Foreign Perspectives

Archive for September, 2010

Friday was Culture Night in Belfast which means a very, very packed night of entertainment all over the city and all free too.

We took the opportunity to finish off some things that we didn’t manage to fit in to the Heritage Weekend earlier in the month. The easy way to include them turned out to be to go on one of the three Community Taster Tours. The listing for these was a little confusing in the booklet about the culture night but it turned out that there were three entirely different tours to choose from, each lasting three hours.

For our purposes the 4pm tour seemed best in that it included the Titanic pump house which we’d missed out on earlier and which normally has a very confusing car parking arrangement that seems best avoided. Surprisingly the tours weren’t anything like fully booked and we found ourselves on an open top bus that didn’t even have a dozen people on it.

Frankly the pump house was a major disappointment. Effectively it’s a small, very overpriced, cafe with one stand containing an assortment of Titanic gifts and a dozen or so panels about various aspects of the Titanic spaced around a very bare room. Next stop was the Engine Room Gallery which is nowhere near the Titanic area as you might expect but instead at Hollywood Arches.

From there we were off to what was supposed to be an Ulster Scots event at the Spectrum Centre on the Shankill Road. Unfortunately the organisation fell apart at that point so we only saw the Lambeg drummer and didn’t see the highland dancing, the flute band nor the lone piper.

Finally, it was on to the Indian Community Centre where they were rather optimistic about the amount that could be included in the short time available. Thus we missed out on the henna and sari demonstration, Hindi class information, Indian dance and musical performance and we just about managed to fit in the Indian tea, food and snacks.

Although three hours seemed like an awfully long time for a bus tour round Belfast when we read about it in the brochure, in practice the time just flew in and really it needed to be around twice as long to do justice to everything but then that’s only to be expected of a taster tour. In fact, it was almost perfect as a taster and has highlighted a couple of places that we will be revisiting at the next opportunity.

By the time we got back, it was almost the perfect time to go on the tour round the offices of the Belfast Telegraph. No smell of fire and brimstone as you sort-of expect from seeing newspaper back-offices in movies but rather a very automated newspaper production factory. Sadly we didn’t get to see the presses running as they don’t kick off ’til a couple of hours after the tours finish but a very interesting tour nonetheless and the hour just flew in.

Both the little guys were running on empty by this point so we finished off with a brief look round some of the activities going on before heading home.

The Open University TT courses are a set of six courses on various aspects of web development making up the web development certificate. Sadly, it proved a form of course that was a) too hard to keep updated sufficiently frequently and b) not sufficiently attractive to students towards the latter end of the certificate (a recent run had 800+ on the first course, 80 on the penultimate).

Anyway, as a result of that I’ve just started on what’s the final run of the suite of courses. The first one is TT280 which seems to be essentially a run through of XHTML and CSS along with a lot of related stuff such as the various web standards (boy, are they long, or what?).

Supposedly this course should take around 8 hours a week but it looks like I’ll be scooting through at more like two hours a week as I’ve already finished the first week’s worth of material (yes, all of it) this morning and that included downloading the first four weeks of material. One thing about this course that is a real pain is that the material is drip-fed week by week so that you can’t run more than four weeks ahead of the official schedule. Thus in place of my normal complete download of the course at the start, I’ll need to download a weeks worth every week from now on. The first of the Computer Marked Assignments (CMAs) won’t be available ’til next week which is something else that I don’t like as I always like a look at what’s expected early on in a course.

The course has heaps of references outside the course material if the first week is anything to go by. So, although I’ve “everything” downloaded I ended up having to read through the course guide online and download the additional documents as I was going along. That multiple document format is typical of the OU material (because it gets you more engaged in your learning) but having to be online as you read the course guide simply so that you can go off to another website for material is a bit of a nuisance. Still, it has saved a few hundred quid as I initially thought that this was the course that would force the purchase of one of the Android tablets. Oh well, I guess I might have to wait for Christmas.

One ongoing awkward part of the suite of courses is that I’m having to add them on top of my nicely planned out schedule which will be particularly difficult at some points. For instance, I’m having to start this course before the astronomy course is out of the way since the first CMA is due about a week after the astronomy exam. And, of course, there’s the medicine course as well though doing that whilst the kids are in their Kumon class seems to be working out quite well.

The kids new school has what they somewhat confusingly call the Community Room. It grew out of an initiative a few years back to establish links with the local community.

It’s different from the PTA in a number of aspects. For one thing, it meets every Wednesday morning for about 90 minutes rather than once in the evening every couple of months. That of itself means that the make-up of the group is largely mothers with a few fathers and grandmothers (not to mention around a dozen pre-school kids). To some extent that almost makes it a parents and toddlers group and it does take a bit of effort to steer things away from that.

The regular meetings mean that relationships are established much more quickly than in the PTA and similar groups but more importantly it means that it’s easier to organise events through this group. Thus, one of the interests at the moment is in setting up some courses to help the parents with the homework that’s starting to arrive in surprisingly large amounts. The courses run over six weeks so a regular setting is required for such things. Somewhat overlapping with the PTA there are a series of events organised by way of this group with the first one being Halloween. That’s a little confusing as there will be two events happening: one directly for the school and one only for the community group and their families.

As well as the larger courses we were treated to a basic first aid for children course this morning which covered a whole bunch of stuff that falls into the category of “stuff that you should know but hope you’ll never need to know”. So, it covered CPR, choking, bleeding, meningitis and what to do with teeth knocked out, which made for a very full 90 minutes! On the meningitis front, the deciders are if your child is getting bad fast and if they’ve cold hands and cold feet: calling 999 is the way to go if that’s happening.

Although the group was established as a means of establishing links with the local community, it seems to have become a kind of “year 8” class for the parents which is no bad thing as it will help with the kids’ education.

These days most people wouldn’t even think about travellers cheques. After all, surely the pre-paid cash or debit cards are far more practical and they’re accepted everywhere too, aren’t they?

Whilst it’s true that they’re accepted in most places, cards aren’t accepted everywhere. Even in those places where they are usually accepted there are occasional technical problems that crop up, sometimes quite frequently in relatively isolated places where not having an alternative method of payment would cause significant complications for you. Don’t think that these are places that only intrepid explorers will reach because the technical problems can crop up quite often in country areas of the most civilised of countries. Usually, of course, they happen in the most difficult of places and awkward of times.

For most places, you don’t need to consider travellers cheques as a primary means of payment basically because they’re too expensive as they usually involve both costs in purchasing them and again when using them (check if you can use them like cash rather than needing to cash them in a bank branch). However, it’s worth buying around US$250 or so for those awkward times when you really do need them. For maximum flexibility, it’s best to buy Visa or Mastercard branded cheques issued by a non-American bank (Thomas Cook is the brand that seems best known worldwide). Don’t cash them when you get home as they’re valid indefinitely and repurchasing them for each holiday just increases the cost for you.

Keep a note of the cheque numbers, cancellation phone numbers, when you bought them and where you bought them as you’ll need this information if they’re stolen.

So, yes, despite all the promotion of prepaid cards these days, it is worth keeping a few travellers cheques.

We’ve been helping out at the book fair in the school this week which provides a different perspective to some of the money making activities that schools need to get involved in these days.

The first thing that’s noticeable is that the school don’t get cash commission from the sales that they make but instead get that commission in the form of books. Thus what looks like a fairly high rate of commission is actually a good deal less in practice and probably little more than 10% for the company.

The books on offer are from one educational publisher which makes the selection more limited than it really needs to be. Well, seemingly more limited than it needs to be as one of the problems is that the books all need to be suitable for children so they could easily run into difficulties were a general publisher to be used. In fact, a growing problem seems to be that people generally are moving online for their purchases which is particularly understandable this year as the discount vouchers previously issued to the children aren’t there any more whilst the books are all at full price and these days nobody pays full price for books. So, why don’t the schools just put a link on their websites and join the internet sales rush? Basically because the link would have to be to only childrens’ books and there isn’t anything fitting the bill at the moment.

Being tied in to a single supplier is rarely a good idea and this is no exception. For all of the items that I’ve checked, the Scholastic price is around 20% to 30% higher than the Amazon price which probably goes some way to explaining the very low sales at the book fair.