Foreign Perspectives

The Vanessa George affair showed the major weakness of the CRB system ie that you’ll get an “all clear” if you haven’t been caught yet.

However, the various schools are required to have the CRB check done on anyone who comes into contact with children. Thus last year our offer of assistance to go along and help with the supervision on a couple of school outings was turned down.

Ironically, this year we are allowed to go along even though all we’ve done is to put the form in for the CRB check to be done. How come? Well, there’s such a backlog of checks to be done that they have to operate essentially as they’ve always done and assess whether or not a given parent is a risk to the children. That seems to be close to offering the best of both worlds in using the CRB as a backup to the judgement of the teachers.

So all being well, we’ll be off to seen round the airport by the time you read this.

I’ve been weaning everyone off Windows over the past year so we’re getting into the first multi-computer upgrade of Ubuntu.

One of the problems seems to be that an Ubuntu upgrade seems to take forever if you’ve been installing bits and pieces of software over the course of the year. Of course, that’s pretty much the situation everyone is in thus it seems to be over 10 hours for everyone (my Aspire One weighed in at 15 hours).

On the other hand, a new install of 9.10 on another Aspire One took under 30 minutes although there’s another hour to download prior to the install.

Granted, there’s more software to download in an upgrade and indeed that “30 minute” install will likely end up at two or three hours counting downloading time. That’s still a long, long way short of the 10-15 hour times for upgrades though.

I’m going to see if I can speed things up somewhat for the next upgrade by copying the downloaded packages from /var/cache/apt/archives. There’s the “proper” way to do this but it sounds simpler to just copy all the .deb files and plonk them on with dpkg. Doing that should mean that I can get away with a backup, clean install and package install for the last couple of machines with the only thing remaining being setting up the Internet and email on them.

When John started school this year he only went to noon which wasn’t too bad as it gave us a sensible break before needing to go back for James at 2.30pm.

However, they changed that to a 1.30pm finish for John the week before the holidays which was a major pain for everyone with more than one child at the school. That hour just doesn’t give you enough time to really do anything yet it’s a bit pointless hanging around the school too.

Still, they’re now onto a 2.15pm finish so at least we can pick them both up at the same time now. That’s also given us a lot more time to do our own thing in the mornings so, all being well, I’ll be able to get caught up with everything that just didn’t seem to fit into what turned out to be a very limited period in the mornings.

Also on another schedule is James’ Kumon. Thanks to something of a buildup of kids going to it, they’ve had to give us broad timeslots for the two days as it was getting just too crowded at times. In practice, we’re going to our regular Tuesday slot at 4pm which seems to work fairly well but I’m not so sure about the 10am Saturday morning slot. The snag is that on Saturdays sometimes we have a bit of a lie-in but other times we want to get out early to go somewhere. With a fixed timeslot for James the lie-ins won’t be possible though aiming for a later slot would mean we couldn’t get out anywhere which isn’t good either.

Not that it looks like it’ll matter much. With the arrival of James’ glasses it seems clear that it was his eyesight that was causing the reading difficulties so he may be shooting ahead with that over the next month or two.

If it weren’t for the OU appearing to be about to drop all their science summer schools and consequently their named science degrees, the choices for 2010 would be very easy. First I’d be doing Biological Psychology in February and then in October I’d be starting Exploring Psychology (the psychology course that I should have done first).

However, I really had my heart set on picking up a physics degree at some point and therefore I need to do something about that as it seems sure to disappear from the list of options within the next couple of years. The particular problem with the named science degrees is that they require three summer schools to be included within them and said summer schools are currently all sitting with expiry dates no later than 2012.

Thus, for the physics, I need to do both Observing the Universe (SXR208) and Physics by Experiment (SXR207) plus one other. The one other can come from quite a massive range of options although given the 2012 expiry dates that are on most of the courses that choice is much more limited than it would be normally. Of those that are around, I would normally be inclined to do the residential associated with the main chemistry course but there doesn’t seem to be the time to do that. Thus I’m currently looking at the geology option which is also on my “must do sometime” list and has the advantage that it seems possible to slot it into the schedule.

In terms of when to do the courses the ideal sequence seems to be Astronomy (S282) in February 2010, Geology (S276) in November 2010, Using mathematics February 2011, with the astronomy and geology residentials in the summer of 2011. Then it’s on to the physical world in October 2011 with its residential in the summer of 2012. Finally, it’s back to the psychology sequence in October 2012 and the final chunk of the physics degree after that. Not ideal, but at least it appears possible.

The annoying part about all this is that it’s twisting round what started out as a reasonably sensible study sequence to one that’s purely aimed at meeting requirements as soon as possible just in case the option to meet them disappears. Moreover, it’s not even sure that the list of courses I’d need to complete the physics degree will remain so to some extent it might be a pointless exercise in terms of trying to pick up that degree although it will take me through a very interesting list of courses regardless.

Thanks to the Child Development exam last week and the revision for it over the previous month, I only got around to signing up for Understanding cardiovascular diseases (SK121) a matter of days ago but this morning the website was already up for me.

That meant that I could download loads of course related stuff and in particular the full text of the course book which in turn meant that I could formally start the course this morning. So far, it’s not too bad though there’s a serious amount of medical terminology in the first chapter. I’m going to ignore most of that for the moment on the basis that they’re bound to come back to it in more detail later on in the course.

It’s the first full online course that I’ve done so no live tutorials but instead there’s an online forum where “tutorials” will be held, starting the week after next. Not sure how that’ll go though if the first one is anything to go by they’ll take me a lot less time than the suggested time listed in the course guide. I’m expecting that’ll be the case for many aspects of the course since it’s a level 1 course which means there’s lots of “this is how a course works” material. All being well, that’ll let me get considerably ahead of the course schedule as I’d like to have the final assignment completed before my February course starts which means I need to finish almost two months ahead of the formal timetable.

The nature of the course means that it’s attracted a massive number of health professionals on it. Presumably they’ll know a whole bunch of the terminology which is pretty much totally new to me; were the tutorials in person ones I’d have been left in the dust I expect!

If nothing else, this course should give me some practice at doing two courses simultaneously which will be handy to get me through 2010 which looks like being a year of overlapping courses. Having said that, SK121 is covering ground that I’ll also be doing in the Human Biology course albeit with a lot more detail in SK121 presumably. The other overlapping courses seem likely to be quite different thus less scope for semi-revision with them.