when you ejected a CD, Windows took care of the rest? Apart from that, Windows Vista is a fantastic operating system.

An update on The Old Waiting Game

Today, I finally had my toenail delt with, about three months after my ringing up for an appointment. I was in a BitTorrent of pain this morning after the anaesthetic wore off but I took a couple of painkillers and they did the trick (well that could have been the couple of Belgian Chocolates that my housemate left me, eaten well after the painkillers).

I am really looking forward to hobbling to Slide 7 on Monday at Microsoft UK HQ in Reading. It should be a good day. I never did consider getting into Web development but it could help me with disabled access to computers, talking of which, Disability Services at Hull have realised that they need ZoomText 9.1 as the university is planning on deploying Office 2007 on it's student network, and ZoomText 9.0 does not follow the cursor in Word, meaning you have to manually move the mouse pointer to where the cursor is. This said, and the fact that I am using the copy of Office 2007 Ultimate that I acquired for Microsoft when they gave a talk at Hull University, the Disability services have ordered me a copy of ZoomText 9.1 from Sight and Sound. Hopefully Jacobs Well will give us the funding for it.

Day on Windermere

Today, I was woken up by staff member Jeff singing "Oh what a beautiful morning, oh what a beautiful day" at some unearthly hour. After a bit of mumbling and generally waking up, I went down for Breakfast. I have never had panneau chocolat, bacvon and eggs on something which is akin to a large saucer before, but hey - at least the food was good. We then went to Tower Wood, where our boats are, and I spent the mo0ning kayaking. I need to regain a bit of confidence that may have been lost in the last year. After a morniong of kayaking from one side of the lake to the other, we breaked and had lunch, after which I went in a raft of three canadian canoes, which had been tied together by string and to a wooden pole. Once we had reached Tower Wood, we all decided to jump in the lake for a swim. It was very cold at first but we warmed up. Once we had showered at Tower Wood, we headed back to the hostel. I think tonight we are going to the pub. What a good end to the day.

Going to the lakes

Today I decided to go with the Outlook Trust (the charity that used to be a subsiduary of Temple Bank www.theoutlooktrust.co.uk)
to the lake district. I go0t up bright and early to head to Hull to buy some sandals for going on the lake with. After the sandals were bought, I headed for Hull Station to catch a pink train to Leeds. With my Young Person's railcard this cost me £11 for an Open Return ticket, which means I can head back to Hull anytime until July 7th. I was supposed to meet someone in Leeds but unfortunaqely they had a chain of disasters (déjà vu?), so I waited round Leeds station for a while. Leeds Station is fantastic as everyone is very friendly there. Once I met the person, about four hours later, we caught a train to Bingley station where the Outlook Trust picked us up on the magic bus. They took us to Windermere Youth Hostel and that's where I am now, writing up my blog on a pay-per use Internet PC.

It is very nice to catch up with all my old friends from Temple Bank School, and meet a few new faces too.

Rip-Off Britain hits the Blind

Today I decided to go about obtaining a quote of how much an upgrade to ZoomText 9.1 would cost. I went to AI Squared's web-site to find that an upgrade would cost me $99 (around £50). Great – if I lived in the USA. I followed the advice on AI Squared's page to obtain a quotation from my local ZoomText dealer – i.e. Sight and Sound, a dealer who specializes in equipment for the visually impaired – also where my laptop, Opti Verso, All-In-One printer/scanner/copier, Office software and ZoomText 9.0 came from. They gave me a quote of £90. I asked why it was so high (almost double the price of the American version), and they said it was because of customs and excise and the shipping and all the other bureaucracy and taxes it hikes up the price. I feel SO tempted to use my favourite P2P or Torrent service to get ZoomText 9.1 but I can't as I'm not the keenest on Pirated software anymore

Finishing Touches

All through last week, I added the finishing touches to my new PC. I upgraded the RAM from 1.5GB to 2GB, making it run a lot quicker. I have also upgraded the hard disk configuration. I have removed my 120GB IDE hard disk and installed it in a USB 2.0 enclosure so I can use it as an external hard disk. I originally added a 400GB S-ATA drive but it used to make clicking noises when shutting down and it used to freeze the PC for about thirty seconds during the POST sequence (Power On Self Test, a procedure all PCs undertake to check everything is working okay. Most modern PCs usually display a manufacturer's logo when doing this). It was also extremely noisy. I went back to PC World to replace this with another hard disk of the same model, only to find that I was having the same problem. I ended up this disk back and opted instead for a 320GB IDE hard disk. I know I really should start using S-ATA now but I have had a bad experience with it so it will take me a while to go back to it. I seem to have cracked it now though. I have installed my 320GB IDE hard disk as the master and have set my 160GB hard disk to slave. I have more space than I used to so that is okay, and it is good to know that my PC will support SATA II if I need it to. I also had to send the original ASUS PCI-Express graphics card back to PC World because the bearings were going in the fan and it was making a buzzing sound, which was not very attractive and, in fact, very distracting. I replaced it with a PNY card from PC World which has exactly the same nVidia chipset (7300 GS) and it has VGA and DVI outputs, as well as S-Video. The important thing is that it doesn't use a fan. It uses some sort of heat diffuser instead, so it makes my PC whisper quiet again. I seem to have got my PC running much faster now though. Everyone was right – 1GB of RAM will just about let Windows Vista run with Aero, but if you want the best results, you are best going for 2GB.