Foreign Perspectives

The site went live yesterday with the chapters of the Human Past that we’ll be reading loaded onto it.

Fortunately they’re proper PDFs so I can resize the fonts for the reader but unfortunately they’re landscape 2-up with ain’t readable in full-screen PDF even on the netbook never mind on the reader. However, it’s possible to split these and there’s even a script to do this.

Unfortunately the OU haven’t bothered to title the PDFs properly so they’re all listed as “A251 The Human Past” with no chapter title; I’ll have to change that at some point as it’s a pain finding the right chapter to read.

Aside from the book and assignment booklet there’s not a whole lot to download from the website as the majority of the various resources referred to are online. Going by the number of them I’d say that the online reading will add up to 50% to the book reading but it seems to vary a good deal between the weeks.

Whilst most people will tell you that cards are the way to go, there’s something to be said for having some cash with you too.

As far as cash goes, it’s sometimes handy to take around $100 in US dollars or perhaps 100€ in euro as both currencies are accepted in a lot of places outside their home country. Don’t take anything larger than a 20 as you will, of course, receive change in the local currency and may not want to be stuck with lots of it.

If you’re going to a country which doesn’t use those currencies the best one depends on where you’re going eg US$ are more useful in South America than Euro, but in many former European colonies in Africa the reverse applies.

What about the local currency? If you’re going to a civilised country, it’s usually best to wait ’til you get there and withdraw it from an ATM in the airport. In most other cases you can find that you either can’t get it or there are severe limitations on how much you can get. For example, when I went to India the maximum you were allowed to take in local currency was £5 ($10) which simply wasn’t worth bothering about.

The cost to you is around 7% for amounts of around the $100/€100 if neither are the currency in your own country (don’t believe those “no commission” signs: the actual charge even in those places is around 7%). If you’re going to a fairly civilised country, it’s best to wait ’til you get there as it’s almost always cheaper to withdraw cash in local currency from an ATM than it is to get foreign currency abroad.

If you’ve some foreign currency left over at the end of your trip many places these days advertise that they’ll buy it back off you commission free. That does NOT mean that they won’t be charging you and in fact it usually costs around 3% to 5% to do this. Therefore, if you’re intending to go back to the same country the following year, just keep the cash and definitely do that if you’ve picked up the $100/100€ that we recommended earlier.

Downsides? well, travel insurance rarely covers cash so if it’s stolen, it’s gone. Also, if the country you’re going to doesn’t use the currency you’ve taken then you can pay considerable amounts in commission and other charges to change your money into the local currency. Worth noting is that not all banks offer foreign exchange services.

I’m going to work my way through the various ways you can take money abroad over the next couple of weeks or so which’ll cover travellers cheques (travelers checks), credit/charge cards, debit cards, cash cards and prepaid cards.

The first CMA of the course hardly required any thought at all but this one makes up for it.

Not in a big way mind you as I’ve around 1/3rd of the questions completed at the first run through. The remainder will require a bit more thinking about although there’s scope for a fair amount of short-cutting of that thinking.

There’s a couple of questions on weird tables where you’ve to work out which of the sets of HTML will produce the illustrated table. Frankly, some of them are enough to put you off using tables for layout for life. The code required for the nice simple tables that I would use is complicated enough (I used to fire up FrontPage Express to create the code for me) with one stray <tr> or <td> being quite enough to totally mess up the layout: the ones in some of the questions is something else altogether.

Short-cut wise, it looks like pasting the code in the questions into a file and seeing what Firefox makes of it is the way to go. Sounds a bit like cheating in a way but then this is very much a practical course so it seems the only sensible thing to do.

I’m toying with making a proper start on the ECA this week with a view to spacing out the work over the next six weeks or so. I definitely don’t want to be racing through the report so spacing that out over the remainder of the course seems sensible.

S197 is one of those Open University courses that people are rather put off by as it’s acquired a reputation of being one of the most difficult of the science short courses.

There’s reason behind that view too. It seems to have a fair amount of both mathematics and weird terminology if the extract from it in OpenLearn is anything to go by. Having said that, the short courses tend to start at a fairly basic level and get you to a level that you didn’t think you’d reach in surprisingly few pages so I’m sure that in reality this one is no different.

It would have been handy to have done this one before the astronomy course as it covers a lot of the ground from the later cosmology chapters. On the other hand, it’s still going to be handy as a pre-course for the main physics course which I’ll be getting around to in a few years time. Sadly, it’s not going to be around at that time as the last run is in May 2011 so I’ll need to squeeze it into what’ll be a fairly busy summer period.

The one downside of doing it is that I can’t count it alongside S104 which means that it’ll need to be added to the open degree rather than the physics one where it really belongs.

When we moved to France we drove our car there with the intention of officially importing it at some stage.

However, we were rather busy in the first few months in France setting things up, then spent the rest of that first year trying to catch up on various bits of administration that we’d put off in the early part of the year. Thus it was quite late on that we started looking into importing the car.

By then we’d become rather wary of the circular path that administration often takes in France and so it was no great surprise to find that it was going to be almost impossible to import our car. Compounding the difficulties was that it was a grey (ie personal) import to the UK so it didn’t have the European type approval. That added another circle of administration to be worked through.

Fortunately in some ways the car developed a couple of what seemed like major problems if the garages were to be believed (which we later found out were relatively trivial things) at around the time when we needed to do something concrete in terms of importing the car. So we ended up just leaving it in the car park for the next six years. It’s not that we intended to do nothing about it, just that one thing or another always had a higher priority and besides the more we looked at the administration required to import it officially, the more we tended to look away.

Anyway, it’s obviously not worth a whole lot now and it’s become one of the French annoyances that need to be cleared up so we thought we’d either sell it or at least get it towed away.

It turns out that thanks to the French love of administration that we can do neither until we can come up with some ownership papers that they will recognise. The ancient log book was never going to be a runner in their eyes even if we could find it so we figured that we’d get the new V5 certificate which is a European style document that they should recognise. Now, those that have read the small print of their own V5 certificate will note that it specifically says that it’s not proof of ownership but seemingly is accepted as such in France as it is here.

So, after finally getting the VIN without which the DVLA said they wouldn’t issue a new one, we set off to Coleraine this morning. We’d a couple of queries so couldn’t use the local offices hence the trip to Coleraine. Nope, can’t issue you that. There’s a note on the record that says the car was exported back in 2005. Well, would you expect anything to do with European administration to be easy?

After some debate, it turns out that they can issue the export certificate which they should have issued back in 2005 though. This contains the same information as the V5 and moreover is free. All being well, the French will accept it.