Foreign Perspectives

A few years back, that would have been an easy question to answer as laptops were so expensive that most people only had their work one.

Prices have dived though and that’s even before you consider the additional categories like netbooks and the newer tablet computers. For that matter, would you consider an ebook reader as a very small notebook computer? I suspect that most of us wouldn’t although the Sony runs a version of Linux so technically speaking it is a very small computer.

With that price drop the baby computers have long since ventured into home use and a growing number of people use several of them. I find that I use the little Acer netbook that I bought basically as a toy much more than both my other computers put together. Whilst it may not be as fast as them, it certainly makes up for lack of speed though sheer portability.

The basic argument of the Yes campaign is that it’s better that the people of Scotland are ruled by the people of Scotland i.e. that independence is a good thing by definition and they’re right. The basic argument of the No campaign is that there’s strength in numbers and they’re right too.

But which is actually best?

It’s certainly very easy to knock down the Yes arguments:

• the support from oil will be a lot less then the sums they are expecting not least because Alex seems to count every penny coming in as tax revenue rather than the 20% or so that would actually come in but even that’s from a much bigger base than he’ll have courtesy of various international agreements which divvy up the amounts based on population rather than land area.
• it certainly would be best for Scotland to continue to use the pound and the Bank of England but that just isn’t a runner so at best Alex will be stuck with his first plan B i.e. use sterling but outside a sterling-zone arrangement. Presumably the banks in Scotland wouldn’t be permitted to continue to print their own money as they do now so the Scottish notes would be replaced by Bank of England ones in this scenario.
• since an independent Scotland simply wouldn’t have the wherewithall to support the banking system, it seems certain that most, if not all, of their banks would have to relocate to England even aside from European laws requiring that. There’s going to be quite a hit to the economy and jobs should that happen. On a related note, the various investment companies based in Scotland are already preparing to move and, of course, you could hardly have National Savings (a branch of the UK Treasury) based in Glasgow anymore.
• the freebies (education, prescriptions, etc.) are mainly dependent on the oil revenue which is somewhat less than Alex seems to think it is or would be and, of course, that knocks the “oil premium” fund on the head too.
• defence industries ranging from Trident to loads of small and medium companies would almost certainly have to relocate because the MOD insists on having various key components made and assembled in the UK.
• the much lauded research facilities in the universities are going to have to find their funding elsewhere as the vast majority of the research institutes which fund them are UK institutions.
• Europe is something of a wildcard as nobody can really say what the outcome of negotiations might be at this stage but it seems unlikely to be plain sailing.

For the No camp, well the argument is that none of the above will happen if they win.

However, it’s not really so simple as that. As the Yes people say, it’s not so much the nitty gritty details but that Scotland should be run by the Scots. Which is grand for those at the top of the pile but not so good when you find (as happened just prior to them joining with England in 1600) that it takes twelve Scottish pounds to buy one English pound, that your job went south and your pension is pretty much worthless.

Campbell is a massive school with a number of quite large buildings, a fair number of smaller ones plus assorted sports fields dotted around an enclosed estate of around 100 acres. Or, in short, it’s a massive place for an 11 or 12 to get used to.

As a consequence of that, they have a whole day of familiarisation for the new starts the day before the rest of the school starts back. In theory, that gets them to know where all their classes are but in practice they all seem to have forgotten by the next day. That combined with the school ethos of always doing your best, has led to some tears with some of the kids who find that they haven’t a clue where to go first thing in the morning as they get quite worked up about being late. It’s fine after that because in the first year, the class is just that as all of those in each of the classes go round in a group for the whole year so if one kid knows where to go, they’re fine. Older kids would realise that the teachers will be very forgiving in the first few weeks and they’re not surprised about a few stragglers who’ve gotten lost, but at 11 or 12 it is, of course, a different matter. Courtesy of the two week timetable, it’ll be next Wednesday before they’ve been to all the classes at least once.

Homeworks have, so far, been very easy going affairs ranging from hunting out medieval images for history through to writing out a short critique of a book for English. There’s very much a concentration on English and maths in the timetable with both subjects on nearly every day whilst the other subjects seem generally more like two or three times over the course of the two week timetable (mind you, that’s just my impression as I’ve not got his timetable in front of me).

There is a choice of several after school activities every weekday though they don’t seem to have started yet. That’s understandable as I don’t think the first year people could cope with any more at the moment. Possibles for our little guy include the languages club, fencing, reading club, young enterprise club and perhaps drama. Basically they’ve a mix of sporty things and academic things. On Saturday mornings, there are rugby and hockey with swimming on Saturday and Sunday though he’s ruled out anything that involves getting up early at the weekend.

Other firsts seem to be in the process of being overcome, with the ties getting a touch neater as the week has progressed and the shoes will have been tied a little faster too. Writing with a pen most of the time is something that our little guy has adjusted to really fast – his writing was so neat the other day that I thought someone else had done it. We’ve still not quite a full set of gear for him though I think the main thing remaining is the white sports socks with the mouth guard being measured up for yesterday.

We’ve not quite got properly into our two school routine yet though that’s mainly down to the heap of road works that are ongoing at the moment along seemingly every road. Surprisingly, James being a touch late means that John is a touch late too – we’d expected that John would always be early so long as James was more or less on time. Picking him up is more of a rush than we’d expected too as it can take almost 30 minutes to get between the two schools rather than the 15 or so that we’d expected. Mind you, that doesn’t matter a whole lot as the traffic jam in Campbell is something else sometimes (so far, Friday has been by far the worst day taking 40 minutes to clear last week!).

One major change for us is that his class is tiny so it’s a lot easier to have a chat with his teacher than it has ever been. It’s a big change for him too as there’s no more hiding at the back of the class and I imagine that the level of participation is a good deal higher which can only be for the good.

Overall, it still seems like it was the right choice for him.

The humble barcode scanner was always the poor relation of computer input devices historically.

It was there simply to read numbers and any processing was done behind the scenes by proper computers. Mostly it was used in industrial contexts though most people came across it in the supermarket where, of course, it is indispensible.

However, the usefulness of a simple printed code that can be read by an equally simple device has led to the widening of its use through the barcodes “printed” on computer screens that allow you to load software directly onto your Android phone.

These new barcode readers are mainly software that interprets the photograph taken by the camera in the phone so they’re considerably more sophisticated than the humble scanners that were formerly used in supermarkets.

There’s an awful lot of information out there which should be online but isn’t yet so my family history research is often dictated by the timing of information appearing online.

For instance, whilst contemplating an extended trip to the General Records Office some years ago, I found out that there were plans afoot to make their information available over the internet. That time has now arrived and their online search has speeded up considerably what was proving to be a very time consuming and unfruitful search involving trips to various local registry offices.

Why it was unfruitful is because I’d taken the information written in an 1850s era family bible to be correct. Certainly one thing that I knew to be correct was the place of marriage of the guy whose family bible it was. After all, he’d written that and obviously he would have known where he was married. Turns out that he was wrong and whilst the family bible says (in his handwriting) that he was married in Ballymoney, he was actually married in the Ballymena registry office.

Getting back to him was a breeze with the new service. I had the rough date of marriage of my grandparents and a matter of minutes later I was looking at a copy of their marriage certificate. Going back to his parents’ marriage certificates was another few minutes as was the next generation (the guy who owned the family bible). I can’t go back any further as registration only stated in 1845 but I have a definite location to check with the church records now.

My grandmother’s side is a little more complicated as her dad came from Scotland. It’s still a bit confusing as the family is in Belfast on the 1911 census, but not on the 1901 census yet she was born in Belfast in 1897. Tracking down her parents marriage took 20 minutes or so as I only had the rough date of birth of her dad and you can only search the records in five year slots but I’ve got that now. That in itself changes things somewhat as he was in Belfast much earlier than I’d thought. It gets more difficult from this point as his birth was somewhere in Scotland and his name isn’t overly rare so I will need to think about how to identify him now without knowing the names of any of his family.