A huge thanks is due to my most excellent friend Dan Palmer for a great weekend in Canterbury. During my time there, we attended a housewarming party, and after Jane joined us on Saturday, wandered around the beautiful city, visited the enormous cathedral, spent the evening in a local venue listening to country/funk bands and after one or two beverages ate a ton of fried chicken.
Can’t wait to do it all again some time soon!
Hurrah! Slides for my SkillSwap talk on XML and XSL for the Web are now up! They were created using S5: A Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System.
See them here: SkillSwap Slides.
Okay, so this post is a little late, but for those who didn’t know, Friday 2nd December saw the latest SkillSwap event hosted by none other than… me! The topic of the talk was An Introduction to XML and XSL for the Web, and took place in the BBC building on Queens Road in Brighton (the same Queens Road as Polar Central - see previous post).
It the first time I’ve given any kind of talk or presentation since Uni, so needless to say I was extremely nervous. However, with the encouragement of SkillSwap organiser Andy Budd and the ever enthusiastic web types that made up the ‘audience’, I soon began to actually enjoy myself. Being the worrisome type, I’d had all kinds of pre-event concerns - "Was the talk too niche?", "Was it too general?", "Would those in attendance know more about the subject than me?"… I needn’t have worried. Everyone there knew enough about XML to be interested, but not enough to defeat the point of the talk.
It was great encouragement when people started asking questions, and Paul commented that, during breaks and pauses, people were chatting amongst themselves about what they’d like to do with the technologies they had just been shown. Unfortunately, not quite everything went to plan, and I had to cut the presentation slightly short when a demonstration piece I’d prepared to show what can be achieved with XSLT just didn’t work. It was reliant on two things - a working web server that I had prepared on a USB key, and an Internet connection. We couldn’t get both on the same machine! Oh, well.
I thoroughly enjoyed giving the talk (I love being the centre of attention, really!), and was even more glad to hear that everyone there had enjoyed themselves, too. I can’t wait to see what the next SkillSwap brings!
The slides and a working version of the demonstration page should be available soon…
Subbuteo is back!
Yes, the game I spent many hours setting up, playing and throwing tantrums over as a boy (and that includes teenager) is now back on sale after being axed in 2001. It’s true! I saw an advert on Sky Sports the other day and everything!
The game itself remains laregly unchanged. However, gone are the endless accessories and teams that I used to imagine in my dream Subbuteo stadium. There are now just five products in the Subbuteo range - the ‘Dream Team Stadium’ set, and four ‘Skill Sets’ which contain 12 players, two special player bases, a spare ball, and some kind of practice device.
The biggest change is the players. No longer are they the pressed plastic gentlemen that looked like they were suffering from bad indigestion. Hasbro (the current producers of ‘buteo) have reverted to the original flat, card/celluloid players that were around from the 1940s to the 1970s.
(image pinched from littleplasticmen.co.uk)
This does seem a bit cheap compared to the figures that were used in Subbuteo’s heyday, but I don’t think I have a single team in my old collection that didn’t have at least one player with broken legs where I’d knelt on him, so I think this can be considered an improvement. Another improvement is the pitch tensioning system that pulls the corners out to flatten the playing field, which will certainly reduce the setup time (ironing the creases out of the old cloth every time I got it out of the box was a real pain!).
There is also another reason for the flat players. Rather than buying a whole team painted with the appropriate kit, players have photorealistic images of real players on them. These are supplied in packets, with a random selection in each box, presumably for Panini style playground swappage. These card players slot in to plastic player bases supplied with the basic ‘everything you need to play’ set.
The players appear only to come from real European superstar teams, so unfortunately I won’t be seeing a photoreal Kerry Mayo on any Subbuteo pitches (this year, at least!). It’ll be interesting to see how this new collectable concept works, and I hope it helps Subbuteo stay in toy shops for years to come.
At last I met little Max! He’s possibly the hairiest baby I’ve seen (although I haven’t really seen many babies so young), but he’s a handsome little chap never-the-less.
Here’s a picture of Max, being held by his Auntie Jane.
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