If I haven’t mentioned it before – I like sleep…..and I didn’t get much, a combination of a late night and early morning obviously means I was tired..

The first thing on the agenda was to go and watch the Macy’s Day Thanksgiving Parade, we were out the door by 8am and wondered around trying to find somewhere decent to watch from. The weather was nothing more than a typical Manhattan day from what I can tell, dull and pouring with rain so standing outside wasn’t the greatest thing (the result of this is that I now have a cold). We stayed for a few hours and then decided to go back inside and warm up, we were soaking and cold so it was a welcome event.

The next item on the agenda was to go into Times Square, we were warned about the amount of people that would be there but we weren’t prepared for the amount of people that actually were there, plus the weather was still an issue. We had two tasks in Time Square, the first was to find where the camera on www.earthcam.com was and the second was to find David Blaine. The first one was successful however finding David Blaine was a different matter, every cop we asked had no idea where he was and although we didn’t explore too much we still have no idea where he was hiding.

The final stop was to Ground Zero – the site of the World Trade Centre. It’s hard to believe that it’s a little over 5 years since I awoke to the breaking news, seeing it in real life after seeing it so many times on TV makes you realise just how much damage was done.

After we decided to go back and dry off and spend the rest of the evening getting over the days walking ready for another day, this time (we hoped) with better weather.

12 Hours….

Half a day….

That’s how long I spent sitting on a cramped coach, it’s one thing sleeping…I like sleep, sleep is good – boring – but good, dreams are good too, I have nothing against sleep, the only problem I have is sleeping in a moving vehicle with very little leg room and uncomfortable seats, consequently all of this put together – my demand for sleep and the reasons for me not to be able to sleep – means that little sleep was consumed on the journey.

The first coach driver we had was a pretty cool guy, but obviously on laws prohibit them from driving for 12 hours straight so we had to change drivers.

You would expect a person who was a coach driver to know how to drive a coach, or even how to start one, the first driver had to give the replacement a crash course in how to turn the ignition off of all things, and from what I can gather he was under the impression the first driver parked somewhere other than the ground….

Along the way we stopped off at the New Jersey Turnpike for breakfast and a rest from sitting down (we were about 30 minutes from the hotel, I don’t think anyone was in the mood to do very much else).

Our driver managed to excel even more and took about 15 minutes to find the hotel – driving down every road except the one he was supposed to and then managed to park in a place causing the maximum amount of disruption.

By the time we actually got to the West Side Y we only had about 45 minutes till the scheduled city tour, so we dumped our bags and cursed the fact that we hadn’t had any sleep.

The City Tour took a few hours and showed us some of the main parts of Manhattan, we stopped off at Greenwich Town and had a subway before starting the journey back to the hotel.

Some of you may know that on Thanksgiving Day there is a parade through Manhattan, the night before they blow up the big balloons that will be used the next morning…we found this out while wandering around and decided to ‘follow the crowd’ and take some photos of the balloon blowing ceremony.

More photos and commentry to come…

Yep, you read it right, I’m off to New York till Sunday.

It will be a well needed break, of course there is a list of places to see and take photos of, and of course there will be the usual funny videos and photos to go with them.

And of course I will have lots of photos to upload…

1x Canon EOS 350D + 2x 1GB CF Cards + Battery Grip = Lots and Lots of photos…

A few days ago me Lloyd and Shane went to the UNC Charlotte Vs Hofstra basketball game held here on campus.

The final score was UNCC 88 – Hofstra 82, here is the part that I would normally start talking about what happened during the game but I’m not really an authority on basketball so let’s just assume I’ve just given the play by play and you’re all informed about what happened.

As usual everything we go to include at least one crazy thing, it’s almost as if they throw it in with every ticket they sell to us, I can’t say I’ve seen the words ‘Buy one ticket get a crazy person free’ or even ‘for every ticket you get a crazy person half price’ on anything, but I guess something’s are in the small print.

The craziness extravaganza consisted (for the most part at least) of crazy mascot shaped things doing what crazy people do and messing around, round one consisted of propelling soft but possibly deadly projectiles into the crowd with a customised mortar based weapon, round two was a game of mascot basketball…

Now remember that these are mascots – people dressed up in furry suits that are about as durable as an iron bar in the Arctic, this combination made something that was pretty entertaining to watch, after all everyone likes to watch other people making fools out of themselves.

With all this craziness you would think that there isn’t any more of it within a 2 state radius, but nope, there was still enough for the Brass band to be infected with the spell too, either that or the gyrations and almost performance worthy um…performance was just part of the elaborate plan to steal craziness away from Norm the Niner.

Of course, most people aren’t reading this blog post for the not so up to the minute score information, they’re reading it to get the link to the photos of the cheerleaders (and who can blame you)

Anyone who’s been reading my blog since the first year of university (by that I really mean since last year) you will remember the whole Easy jet Presentation tomfoolery, after the presentation I made another post with a list of things not to do in a presentation, there are certain things that annoy me, bad presentations are one of them.

In the post I mentioned about having a backup plan, normally I have backup plans, enough of them to survive even the longest of silences and awkward situations however this time I didn’t, neither did I think I needed one…how wrong I was.

As I do more of these presentations I get complacent. One thing I’ve become better at is rambling on about something and making it sound as if I actually know what I’m talking about this of course is a useful skill to have. It was only a demoing presentation for my HCI module so it didn’t rate highly on the “stay up all night preparing” meter, the slides were prepared over a week ago and the talking was pretty self explanatory…describe what our proposed system does and the steps involved in getting it there, again, not hard since I was the one that designed the UI.

Probably the most common problem in presentations is technical faults, problems with either the equipment or the presentation itself. There are levels of problems in this arena, on one end of the scale you have the kind of things that go wrong at a professional conference as Chris Sells knows only too well at the PDC, and then you have the things that happen on my end of the scale. Admittedly the presentation didn’t have as many problems as his but it was the sheer stupidity that annoyed me the most.

I tested the slides just hours before we were due to present, everything worked perfectly, all the links worked, the slides were there and we were good to go. I wasn’t particularly concerned about the presentation because it wasn’t going to be that hard to ramble on.

So after overcoming a problem getting Vista, my laptop and the projector to work with each other instead of collaborating against me to make my life a living hell it was time to crack on. Mid way through (after getting a few murmurs of laughter from the other people in the room) came the third and final scenario to be demoed. Things were going ok until the slides that were in perfect working order mere hours before decided to conspire against me.

A few minutes of fumbling and attempts at both getting the damn thing to work and keeping everyone from falling asleep I finally managed to work around the problem leaving the rest of the presentation to flow without a hitch.

Normally this sort of thing wouldn’t bother me, I’m used to technology spontaneously crumbling around my ears and having to deal with the fallout, what did bother me was when I looked at the slides after I sat down there was nothing wrong with it, it all worked as it was supposed to and as it did hours before…something somewhere decided that it was going to mess up at the worst possible time – how can something that worked before suddenly break???

So there you have it, yet another presentation nightmare

I do have two more things to add to my list of don’ts in presentations however:

7. PowerPoint is and should be the only app you use to do a presentation, Internet Explorer is not PowerPoint

8. Clipart and animated gif’s are still forbidden, when are people going to realise this?

We are getting reports in from the East Coast regarding 3 students from Kingston University, Surrey currently stuck in what can only be described as a shock event.

Sometime early this morning, freak weather patterns caused an uncontrollable chain of events leading to the state of North Carolina being declared in an ‘Ice Age’. At present it is not clear how long the Ice Age will last, Scientist’s say that the system of events is unlike anything they have seen before and have advised people to stay calm, when asked to comment the spokesman for the University of North Carolina (UNCC) where the anomaly is said to have began refused to comment, however unofficial sources have indicated it was a leak in an underground laboratory that cause the catastrophic chain reaction.

The Mayor of North Carolina has declared a state of emergency and has requested support from neighbouring states. He has also warned the public not to be fooled by the bright blue cloudless skies, danger lies beneath the appearance of warmth.

The 3 students that are currently on the critical list are thought to have been walking to an early morning lecture when the incident occurred. Although reports are sketchy it would seem the catastrophic incident came completely out of the blue taking the students, who had been promised warm weather all year round, by surprise on their lecture forced campus ramble.

A spokesman for the students has confirmed that they will not be pressing charges however they will be contacting their lawyers regarding a possible misinformation suit against their sources, he added that while the students were baffled by the sudden change in temperature, they understand that sooner or later something like this would happen.

In other news, under proposed legislation, hunters in Wyoming can now carry automatic weapons and guns with silencers to hunt bears, when asked to comment a bear said RARRRRRR!!