Foreign Perspectives

Archive for January, 2010

We’re all getting older and, thanks to the baby boom generation, there are more and more products to deal with that on the shelves these days and increasing number of medical treatments too.

But do you really want to stay young looking forever? I imagine that most peoples’ first reaction is a very definite “YES” and that would certainly be the answer were staying young an easy thing to do. The problem is that it isn’t easy and takes up increasing amounts of time as the years add up.

Those age spots that may be starting to appear will increase in number as your years add up thus it’s gonna take more time to cover them up as the years mount. Likewise for other treatments to cover up the cracks and wrinkles not to mention the hair to be dyed.

The alternative is to aim to gain a distinguished appearance gradually which is going to be much less time consuming I suspect.

Moving to Linux would be very easy were it not for the hassles of getting your emails transferred over. However, at least it’s not the showstopper that it was just a few years ago.

Your first issue is finding your .PST files which you can do by clicking on properties. To copy those over, go out of Outlook and copy them onto a USB stick. Likewise for contacts, calendars, etc. if you want those too though I’ve never used them so won’t be talking about them here. Evolution has a PST import limit of around 500MB so if your PST file(s) are bigger than that you’ll need to create some more and move your email into them until you’ve the PST files below the limit. At this point, it’s best to disable Outlook which you can so simply by changing the POP server that it uses to pick up your email; note down the settings as you’ll need those to set up Evolution.

Next you will need to install Evolution if you’ve not done so already and also ReadPST.

Evolution can take quite a while to import PST files (hours in my case) so you’ll need some patience for this step. Once that’s done you’ll discover one limitation of its import facility: it doesn’t import email in top level folders. Thus you’ll find that various folders which it has created are empty. This is where ReadPST comes in because it will read those PST files and separate them out into the various folders with mbox files in each of them. For the folders which Evolution has left empty, you need to import the contents from the appropriate spot in the folder hierarchy which ReadPST has created for you.

Finally, there’s the business of getting new mail  into Evolution. Go into Edit, Preferences and create the email accounts that you had in Outlook. As always, the settings here aren’t quite the same as those in Outlook (why that’s so is a mystery as the mail servers obviously work with all mail clients). In my case, I found that 1and1 needed a bit of tweaking to get outgoing mail to work, the settings being server: auth.1and1.co.uk (as per Outlook), server requires authentication, no encryption, authentication type: login. Once you’ve those set up, it’s best to send yourself a message to check that it’s all working.

What about email rules? I took the chance to do a little rationalisation of my email folder structure so didn’t bother trying to import those but that seems the best approach anyway as Evolution doesn’t seem to have nearly so much complexity as Outlook did. I say complexity rather than flexibility as there are just so many options in there that if you’re not careful email can seem to go into random folders sometimes.

And that’s it. Sadly, importing the messages isn’t as automated as it could be and, in my case, took quite a while but then that’s down to me having email back to 1996 and a far too complicated folder structure.

Well, not quite a week as I really only started it on Wednesday but it’s enough to begin to get a feel for it I think.

The first thing that struck me about it was that it’s a course that uses an awful lot of different resources. As well as the course guide and course book there’s a series of booklets on “activities” (which covers a lot of different stuff), several course forums to look at, the course website and a series of practical activities related to the assignments (which aren’t, yet, on the site).

In fact, over the last few days I’ve been looking at the course guide, observing guide, first course book and the first observing activity. If that’s a typical week it’ll be quite a large course. So far I’ve been doing pretty much all the reading on the little Reader which is just as well since that chunk of books weighs a fair bit. Downside of that is that the PDFs don’t come out so well with so many diagrams so I think I’ll be needing to read some on the computer (very few are available as printed texts).

I’d have liked to have a look at the assignments but they’re not on the course website yet. The specimen exam is though and, at the moment, it looks a pretty scary affair but, hopefully, that’ll change over the course of the next nine months.

So far it seems like the interesting course I expected to, albeit with quite a lot more work to do than expected.

John’s been wanting to have his own Kumon box for a while now so we signed him up for their maths programme this week.

Unlike James, he’s gotten into the UK school system at the right time so the Kumon with him isn’t a matter of catching up with work not done in France but rather of moving ahead of the class work. In fact, it’s starting to become that way with James too: for the first time his Kumon work is ahead of the work that he’s been given in school. That’s not to say that he’s ahead of where he should have been in school but at least the Kumon is starting to stretch him a little.

With John it’s quite a different matter and he’s finding the Kumon work very easy. That’s as it should be of course as the idea behind the programme is that the children shouldn’t find the work difficult therefore they will be more inclined to do it. Although each stage of the work is quite easy, it does build up over time and the theory is that after a year or two you start working above the level that you’d ordinarily be at in school at that time.

John’s also finding the school work far too easy so we’re expecting that he’ll race through a number of Kumon stages quite quickly to get to a level that’s interesting and useful for him. At the moment, it looks like he’ll be doing twenty of the Kumon pages a day rather than the usual 10 so he should get through the levels fairly quickly and may find himself doing P3 work before the summer break.

One thing the Kumon teacher keeps reminding us is that sometimes it causes “issues” with schools if the children in the programme are too far ahead of the rest of their class. I suspect that we’ll end up with that problem at some stage but I’d much rather be dealing with that than having the kids well behind the rest of their class. Certainly from our experience with James it seems a much better plan to aim to be at least slightly ahead of the class.

Over the last week or so we’ve woken to a white landscape but, so far, the white is only frost with perhaps a very light dusting of snow.

That frosty covering makes for rather slippy pavements of course yet you don’t seem to really get the pleasure that proper snowfall can bring. No snowmen to built, no snowball fights. Just slipping and scraping the windows on the car.

And, yesterday, an unannounced closure of the school for the day. Instead of a final lie-in before school started we’d everyone up early to make sure we weren’t late with the slippery roads and found ourselves in front of a closed school. Oh, sure, if it had been way out in the country we’d have expected that but there wasn’t any big problem in getting to it so it was just closed for no apparent reason.

Still, with the weather forecasts continuing in winter mode for the remainder of the week perhaps we’ll get a proper snowfall one of these days.