Foreign Perspectives

Not so long ago, the only IT seminars put on locally were those by the BCS and usually only about once a month over the winter months with very much the same faces seen at every one.

Roll that on a decade or so and there seem to be seminars coming out of the woodwork everywhere. This week there were two quite different but equally good ones.

First off was a very interesting perspective of how agile methods are used in CME. Although broadly aimed at the development community, it had enough background for others in the IT community to pick up on it. This was one of those from the BCS series and oddly, despite there being hundreds if not thousands more IT jobs locally now, the number attending was much the same as it has always been for BCS events. That unchanging number is a bit sad really as some other non-BCS events can have hundreds of people at them these days, so why not the BCS ones?

The next day was something of a marathon ISACA one on COBIT that ran on for around two hours. That’s something of a specialist field so it wasn’t surprising to see just a handful of attendees for what turned out to be a surprisingly comprehensive overview of the COBIT methodology. The ISACA events are quite frequently attended by a hundred or more people but it does vary from topic to topic and speaker to speaker.

Over the course of a year there are quite a number of such talks. By far the best attended are generally the ISACA and BASH ones representing the IT security and IT development communities with a continual stream of niche ones at Farset Labs.

These days there’s really no excuse if you’re using simple wallpaper that everyone else has to decorate your home.

How much better to display a selection of your own photographs instead? You’ve probably not thought about that before as the normal commercial photographic printers just cater for the typical album size prints and don’t have the equipment to produce a trully impressive work of art for your wall from your photographs.

However, you don’t need to limit yourself to the photographic shop round the corner these days as it’s very easy to transfer a photograph to a printer anywhere. Not only does this open up the possibility of much larger prints but you’ve also the option of printing on various types of “paper” from the usual glossy (not really suitable for large scale photos) through to canvas if you’d like an almost painting like quality to your print.

Particularly for the larger sizes, printing photograph on canvas is really the only way to go. If your image is from a compact digital camera more than a year or two old then it’ll go “blocky” on normal photographic paper if you try to run off a print at the larger sizes but on canvas this disappears into the texture of the material you’re getting it printed on.

What about the subject for your photo? That depends on you. I’m quite taken with this photo that I took of Cordoba and I’ve a heap of similar scenic photos from that particular trip. On the other hand, all scenes would make for a dull home I suspect and it’s probably best to mix them up with photos of the kids and so on. One thing to watch on the landscape photos is that if you’re not careful they can date quite quickly if you’ve included people in them as dress styles change surprisingly quickly sometimes (unless the people are in native dress of course).

Last, but not least, don’t forget that you can update the photos now and again too.

Although it’s actually possible to see all the highlights in a single, very hectic, day, it’s much better to spread the trip out over about a week as there’s an awful lot to be seen.

What we did was very much the whistle-stop tour with an early morning flight over then a short bus tour of some of the highlights which were mainly the Colosseum that you see here and the Trevi fountain. However, we needed to part company with the bus at that point as they were heading off to the shops whilst we wanted to see the Sistine chapel and as much as we could fit in after that which turned out to be quite a lot as we managed all but the Spanish Steps on our list and could have fitted in that too if I’d not been vetoed (“We’ll miss the bus!”).

However, that’s the crazy way to see Rome. Much more sensible is to do the above over three or four days and spend the rest of the week checking out some of the other wonders of the city. For most people that means staying in a hotel but to really get the most of your time it’s better to look towards self-catering as that’ll give you a much more Italian feel to your holiday.

We’d gotten into a reasonable routine on the homework front as we moved through September which, most of the time, let James keep on top of it. Not an entirely perfect routine mind you as we’d a bit of a wobble mid-month when he figured that he should only do homework the day before handing it in rather than when he received it but we recovered from that. I say “we” as this early in the journey, he’s not quite organised enough to run the whole show himself but he is progressing in the right direction on that front. A couple of weeks in, he took over the organisation of his bag for the next day which was a big step forwards.

The volume of homework, so far, has been surprisingly manageable. Quite a varied mix from day to day and quite a variation in what is required from each of his subjects too. The technology in particular seems to vary quite a lot with bits of reading and note-taking, literacy, drawing, and design work making it by far the most well-rounded subject at the moment. Maths is pretty much as you’d expect with a mix of written and online homeworks that are going over some of the same ground as was covered rather speedily for the transfer test. The early weeks of both technology and art highlighted how much the standard has moved up from primary school and over just a few weeks the work he was handing in moved from being very obviously primary school homework through to bearing at least a reasonable resemblance to grammar school work. The homework tails off rapidly as the mid-term break nears.

We’ve been to a presentation cum seminar that was run for the new starts a few weeks into the term. That tidied up a number of points that I’m sure that many were wondering about but I don’t think that we would say that we know everything yet, the snag being that we don’t know exactly what questions to ask. Way back for instance, we were assuming that we needed to pay the fee upfront and never thought to ask about paying it over a number of months but in practice when you get to the point of paying, their assumption seems to be that you’ll pay by direct debit. On the other side, we’d assumed that we’d only be paying the £50 for the lunch card but in fact the bill was £154 with the extra £100 being made up of the charge for the stationery pack (which is actually all the workbooks etc. and not just the calculator, pencil case and compass), a peculiar charge for transport (which covers excursions that haven’t happened yet) and some additional materials for technology and home economics.

In place of a PTA, for the moment, is the parents’ forum. So far, there’s only been one quite informative meeting of that. It’s better than a PTA in the sense that it’s not restricted to a limited clique but not so good in that it’s not a vehicle for organising parent/teacher events which is the one area that the school lacks at the moment. Somewhat surprisingly, the school has only had a marketing manager for a few months; I get the impression that she will radically lift the profile of the school in the months and years to come.

The family service in October was a very well attended event. Whilst we hadn’t particularly looked for a Christian school, it’s clear that Christian values run right through the school and I think that’s underlying the various “trivial” things that we noticed at the outset and continue to notice as time goes on. Although it’s not a faith school as such it does have the very caring attitudes and values that you’d expect to see in one – in fact the only other school we saw with a similar approach was the Catholic grammar school Our Lady and St Patrick’s.

The only downside we’ve seen is in the traffic jams that are frequent at 3.30 but avoidable when we set off in time in the mornings. Friday afternoon in particular is generally really bad as there aren’t so many after school clubs that day so just about everyone arrives at the same time.

Major upsides are that James has become quite fired about maths which is some feat as he just hated the maths in primary school. The catering exclusively for boys’ interests has helped him in all of the subjects yet it’s not something that we’d even considered a year ago. For example, the topics in English kicked off with those aimed at getting boys fired up about the subject rather than attempting to go for topics that would interest both boys and girls. The library is just for boys which has bumped up the reading he does and he’s even ordered a book. Even though it’s early days for us, his confidence is clearly up – he’d never have even thought to order a book before. Having just 17 in his class has removed the chance of “hiding at the back” that you can get when there are 30 and, whilst we can’t point to something specific, that extra attention can only be to the good and will pay off over the years to come.

So, for us, a good choice and one that is surprisingly affordable.

Las Vegas is one of those places that seems to have everything that you could possibly be looking for in a holiday.

Las Vegas golf vacations are no different with courses set in fantastic scenery like this at Paiute Resort. That’s just one of many courses that you can book golf packages with via the Las Vegas Golf Authority which offers great deals on all of the top courses in the area.

One big plus point of golfing here is that Las Vegas is close by all of the resorts so it’s easier to persuade the family that it’s a great place for everyone to go to.