Foreign Perspectives

I have to confess to being one of those addicted to browsing prospectuses. Long ago it wasn’t really a problem as there really wasn’t much chance of me upping sticks to move somewhere or other just to do a course but these days it’s different as there are dozens of universities around the world collectively offering thousands of different courses in a distance learning format ie you can do them from pretty much anywhere.

The selection of courses available in this kind of format has grown dramatically over the years with, apparently, the only frontier remaining being medicine although even there you can pick up nursing level qualification; it’s just that you can’t get to be a doctor that way. You can actually pick up doctorates by distance learning (real ones that is, not the “send us $250 and we’ll send you your qualification” variety) but seemingly in just about every field apart from medicine.

Just recently I came across the arts equivalent of the Open University which is the Open College of the Arts which offers a creative arts degree with specialisms ranging from art history to painting. Now, I would have expected the art history and writing specialisms (also offered by the OU) in that they’re clearly doable at a distance. However, it was surprising to see that you can also so painting and sculpture this way too and from the beginner level too. Even more surprising was the geographic spread of people doing courses with them with people from seemingly every corner of the globe if a scan of their forum is any guide (yes, I know, distance learning places should be global, but usually they aren’t). Price-wise it seems broadly similar to the OU but the tutorials operate rather differently with one to one tuition being the norm although groups do form to extend the tuition time when in-person tution is offered (overall it works out around £4000 for the degree). It also seems to operate a much freer approach to the courses with up to two years in principle to do each module vs the very fixed timetable of the OU and there don’t seem to be fixed start dates either.

Interestingly, it was Baron Young who was behind both these organisations and got the OCA going when the OU figured that teaching degree level creative arts wasn’t possible. On a separate note he was also the guy behind the Consumers’ Association… ’tis quite an achievement to be behind three organisations of that calibre but they’re merely three from quite a long list of rather significant outfits that he had a hand in forming.

I’m very tempted by the writing and painting specialisms. Still, it’s the first time I’ve had a leaf through their offerings so it might be a while before I get around to signing up (it was 16 years between first read of an OU prospectus and doing the first course for me!).

I know that computers are supposed to go down in price on a regular basis but the drops recently seem even more extreme than usual unless, of course, it’s just me keeping more of an eye on them than normal.

For instance, the Acer Aspire One that I bought in early December is now replaced by a model that comes with twice the RAM and 50% more storage space for exactly the same money. Now, that’s pretty typical of computers but the impact on the lower end of the market is a little more extreme.

The somewhat less cute version that Maplin originally put out for £160 at one stage came with all of 128MB RAM, 2GB space and a 7″ screen was obviously severely overpriced when the 512MB RAM, 8GB storage and 9″ display Acer dropped to £135 so the Maplin price has pretty much collapsed to £99 and may have a little further to fall yet. Actually, it’s getting to the point where I’m starting to think that perhaps it’s time to consider getting one to leave in the living room to read the paper on or whatever.

And, of course, these price drops and performance improvements can only continue. Next year we can expect that the Acer will be down to close to that £99 price point with potentially the Maplin or something similar coming in around £50.

As expected the new Star Trek movie did rather well in the opening weekend, pulling in over twice that of the previous box office record Star Trek movie way back in 1996. Of course, that’s broadly what the studio were hoping for and the reason behind the making of this movie by them in the first place.

One complication that always crops up with long running and popular series is that sooner or later the writers end up essentially writing themselves into a corner and the Star Trek franchise is now into its 40th year which leaves Dr Who as the only other science fiction that’s been around longer. In the case of trek, the original NCC 1701 was destroyed in one of the films which makes later series featuring it a non-runner and now we’ve sort-of seen its origins in the latest movie which basically uses it up and the NCC 1701D from the Next Generation series was also destroyed in another film so it’s out of the picture. At least the NX-01 from Enterprise managed to survive into retirement but that also means that a successor series based on it seems unlikely to be a runner even had that series been more successful.

The short gap from the Phoenix to the Enterprise era doesn’t seem to leave much scope for further prequels and in that the NG Enterprise timeline stretches into the origins of the Department for Temporal Investigations there’s an implication that there would be something of a discontinuity in technological development around that time and besides if the DTI are operational then that implies that explorations in time are becoming more important than explorations in space were by that time in the Star Trek universe. That leaves open the potential for a spin-off series, possibly along the lines of the proposed Gary Seven spin-off back in the days of the original series and that could be a relatively open series in that there hasn’t been an awful lot of information put out about the future time cops in any of their interactions within the various series.

So, given that there don’t seem to be any gaps to fit in a new series based on a USS Enterprise, the writers have collectively written themselves into a corner. Unless, of course, one moves to an alternate timeline and a whole new NCC 1701 as they’ve done in the new film. This potentially opens up in effect a remake of the original series and one wonders if that’s what the studio are hoping to do? Interestingly, it also moves knowledge of the potential for time travel and alternate realities into the foreground in this reality so perhaps the DTI or its alternate reality equivalent would be formed much earlier in this particular universe?

Over the years I’ve been making efforts now and again to track down various friends from places I’ve been ranging from primary school through to university.

Thanks to the likes of FriendsReunited, FaceBook and LinkedIn it’s gradually become an easier task as the years went by. However, there’s a surprisingly high percentage of people who don’t use any of those services and particularly surprising in my case as I did computer science at university so I’d have expected the percentage of those from the course using these services to be higher than average. I even had the idea some years back that presumably there’d be quite a high percentage of the computer science people who would have their own domain name by now but, so far, I’ve only tracked down one person that way. Still, now and again there’s little flurry of activity on one or other of those sites and suddenly you find people you’d been looking for over a number of years.

One of those little flurries happened over the past couple of months and I’ve added more contacts from the past than I’d done in the previous several decade from primary school right through to university.

Obviously the people I’ve not seen from primary school have put on “a few years” with their appearance. However, what’s really striking is how differently people have aged from university. Probably a silly assumption to make but I figured that we’d all look like we were 22+X years but in fact the range of appearances is something like 22+X-10 through to 22+X+10 ie some look around 20 years older than others even though we’re all just about the same age.

Now, I can understand the shows like 10 years younger have 40 year olds who look like they’re 50 to begin with and who look 35 after their transformation because they’re picking people from a whole host of different backgrounds and lifestyles. It seems strange that you can get a similar range from people with quite similar backgrounds and, by and large, fairly similar life histories since the last time I saw them at university too.

What I must do next is to compare what people said they were going to do with what they actually did… I’m sure between this post and that one I’ll end up having nobody speaking to me 🙂

Not so long ago just about every company manufacturing portable computers seemed to offer a whole raft of options with the basic model so you could have one or two batteries, or you could have a CD drive (’twas pre-DVD then) instead of one of the batteries or you could have…. well, loads of different things that probably served to seriously complicate the buying decision for most people.

However, these days the portable is very much a standard issue device with not a whole lot of uniqueness to really distinguish the products from different manufacturers. There still remains some specialism of course but mainly that’s severely limited so, for example, Sony tend to specialise in expensive multimedia models and, as always, Apple plough their own furrow in the marketplace. A year ago I’d have added that for a mini portable it was Asus but that marketplace is now totally swamped by offerings from the other manufacturers.

What’s missing from that sameness are the little things. For instance, I’m looking for a portable right now and would like to have an AV socket on it yet there doesn’t seem to be such a beastie these days and instead some have HDMI connections which are handy but it would have been nice to have been able to connect camcorders and whatnot that are only a few years old and don’t have HDMI. Likewise, I’d have liked to have been able to continue to use some PCMCIA devices but everyone seems to have moved on to ExpressCard slots now.

On the software front it’s nice to see that several flavours of Unix are on offer these days, notably on the netbooks of course in that it would seem pretty ridiculous to be spending far more to buy the wordprocessing software than it did to buy the computer.