Foreign Perspectives

The Connswater greenway is a project which will, over the course of the next two or three years, link up pretty much all of the existing smattering of parks and walkways from the Titanic quarter through to the Castlereagh hills.

Although it’s an area that I’ve been in and around for most of my life their booklet highlights a whole bunch of things that I never knew existed. In fact, it comes across as a much more interesting area than you would expect, picking out as it does interests ranging from George Best’s home and Van Morrison’s home and haunts through to a 400 year old bridge in what it a fairly compact area.

That bridge is the most surprising for me as I went to school right beside it yet never knew of its existence until Wednesday morning! To be fair, it doesn’t look that impressive these days but then ancient footbridges rarely do and this one crosses the river at a point where the flow tends to collect a whole heap of junk ranging from fallen branches through to the Tesco trolley which seem to get everywhere these days.

Whilst the majority of the open spaces exist already, many of them have seen better days and the walkways have generally fallen into disuse over the years. Thus one of the major tasks of the project is to spruce up what’s already there which is no small task given the span of the greenway. This will include re-routing some of the stretches of river to both create a more typical meandering look and to sort out the flooding problem that arises along some sections of the rivers. In addition to all the prettying up the playgrounds scattered along the route will have their numbers increased somewhat and upgrades to those that are already there.

One of the most staggering figures that was quoted in the presentation on Wednesday was that over 50% of the population in the area is “economically inactive” ie there’s a very high level of unemployment. Whilst this project won’t directly change that, it should help to pretty up the area substantially which may in turn attract more businesses to move to what was once an area with close to 100% employment thanks to the shipyard, aircraft factory and all the supporting businesses which they drew in.

Largely because it’s a course that I need to think about I’ve not established a proper time slot for it yet so the work on it has been slipping back over the last few weeks.

That said, I’m over half way through it so over the point where it’s worthwhile having a look at the ECA. Since the first submission date is the end of October which clashes with the astronomy exam and the first web development CMA I thought that I’d aim for the second date which is the end of January. If nothing else, that gives me the option of backpedalling a little with the course if needbe.

Anyway, I’ve made a start on the ECA as some of the questions relate to chapters relatively early on in the book and should be able to complete the first question sometime this week and perhaps part of the second one. Unlike in other courses the questions don’t follow a neat progression through the course so it’s not entirely clear in advance what questions you’d be able to answer by the time you’ve reached any given chapter. That contributes to making it a little more difficult to do than typical short courses are and there’s also more of an element of needing to understand things generally with this course than I’ve seen before on a short course too. It’s not that the questions are overlly difficult but you definitely need to think more about this course than is usual for the short courses at this level which, of course, is no bad thing and should help me when I start the big chemistry course this time next year.

At the moment it’s starting to look like I would be able to hit the first submission date but since I’ve started on the ECA for the second date I’ll just be plugging away with that and I’ll hang on to it ’til December when I can submit it. Having said that, I may have a look at the earlier ECA if I finish the course really early.

It covers some ground that I did way back in the anaesthetics section of A-level chemistry many years ago but in more detail. Thus, whereas the A-level largely concentrated on telling the story of the development of modern anaesthetics, SK185 tells that story but goes on to explain how the various compounds were developed. Fascinating both in terms of the story, of how the chemicals work and how one goes about developing a new medicine. Very much a recommended course if you’re at all interested in how things like painkillers actually work.

Thanks to our Kumon centre taking on rather too many new students than they seem to be able to cope with and hence arbitrarily halving the number of worksheets per session (without reducing the fees, of course), we’ve been looking around at other options.

The Kumon issue arose because there’s no set limit to the number of students that a given centre can take on. Thus, with a sudden increase in numbers following the free trial at the end of August, the numbers in the class seemed to pretty much double. Due to the way the in-class marking is handled that in turn meant that the time taken to get through the work in class went up from around 40 minutes for our guys to over an hour which might not sound like much of an increase but had the overall effect that there just wasn’t enough time to get through all the students. Rather than recruit more supervisors, the centre just halved the number of worksheets so that 60 minute time-slot now takes about 30 minutes.

So we’ve started looking for something similar that places explicit limits on the maximum number of students that they can take on. That’s thrown up Kip McGrath which operates rather differently in that rather than trying to run the kids through a standardised programme, they tailor their programmes to the children and there’s a maximum of six per class. Anyway, we’re getting the kids assessed for their programme later this week.

Ironically, we would have stuck with Kumon as it showed steady progress for the kids but it’s just too expensive for what they’re providing at the moment.

Courses that are largely online are even more difficult to judge ahead of time than book based courses.

You might think that student reviews would be a good place to start in assessing how long a course will take to do but in reality it’s very much based on your prior knowledge and experience. Thus whilst the comments on U211 a few years back indicated that it took getting on for 20 hours a week to do, in reality it rarely took me more than three ie about 1/5th of the recommended time of 16 hours. It looks like TT280 will be even worse. The OU guideline is 8 hours, which I usually divide by two, but I finished the first three weeks worth of work in something like three or four hours (and, no, I didn’t skip things). That leaves me with just one chapter of the book to read to complete week three which is as far as I can go ’til October the 1st when the first CMA is released.

One of the exercises was to run a W3C validation on a website. For that I thought that I’d give some of my own websites a spin. Turns out that the one with the most problems is this one and all because of some of the plugins that I use; my completely DIY inns sites were fine apart from a couple of typing mistakes.

Anyway, all being well, I’ll be able to maintain this pace in future courses in the web development certificate as I’ll be running some of them alongside quite a heavy workload. The medicine course is slipping back a ways at the moment though I’m still on schedule to complete it sometime in October even with my “pottering along” pace.

Friday was Culture Night in Belfast which means a very, very packed night of entertainment all over the city and all free too.

We took the opportunity to finish off some things that we didn’t manage to fit in to the Heritage Weekend earlier in the month. The easy way to include them turned out to be to go on one of the three Community Taster Tours. The listing for these was a little confusing in the booklet about the culture night but it turned out that there were three entirely different tours to choose from, each lasting three hours.

For our purposes the 4pm tour seemed best in that it included the Titanic pump house which we’d missed out on earlier and which normally has a very confusing car parking arrangement that seems best avoided. Surprisingly the tours weren’t anything like fully booked and we found ourselves on an open top bus that didn’t even have a dozen people on it.

Frankly the pump house was a major disappointment. Effectively it’s a small, very overpriced, cafe with one stand containing an assortment of Titanic gifts and a dozen or so panels about various aspects of the Titanic spaced around a very bare room. Next stop was the Engine Room Gallery which is nowhere near the Titanic area as you might expect but instead at Hollywood Arches.

From there we were off to what was supposed to be an Ulster Scots event at the Spectrum Centre on the Shankill Road. Unfortunately the organisation fell apart at that point so we only saw the Lambeg drummer and didn’t see the highland dancing, the flute band nor the lone piper.

Finally, it was on to the Indian Community Centre where they were rather optimistic about the amount that could be included in the short time available. Thus we missed out on the henna and sari demonstration, Hindi class information, Indian dance and musical performance and we just about managed to fit in the Indian tea, food and snacks.

Although three hours seemed like an awfully long time for a bus tour round Belfast when we read about it in the brochure, in practice the time just flew in and really it needed to be around twice as long to do justice to everything but then that’s only to be expected of a taster tour. In fact, it was almost perfect as a taster and has highlighted a couple of places that we will be revisiting at the next opportunity.

By the time we got back, it was almost the perfect time to go on the tour round the offices of the Belfast Telegraph. No smell of fire and brimstone as you sort-of expect from seeing newspaper back-offices in movies but rather a very automated newspaper production factory. Sadly we didn’t get to see the presses running as they don’t kick off ’til a couple of hours after the tours finish but a very interesting tour nonetheless and the hour just flew in.

Both the little guys were running on empty by this point so we finished off with a brief look round some of the activities going on before heading home.