Foreign Perspectives

Well, not quite a week as I really only started it on Wednesday but it’s enough to begin to get a feel for it I think.

The first thing that struck me about it was that it’s a course that uses an awful lot of different resources. As well as the course guide and course book there’s a series of booklets on “activities” (which covers a lot of different stuff), several course forums to look at, the course website and a series of practical activities related to the assignments (which aren’t, yet, on the site).

In fact, over the last few days I’ve been looking at the course guide, observing guide, first course book and the first observing activity. If that’s a typical week it’ll be quite a large course. So far I’ve been doing pretty much all the reading on the little Reader which is just as well since that chunk of books weighs a fair bit. Downside of that is that the PDFs don’t come out so well with so many diagrams so I think I’ll be needing to read some on the computer (very few are available as printed texts).

I’d have liked to have a look at the assignments but they’re not on the course website yet. The specimen exam is though and, at the moment, it looks a pretty scary affair but, hopefully, that’ll change over the course of the next nine months.

So far it seems like the interesting course I expected to, albeit with quite a lot more work to do than expected.

John’s been wanting to have his own Kumon box for a while now so we signed him up for their maths programme this week.

Unlike James, he’s gotten into the UK school system at the right time so the Kumon with him isn’t a matter of catching up with work not done in France but rather of moving ahead of the class work. In fact, it’s starting to become that way with James too: for the first time his Kumon work is ahead of the work that he’s been given in school. That’s not to say that he’s ahead of where he should have been in school but at least the Kumon is starting to stretch him a little.

With John it’s quite a different matter and he’s finding the Kumon work very easy. That’s as it should be of course as the idea behind the programme is that the children shouldn’t find the work difficult therefore they will be more inclined to do it. Although each stage of the work is quite easy, it does build up over time and the theory is that after a year or two you start working above the level that you’d ordinarily be at in school at that time.

John’s also finding the school work far too easy so we’re expecting that he’ll race through a number of Kumon stages quite quickly to get to a level that’s interesting and useful for him. At the moment, it looks like he’ll be doing twenty of the Kumon pages a day rather than the usual 10 so he should get through the levels fairly quickly and may find himself doing P3 work before the summer break.

One thing the Kumon teacher keeps reminding us is that sometimes it causes “issues” with schools if the children in the programme are too far ahead of the rest of their class. I suspect that we’ll end up with that problem at some stage but I’d much rather be dealing with that than having the kids well behind the rest of their class. Certainly from our experience with James it seems a much better plan to aim to be at least slightly ahead of the class.

Over the last week or so we’ve woken to a white landscape but, so far, the white is only frost with perhaps a very light dusting of snow.

That frosty covering makes for rather slippy pavements of course yet you don’t seem to really get the pleasure that proper snowfall can bring. No snowmen to built, no snowball fights. Just slipping and scraping the windows on the car.

And, yesterday, an unannounced closure of the school for the day. Instead of a final lie-in before school started we’d everyone up early to make sure we weren’t late with the slippery roads and found ourselves in front of a closed school. Oh, sure, if it had been way out in the country we’d have expected that but there wasn’t any big problem in getting to it so it was just closed for no apparent reason.

Still, with the weather forecasts continuing in winter mode for the remainder of the week perhaps we’ll get a proper snowfall one of these days.

For me Vista was the final straw that decided me upon dumping Windows at the earliest opportunity. Never before had I seen such a poorly tested system.

That was a couple of years ago but moving out of Windows wasn’t possible for me then as I’d heaps of mail in Outlook which I wanted to take with me. Now it’s different though as the mail import facilities available in the Ubuntu mail programs have come on considerably so at the moment I’m in the process of cutting down the size of the PST below the 1GB import limit which seems the final barrier. Still, it’s on the home run so later today I should have everything moved into Ubuntu.

Aside from the email the move has been incredibly easy to do. Backing up everything in Vista and restoring it all in Ubuntu worked just fine. The only preparation required for that was making sure not to use the Office 2007 file formats though even that’s not really a requirement these days as OpenOffice can read those just fine.

What’s the benefit of the move though? Well, the Vista computer was quite simply becoming unuseably slow thanks to all the junk that’s associated with Vista. One notable improvement that I did make on Vista was disabling the “indexing” facility. That’s there simply to speed up searching for text within the files on your computer. Sounds like a useful facility, doesn’t it? How many times have you ever used it? For me, it’s at best once every couple of years yet enabling indexing has a major impact on the day to day speed of your computer (it’s the reason why your disk is in almost constant use even when you’re not doing anything). Even disabling it takes hours though as it needs to switch off indexing on every file on your computer which probably means hundreds of thousands of files these days for almost everyone.

The other major benefit is that Ubuntu is smaller. A lot smaller. It runs just fine on the netbook computer with 512MB which isn’t an option for Vista. That smaller size means that it runs a whole lot faster. Running SkyPE works great on the Acer 751 in Ubuntu; the same computer can’t deal with video when running Vista. It takes a lot less discspace too. The basic Windows 7 installation needs about 25GB, the basic Ubuntu installation needs less than 10GB. That’s not comparing like with like either as the Ubuntu install includes a fully working Office installation.

It’s almost always the case that the best Christmas presents are things that you’d never have bought for yourself but which seem perfect when you get them.

This year my best one is very definitely the Sony Reader which Wendy bought me. It’s the one that’s with me almost constantly and in use throughout the day. Why? Well, I’m doing a couple of Open University courses at the moment and that means up to four books totally around four inches in thickness to carry around. Instead of that pile I’ve a pocket sized electronic book which means that I can carry all those books around with me and read them when I get the chance rather than having to plan in advance to take them with me.

In fact I can carry around all the course books for all the courses which would have been pretty much impossible without the Reader.

The ebook technology is one that’s quietly zoomed ahead in recent years with the arrival of e-paper. The screens in these readers aren’t the same as those that you see in laptops. They’re not backlit, they’re quite slow to refresh (fine for reading, useless as a computer screen) but most importantly use virtually no power which means that the batteries last for weeks for even the most voracious reader and probably months for most people. Even my initial flicking around all the options and from book to book barely made an impression on the battery after a week. One thing to note is that the battery is only required when you turn the page and it makes virtually no difference to battery life if you take a second or a minute to read a page.

Thanks to Google Books there are millions of free books available for download. Beyond the free ones you can buy a great many books in ebook format these days though for reasons which escape me they are currently at pretty much the same price as the paper versions.

Downsides of it all? I miss the colour and the PDF scaling feature needs work. The metal casing makes for a cold read compared to actual paper though there are fancy covers that would fix that. The Pocket Reader doesn’t have an SD card slot so you’re limited to the 1/2GB internal memory. It’s not permanently online like the Kindle so no buying books on the fly although I usually mull over book purchases anyway.

Upsides are that the 1/2GB “limit” to internal memory means that it’ll hold over three hundred books which doesn’t seem like much of a limit to me. Copying books to the Reader is a whole lot faster than I’d expected: even copying a couple of hundred books was a matter of a few minutes. For normal books the 5″ screen is more than enough to display text at the normal size and in sensible chunks. That it’s not permanently online like the Kindle is a plus to me: Sony can’t see what’s on my Reader and neither can they delete things from it as Amazon have done.

In a word, this is brilliant.