Foreign Perspectives

School days are a bit of a nuisance for us to be honest as indeed they must be to most parents.

In our case, four days a week (he gets Wednesday off) we have to take James round to school before 9am, which gives us a few hours to get some stuff done (mostly blogging in the Winter as you may have noticed!), then off to collect him from school at 11.45am ie we’ve all of 2 1/2 hours to ourselves in the morning.

The afternoon isn’t much better, of course. To give us a little more time we usually drop him off at 2pm and head straight on for the shops or whatever though often it’s a bit of a race back to collect him at 5pm.

What we’re trying to do is to make the most of the Wednesdays by heading off somewhere when we collect him on the Tuesday evenings. Our first attempt at that was this week and we’d a very nice day in Arles.

Longer trips are more difficult though. In theory, we should set out on Saturday morning for Geneva but that would get us there in the evening and we’d have to go back on Sunday. Instead, we’re hoping to pick him up at lunchtime and head on then (he’s only at nursery school so it’s not a big deal if he misses an afternoon). That should give us all day Saturday and at least part of Sunday in Switzerland which is a nice little mini-holiday for us.

One of the things that’s been happening over the last few months is that the paid posting sites are demanding better standards of spelling and grammar from the bloggers and promising penalties if they don’t get them.

Recently, the advertisers have added some text to the effect that the blogger should check their spelling and grammar and that those with bad spelling will be rejected. Fair enough, except that almost all of those demanding better spelling have spelling mistakes in their own advert (and, in one case, in their mandatory link text!) and impose bad grammar through their poorly though out link text.

Perhaps laughably, it’s not uncommon to find that the link specified doesn’t actually work which shows how little care is put into the advertising from some places!

To be honest, with all the security things on these days, I figured that visits to CERN would have been cancelled but apparently not.

In fact, they seem pretty keen on getting people to go. Well, one aspect of that is that CERN costs a whole heap of public money and as with the likes of NASA they’re very keen to show that the money is being well spent.

That would ordinarily be particularly difficult for CERN in that the stuff that they do is very much into seriously technical high energy physics which, let’s face it, is far removed from most peoples’ lives. On the other hand, how could you put a value on the invention of the World Wide Web? The money that’s been generated by that single invention would more than likely repay all the money that’s been invested in CERN from the day it opened.

They go a little overboard on the visits in that they take a half day vs the cursory hour or so in normal places. That in turn means that they can’t have people just dropping in for a visit so if you book one, expect a wait of anything up to six months between your application and when they can show you around.

Oh, and they do show you around too. You get to see at least one of the experimental areas during your visit.

Aside from anything else, one thing that surprises me about this photo is that although I scanned it with a reasonably good scanner for its day, the resolution is much lower than even that of a cheap digital camera these days.

That aside, we’re planning on a trip to Geneva this Friday. As usual, it’ll be “weather permitting” though at the moment the prospects are looking quite good.

You might think that there would be loads to see in Geneva but in reality there isn’t a whole lot. Having said that, what there is, is pretty good in that you get the Red Cross museum, the Olympic museum, etc. courtesy of all the international organisations based there and, of course, there’s the scenery. Oh, and not to forget CERN where Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1990 (that link is to the first ever website). Yes, it’s that recent!

Also potentially on the cards is Lausanne which is about 40 mins up the road from Geneva.

With all this running around Roman remains that we’ve been doing of late, I’m sort-of half toying with the idea of doing a course to learn something more about that era.

As usual, I should never even pick up an Open University prospectus as there are just too many interesting little courses in it which could keep you busy for several lifetimes. Still… their course on Exploring the Classical World would seem to fit the bill perfectly. The only problem with it really is that it’s a 60 point course which requires a fairly full committment unlike the 30 point ones which can be done as a sideline.

Funnily enough for a level 2 course, it doesn’t have any prerequisites as such other than a wishy-washy recommendation to do the Humanities course which I’ve heard, whilst interesting, isn’t worth doing in terms of being a stepping stone to further course.