Foreign Perspectives

Heading off at 8am got me to the Nottingham campus not too much after 11am so it was quite quiet to begin with and the numbers of students are really only starting to build up now, just after lunch.

Registration runs on ’til after 3pm with the introductory lecture in the biology building just after 4pm so I’ve hours to fiddle around. As expected, the shopping centre on campus is closed over the weekend which meant a long trek down to the little shop in the hospital this afternoon.

Surprisingly the taxi was the same price as last year (Lenton on 0115 9 781 781 do the airport pickups for £19.50, just over half the price of the airport taxis; it’s best to arrange for them to collect you at the petrol station just outside the airport parking area as otherwise they charge for the airport parking.

I’ve acquired a green dot already which presumably has some significance for the division up into groups for the lab sessions that start tomorrow but hasn’t been mentioned in anything so far today.

The introductory spiel from the admin people, learning advisor, OUSA and the course director was a joint one for both SXR375 and SXR376 kicking off just after 4pm and running on to almost 5pm. That was immediately followed by the course specific stuff in our respective laboratories. Just one lab for the course this year as there are only 29 of us but we’ve been split up into two groups to do the experiments over the next two days, which we’ll be doing in groups of three.

They seem quite keen on evening lectures although a number of them are optional, including the one on Populations and polymorphism this evening. It was quite well attended but I’m not sure that a lot was taken in as a lot of people seemed quite tired from the days travelling.

In the room is a phone (free internal calls), wired internet connection (you need a cable for this which you can get (free) in the Cripps security office; the wifi varies from poor to non-existent in the rooms), desk, tea/coffee tray with kettle, sink, wardrobe, towels (with soap & shampoos) and a single bed. The shower-room and toilet is shared  by about half a dozen rooms.

It hardly seems like two months have passed since the course materials for this arrived at the end of April.

It’s been quite a busy time although I don’t think I did anything remotely close to the 60 hours preparation that the course is supposed to take. Still, the CMA is out of the way and I may even complete the reading for the S204 plants book before I go. Also on the cards is scanning the relevant pages of the set book to save carting that along this year (not that it was opened during the summer school last year).

I’m not bringing any of the lab notes as the whole lot are on the ASUS already which combined with not bringing the set book makes for a much lighter case. I’ll probably bring along the baby computer too as the wifi is rather flaky in the university. The lab coat will get its second outing and there’s the sometimes used calculator as well. You sort-of feel that you need to bring along a notebook but in reality not much gets written in it as you’ve to write everything in the lab book. New for this year is a USB key to bring back the data from the experiments.

What’s most important to remember is that there’s a heap of handouts to be brought back. They’ll all be on the course website but not until after the final week which means mid-August this year.

Seems like less packing than last year but I’m sure that’ll change before I reach the plane.

After much debate as to the best tablet to get I finally settled on the ASUS transformer.

Why that one? Well, my first criteria was that I wanted a bigger ebook reader which eliminated all the 7″ tablets. In practice it seemed to leave the Motorola Xoom and the ASUS transformer. Ignoring the price difference (quite substantial) the Motorola has a non functional microSD slot which doesn’t strike me with confidence for the rest of it.

Anyway, the move to the ASUS went really smoothly. First up was a PDF reader which would normally be the Adobe one but it’s not really a runner if you’re reading more than the odd brochure so I’ve opted for Repligo ($5) which has all the facilities that the Adobe one should have had. In many ways, it’s the equivalent of the Sony reader software but for Android ie you can do the essentials like jumping to a page number and enlarge the font which are features generally absent from PDF readers on tablets.

Also essential is the Screen Filter (free) application which turns down the brightness to a more appropriate level. You might think that you’d want something that sets the screen brightness directly but leaving it on automatic with the filter means that it adjusts automatically for changing light conditions but with a dimmer backlight than the standard setting gives you. Not only does this bump up the battery life somewhat but it saves on eyestrain.

The ASUS comes with Polaris office which, in theory, is handy if you feel the urge to run up a document with the onscreen keyboard but would probably be a lot more useful with the optional keyboard attachment. It includes word processing, spreadsheet and presentation packages, all of which seem fairly basic.

Sketchbook Express (free) combined with a capacitative pen (£5 from Maplin) is proving to be very handy in running up illustrations for the assignments. Whilst the capacitative screen is very nice when doing the finger swiping, it would be a lot more convenient to be able to use a normal stylus and certainly more accurate when drawing.

Playing videos isn’t as easy as it should be as the supplied player doesn’t currently support a whole lot. Adding Moboplayer (free) sorted out the majority of those with the rather flaky VPlayer (free) adding the final piece. Moai FLV (free) handles FLV files. Incidently, although the BBC iPlayer won’t run, you can just go to the iPlayer site and play the videos from there.

Overall, it’s a very nice tablet that does all that I was wanting it to do plus a lot more besides.

Mum had a fall a few months back and managed to break her hip which was replaced surprisingly quickly but unfortunately even after a couple of months worth of rehabilitation, her mobility is still way down from what it was and stairs aren’t a runner for her. That’s something of a problem as she’d have to be able to deal with the stairs to come home and so we’ve been looking for some kind of nursing home.

At the discharge meeting the consensus was that it would need to be a nursing home rather than a residential one so off we went round looking at places on that basis. All of that time was wasted as a) she’d not been formally assessed (and didn’t need “nursing” as it turned out) and b) every place we went to had a waiting list (20 years, yes TWENTY YEARS, in one case!!).

As far as rehabilitation goes, you get up to six weeks before they start looking for money and then you’ve 48 hours to move before you start writing cheques. That being the case, you’d think that they’d do the assessment a week or two in advance of discharge but in our case it was done the day before she notionally had to leave. Anyway, that kicked off another round of running around looking at residential homes. Except that they too had waiting lists and it was only a few days later that we were given a short list of ones that didn’t have lists. A list with three places on it, two of which were miles away and the third of which had a waiting list. So we asked again and were given another name which had a place. Except that it didn’t as it was away by the time we got there, just a couple of hours after getting the name of it.

We asked the doctor and he had a name of a place that seemed perfect. Snag was that it turned out not to be a runner financially. What they didn’t tell us was that they’d pay £426 and we’d have to pay anything above that. You might think that the person going in could pay it but they can’t as it has to be a “3rd party” (ie usually the sons/daughters). It’s also worth bearing in mind that this “top-up” can go up quite dramatically over the years eg one place we know of went from £10 a week to getting on for £100 a week over the course of 10 years (bear in mind that people usually stay 10-15 years).

Anyway, we’re back to the place that said they had a waiting list but had two empty rooms. Quite why those rooms were available us and not offered to those on the waiting list first is a mystery, but then so much of nursing home lore is a mystery. The remaining issue with it is that it’s basically an unfurnished flat so we need to source some furniture.

It appears that the OU are allowing a number (all?) of courses to be booked somewhat earlier than normal. Apparently gone too is the nonsense that was pre-registration which didn’t actually reserve a place as you might think. Combine that with the appearance of the phrase “subject to availability” beside all of the reservation buttons and it seems prudent to be booking courses somewhat earlier than usual.

The first impact of that for me was booking a place on the final run of SD329 (Signals and perception) which starts next February. A brilliant course by all accounts and one which is equally relevant to the three degree strands which I’m notionally running with at the moment (life sciences, chemistry and psychology). Ordinarily I’d not have been able to book that until around September (ie six months in advance).

More importantly, the second impact of that much earlier booking time is that the residentials for 2012 open for booking in late June rather than mid-October. Ordinarily that would be an easy choice as I need SXR376 (infectious diseases) for life sciences and it’s a really interesting one too. However, having signed up for S205 I could do SXR344 (drug design) which is the chemisty counterpart to SXR376 and looks really interesting too and one that I’d have gotten around to the following year were it not for 2012 being the final year for all the level 3 science summer schools.

To top it all, apparently there’s a major price increase on its way for courses starting in 2013. That’s encouraging people to rejig their plans to include any 60 pointers much earlier. Fortunately that doesn’t appear to affect me as by then I should only have two 30 pointers remaining.