Rob was on Newsnight recently. I tuned in to watch and to my dismay it appeared that they had created a story where there wasn’t one, and Rob had been cast as the villain of the piece, and was there to defend the Imagine Cup because the winners had made some assumptions about what deaf people might want that turned out may be flawed.
The Imagine Cup is a student competition organised and sponsored by Microsoft about solving problems using (Microsoft) technologies. Rob has put a lot of hard work into promoting it to our students, and now serves as a judge. The Newsnight story however focused on one tiny oversight and asked leading questions that implied wrong doing where there was none.
Anyway, Rob handled the whole situation really, really well and did a great job of deflecting any bad stuff, and focussing on the good stuff and generally made the event, just like everything else he does, a great success. Even so though the whole thing still left me with a bit of a bitter taste though.
I have a huge amount of respect for Rob, both in a professional capacity, and in the context of being the quintessential good egg. I find the notion that they seemed to try to make him a villain laughable, so in that spirit, I thought I might do it again and laugh at him some more.
Casting Rob as a villain.
Sorry Rob, you just don’t make a very good bad guy.
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