Foreign Perspectives

I went for a job interview yesterday which was unusual in that, whilst I felt that I did meet the requirements for the job on the whole, I didn’t fulfil all their essential requirements. So, I shouldn’t have been asked for the interview.

The snag is that, as with many other employers at the moment, these guys basically wrote a wish list rather than a list of requirements that anybody they could expect to recruit would actually possess. Not quite in the same league as one notorious job advert a few years back which had as an essential requirement a minimum of 5 years experience in using a particular version of software that had only been released the year before, but certainly getting there. That wish-list approach is one reason why it’s best to apply for a job that you like the sound of but which you feel you can only do a small fraction of: employers have been known to get a zero response from some job adverts these days as a consequence of that wish-list mentality.

For example, they asked for experience of a product that was written by a company who have since gone bankrupt and which seems to be mainly used in a different continent. I’m guessing that the number of people who could cover that will be quite limited and indeed the acknowledged local expert is returning to Canada later this year.

Other things had an air of inconsistency about them. Things like an essential requirement of experience in a product that is long past its heyday whilst also having a complete knowledge of the latest of technologies.

One question was particularly interesting in that they reckoned that the team would largely be made up of people in their 20s who would be “very sharp and know all the latest software” so how would I deal with that. Actually, chances are that I’d be even more up to date than they are since, as y’all know, I’m in the midst of a university IT course. It’s been a long time since I met anyone who could talk me under the table in terms of computer technology and even then it was a telecoms guy and they don’t count.

Oh well, I guess I better keep at the job applications.

For the most part, the relative valuation of currencies isn’t something that affects day to day life for most people.

After all, outside holidays, how often do you directly buy something from overseas? Even with Internet sales sites as numerous as they are, in reality most people buy from their closest outlet for the simple reason that to do otherwise would add to the shipping costs. Even when that’s not so much the case it needs a major price disparity to make it worthwhile shipping internationally for most products.

However, that all changes when it’s a major transaction such as a house. Which is why we find ourselves wonder just what’s going to happen to the sterling/euro rate over the next six months or so.

Frankly, most ways of predicting the future direction of exchange rates are little more than gambling. However, looking at it historically the rate has been between 1.50€ to about 1.05€ over the last five years and around 1.10€ to 1.25€ over the last year. Perhaps more importantly though is that the Euro is clearly overvalued a lot. For example, the Big Mac Index puts the over-valuation at 30% (ie the 1.50€ from getting on for five year ago is the right one); the problem is that it can take a long time before a currency reaches its correct exchange rate, however one might define that.

So what’s a person to do?

In practice most people do nothing which leaves them wide-open to what can be massive exchange rate differences. For example, that 15% change over the last year might not sound like much but translate that into a house price of, say, 200,000€ and you could be looking at a change of around 30,000€ which isn’t small change obviously.

Second choice is to translate the prices into your own currency at the current rate and build that into the sale contract. A reasonable option for you, if you can convince the other party into running with it. Chances are that in reality this is going to be a non-runner.

Finally, there’s the option of using one of the currency exchange places and fixing the exchange rate in advance. There are a whole lot of options with this route but the principle differences are between committing yourself to buy/sell at the rate quoted and getting an option to buy/sell at that rate. It’s much, much better to run with the option as, of course, the exchange rate could move in your favour. With an option, you can change your mind and exchange at the better rate.

After a bit of a to-do between students and faculty as to why they were forcing us to use CafeScribe (a truly dire piece of software by all accounts), things settled down as we got into the second week of the course (or week 3 according to the students) for the simple reason that everyone seems to have printed the whole book either on paper or to a PDF and thereby abandoned CafeScribe.

It’s an odd kind of course. There’s a bit of programming in it (JavaScript) but that aspect is downplayed a lot as the Web Applications Certificate is at more a management level than a programming one. Thus the first daily (yes, daily) seminar on JavaScript started at a very low level and by the end of the week it was producing a single alert message. That said, I have the feeling that some people have already been put off by the programming aspect.

The daily seminars are a bit much really when added to the rest of the course work. All told there’s the usual course guide which is fine. It mainly points you towards parts of the main course text but also to parts of the JavaScript guide and to a couple of websites too. Add that to the daily seminars and the daily activities and the rather active forums and you’ve a lot of course packed into 10 points.

Coming up quite soon is the first computer marked assignment. I’ve about 1/3rd of that done already and should get the rest completed sometime this week all being well although seeing as I’m a bit behind schedule with the biology assignment perhaps not.

It’s the usual equation for me though seemingly never for an obvious reason.

With the archaeology the tutor has been giving really good comments on the assignments that I’ve put in. Just as well as I’ve studied neither history nor art subjects in any form for a very long time indeed.

So, in the first one I lost marks in leaving out what seems obvious in hindsight, namely the dates of the various events. I’d bandied about the terms for the periods alright, just not added the dates. Easy to fix obviously.

In the second I’d not put in enough in the way of references which seemed to drop a similar number of marks as the overall mark was much the same as for the first one. Not quite so easy to fix as I found out in the third one.

For the third one, there were dates everywhere and a page and a half of references which took ages to research. In this world archaeology course I thought that I’d take two empires as they suggested and add references from around the world. Net effect was that within the word count you couldn’t say a massive amount about those additional examples so 10% less than before! I think I fell into the trap of this course: it covers a lot of ground in a short time and leaves you with lots of examples whereas what’s really wanted at this level is an in-depth critique of a few cases with perhaps a short reference to other examples.

Which leaves the end of course assessment to do. There are two options on this one. In the first you’ve to look at the impact of cultural contact and movement which sounded good to me as there are lots of examples. For the second you’ve to choose three examples of the impact of population growth on the development of societies.

Prior to receiving the latest mark I’d decided to go for the first option as it seemed to allow the inclusion of loads of examples but I suspect that the second option is probably better as it would force me into concentrating more on fewer examples. The problem with doing that is that it depends on being able to find references to quite detailed aspects of the impact of population growth and in some really interesting societies there’s not a whole lot of detail to draw upon. So, for example, whilst presumably population growth had a major impact on the formation of early agricultural villages, there’s next to nothing to say about them.

Are you going for the sexy undies again or are you going to buy your girl some chocolate this time?

The downside of the undies is that men tend to buy something sexy whilst women are looking for something comfortable. The two rarely meet in the middle. Sexy stuff is generally tight and made of thin material but women are looking for comfy and this time of year thin material generally doesn’t cut it.

But why do they like chocolate so much anyway? These days a lot of it is to do with the marketing by the chocolate companies, hence the mass of those little heart shaped chocolates that you see around Valentine’s Day.

However, there are also chemical reasons behind the attraction of chocolate. It’s a sweet and we are all attracted to sugary things for a start. However, it also contains triggers for your endorphins (the “feel good” chemicals) which other sweets don’t. Finally, specifically for the women it contains phenylethylamine which is related to chemicals peaking during orgasm.