Dave's Blog

Last Wednesday we headed down to Dublin for the Ireland final of the Microsoft Imagine Cup competition. The final itself was on the Thursday but Microsoft had organised a night at Shelbourne Park, a greyhound race track. It was a very early start on Wednesday, we wanted to get one final run through of our presentation before heading down. I headed down on the train with two other team members and then met up with everybody else at the hotel. There wasn’t much of a chance to stop, we headed straight to Microsoft to see where we would be presenting and to get a run through there to get a feel for the place. The night at the greyhound racing was very good, nice food and free bar (which is always good)!

We were up bright and early on Thursday morning to head to Microsoft to set up. I have to say I think I had the best sleep I’ve had in a good while on Wednesday night. Going to bed knowing there was nothing more I could do at that point meant I had nothing much to distract me, and the fact I was absolutely wrecked after weeks of late nights probably helped too!

Whenever we got in we got our display setup and started showing our system to people who were walking around. You may have noticed the addition of my ‘Envirotag’ to the sidebar of the site, this is part of the system. We had developed a social network which would be used to promote a sustainable environment and link in with other organisations such as councils. We would be using environmentally themed games as a ‘hook’ to get people into our network. Currently there are three games on the network fully (and freely!) available to download, Mephitis Pyre, Future Shock and Recylotron. We would be using viral marketing techniques to allow our network to grow and the ‘Envirotag’ was one way in which this would be done. We also plan on taking a step back and allowing the network to grow by allowing our members to create their own games which could be distributed through the site. This is possible due to our use of web services, meaning that any development environment that allows the use of web services means our system can be built into the game. You can check the site out here if you want. Feel free to register and download the games.

We had to present to a panel of four judges initially and then we were brought into the auditorium to say who made the top three, unfortunately we didn’t make it this year.

I would like to congratulate Sligo on winning and wish them luck at the finals in Paris. I would also like to say well done to Future Horizons from Dundalk on coming second. Dundalk’s entry, a game used to educate primary school children, was my personal favourite from the day.

I got a tour of the offices and I have to say I am looking forward to starting with Microsoft even more than I originally was, and anybody who knows me will know that I was looking forward to it a lot! I liked everything about the place: the offices, the atmosphere and the staff I met. I also discovered just how cheap we will get things in the Microsoft shop, I have a feeling a lot of my wages will end up going in there! Thanks to Marty, our ‘Microsoft Buddy’, for all your help and for showing me about the place later on.

Photos from the day will be coming up soon.

I’m slightly late in making this post but things have been a bit crazy recently with a lot of work to get done, but better late than never.

It’s always good to see what different sites do on April Fool’s Day to try and catch their visitors out and this year proved to be quite a good year with some sites going to pretty extreme lengths. My personal favourite had to be ThinkGeek who altered their home page to display a series of fake products to buy. This was done very well and was incredibly believable (despite the products being rediculous, knowing nobody would ever want them unless it was to give as a joke). Some of the products featured were the ‘USB George Foreman Grill‘, ‘USB Pregnancy Test Kit‘, ‘Betamax to HD-DVD Converter‘, and my personal favourites: the ‘Shrinter‘ and Wii game ‘Super Pii Pii Bros‘. They have kept their fake homepage online so it’s still possible to go and see all the April Fool’s products.

Another elaborate April Fool was done by IGN who premiered the trailer for the ‘new’ Legend of Zelda movie.

A story that made me laugh was an article on the Register about a teacher’s head exploding due to WiFi.