Juggling

You know it’s been a busy week when you come into the lounge on a Sunday evening, and there’s a glass on the side table from Thursday evening, and you realise that you’ve not been in there all weekend.

I can’t say that I’ve not sat on a sofa – one thing I did do on Thursday is purchase a new one for my study, as the other had seen better days.  It’s not been lost forever, and makes a nice slouching sofa for the games room, here’s the new one -

The original plan was to go to the education show on Friday, and had the day booked as holiday.  Things change though for various reasons, and instead I ended up in an all day teaching session on Friday (the less said about it the better, though I’ve never had to ask students to stop playing Farmville in the middle of a class before).

Saturday was OU TMA marking day.  I tried a new process of ‘batch marking’, marking all the question ones, then question twos etc.  This worked fairly well.  Student feedback has mostly been positive, and they do appreciate a quick turnaround of assignments.

Today, after a necessarily slow start (see Friday and Saturday above), and Sunday lunch at parents it was PhD afternoon.  My group are preparing a ‘resource’ for the residential with regard to Action Research, I was keen to differentiate between this, and professional practice, and prepared a fairly dinky 500 word summary of this.  Flushed with success of this, I’ve started to think about my first assignment again, and prepared a ‘one pager’ to start the negotiations.

It’s hardly surprising that I woke Monday morning with a headache, so I’m taking it easy and will head into work later.  But despite this ‘hangover’, it’s been a productive weekend – here’s to many more of them.

Holiday booking

What do you look for when you’re booking a summer holiday?

Good weather?

Pool or beach nearby?

Air Conditioning?

Wi-fi internet access?

I freely admit that each of those probably have equal weighting for me.  After a fortnight in Lanzarote last year saying ‘it’s too hot’, air conditioning became an essential this year for anywhere apart from a UK based holiday (well OK, if I was heading into the Arctic circle that would probably negate this request).

But wi-fi?

It’s one of those milestone years for me this year, the big four-oh (I know, I don’t look it, especially in my profile pic).  So we wanted to do something special, something different.  In the past, choosing and booking holidays has been a long and drawn-out process.  We did the whole thing this time in less than 24 hours, including four hotels booked on the journey there and back, ferry and a fortnight stay in a gite in France (here).  Even a couple of years ago I had problems transferring money from a UK account to a Euro-based one – this year Paypal came to the rescue and the transfer took literally seconds.

There’s a great line in the promotional web site – Outside, you can enjoy wireless high-speed broadband internet on your laptop.  Clearly the stone walls don’t allow for wi-fi signals to travel!

Through some terrible planning on my mother’s part, my birthday also falls just at the time that the second PhD module comes to its culmination, with peer reviews and final submissions.  I’m sure I could have survived without my laptop(s), but I’m not willing to put it to the test.  A few minutes a day will keep me in touch.

The holiday booking is also giving me something to look forward to, having succumbed to the flu for the last week, and still off work sick.  If this sounds familiar, it is.  Last time I was on holiday during much of my illness, not so lucky this time.

My rules… my way

Tonight, due to circumstances somewhat beyond my control, I’ve had to spend five hours solid working on PhD reading.  The output of this can be found here, and I’ve still got around five pages to go.

I’m not looking for sympathy – I knew this was the sort of thing I knew I would be spending a lot of time doing this.  What I’m posting here, and reminding myself of, are the rules which I’m setting myself for the next four years (eeek).

1. Stop working an hour before going to bed.
   I heard today that a quarter of all people in the UK suffer from some sort of insomnia.  I get the worst of both worlds, trouble dropping off, and then waking during the night.  Even before I started at Lancaster I was thinking about it late into the night.  Stopping work and doing something else (OK, here it is writing a blog post but usually it will be something less taxing) will pay dividends I hope.
2. Keep a balance.
   Hmmm, tricky one this.  I’ve never been one to get a good work/work/life balance, but one of the reasons that I’m working so hard tonight is that I’m planning a weekend of no study.  I’m sure to get the balance wrong at times, luckily I have good support mechanisms to keep me on track,
3. Do it properly.
   There’s a tendency to skim read important articles, and only get the bare bones out – I admit that my mind mapping technique does tend to emphasize this, though they are meant to be summaries, and not the total of the articles.  A couple of times tonight I’ve found myself ‘drifting off’ whilst staring at a page of incomprehensible text.  It’s tricky to do, but I must focus, so no half watching of Family Guy or American Dad to distract me… honest!

I’ll write later about some technologies which are helping me even at this early stage – though a quick mention of Dropbox and Zotero is always welcome I’m sure, and they’re allowing me to work across many machines (now across two work sites, plus two laptops and my main desktop machine).

But, following Rule one above, I’m going to stop now.

PhD – Week One

Well, the first week of study on my PhD is complete.  As a minimum I will be on this programme for at least four years, so in some ways I’m 0.5% of my way through the course!

I’ve already got back in the habit of ‘critical reading’, and it will come as no surprise that I’m preparing mind maps of the important articles which we are reading, at present as a cohort.  Very soon we will split into learning groups, and focus on a particular area.  Later we select our own ‘research question’, and move onto a mini research project.

This is a ‘professional doctorate’ course – with the same rigours as a conventional PhD, but with a more structured first couple of years.  I need to get at least 60% in all of the assessments to be able to progress onto the PhD route, otherwise I will be offered a transfer onto the MPhil course.  Still worthwhile of course, but a poor second prize.

It’s exciting, and I am also looking forward to the residential in March – I’ve booked student accommodation on Campus, so I can re-live, or in my case live my student days… well as long as I’m tucked up by 10:00.

Interestingly, the doctorate has separated the e-learning system (moodle) from the social networking side (ning).  Ning gives you the chance to upload photos and videos as well as all the usual blogging and online forums.  This keeps the ‘proper’ system uncluttered.  It is different to other e-learning environments I’ve encountered, but it does work.

Of course it’s early days, but so far, so good, and don’t worry, I won’t be posting each week – here anyhow, what happens in ning, stays in ning”

End of a dream

The long-expected decision has been made.  After the Augustine commission published its findings last year, it was clear that the Constellation program to take human spaceflight “To the moon, mars and beyond” was doomed.  Today’s confirmation was simply the start of the end.

I was born six months after Apollo 13’s famous ‘Houston, we have a problem’.  Hmm, I’ve just checked and I was born 9.5 months after Apollo 12’s flight.. something you want to tell me Mom!

I’ve lived with NASA’s triumphs and tragedies.  I remember looking in the sky at the park I used to play at when Skylab was due to crash back to Earth, and I remember the landing of the first space shuttle flight, Columbia in 1981, and a few years later I was watching BBC Newsround’s coverage of the launch of Challenger when it exploded so devestatingly after take-off.  

(Another memory, the shuttle that never went to space, Enterprise, arrived at Birmingham airport when I was about 12. My Dad was working in an office in Birmingham at the time and saw it, I was in a pottery lesson, the one classroom in school that had no windows.)

And I was there watching Sky News as Columbia disintegrated over huge swathes of the American countryside.  I remember texting friends at the time, and whilst they acknowledged it was sad, they clearly didn’t feel the impact that it had on me.

But shortly after, a Vision for Space Exploration was published.  This was the era of pdf downloads, and I’ve spent far too much time since 2003 looking at the huge number of documents that have been published.  Those who follow it closely knew the shortcomings of the Constellation program.  It was designed to keep the people who worked on the shuttle program employed, by making the solid rocket boosters almost the same as the shuttle SRB. 

The worst thing that NASA did through the development of the Ares rocket and Orion capsule was to call new Orion capsule ‘Apollo on steroids’.  This was picked up negatively by many press pundits, and as many of the innovative features of the original Orion capsule were watered down (literally, a water based landing instead of the much cheaper, soviet-based earth landing, and the reusability of the Orion capsule itself came under scrutiny), it was clear that Orion, even if it did take off in 2015, would still be seen as a ‘dead duck’.  The retro-look is fine for telephones, not for space capsules which people’s lives depended upon.

Where now?  Private enterprise seems to be the key, and NASA may find itself transforming from a space ‘agency’ to a procurement of services.  We can’t forget the huge amount of work that is done in the area of unmanned missions to the planets, and the plethora of satellites which orbit the earth under the control of NASA, but it wasalways the manned spaceflight, the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo and Space Shuttle programs which captured people’s imaginations.

When I heard the outcome of the review, and President Obama’s decision, I tweeted ‘there goes my chance of retiring to the moon’.  There already is a generation who have grown up without knwing the excitment of watching a moon landing (I was two when man last set foot there), may there be a generation soon that can’t even remember when man went into space?

I have read enough science fiction to know the difficulties of space travel, and if I had succeeded in completing NaNoWriMo I would have been able to add my own small body of work (the novel would have covered the next fifty years of manned spaceflight, if Obama had closed down NASA’s manned spaceflight program – prophetic eh!).  Let’s hope that I can look back at this article in five years time and recognise how bleak my outlook was.

Until then, try and catch the moon in the early evening over the next few days.  The bright non-shining star at about 7 o’clock assuming the moon is at the centre of the clock-face.  That’s Mars.

Maybe one day.

Back to basics

I have somewhat fallen out of love with my little eee PC.  Looking back through my blog, the clues were there a while back.  I never really did get over the performance blips at the time, and over time it became slower.

I did, over Christmas, spend a lot of time looking at alternative Operating Systems, but all of them needed me to scrub the XP systeem.  If I was the only person to use the machine this would have been fine, but I had to think about the legacy of the machine, there’s a chance that this will be handed down to someone else, and there’s no chance that they would cope with a non-windows machine.

So today, with some time on my hands (I spent too long yesterday in my study on uni and PhD work), I decided to go ‘back to basics.’

I removed all google software, including notifier, gears, chrome and google earth.  (Nearly) all microsoft software went too (yay!).  iTunes and Quicktime went into the recycling bin.

The only software installed on the machine is IE 8, Twihirl (and the associated Adobe Air framework), and Glary Utilities.

I have all the other applications I would need on a laptot via PortableApps.com siting on an 8 gig memory card, which has recently been upraded and contains everything I need (apart from a twitter client, come on guys!).

A few other tweaks, I’ve gone into the performance settings through my computer and adjusted for best perfomance, though have kept font smoothing on, as the screen does not look ‘right’ otherwise.

I’ve got boot up speed from turning on, to opening Internet Explorer (FireFox runs off the memory card so it a little slower) to a little under two minutes – not bad and I reckon about half the time that it was creaking along.

So, new life in a machine without installing the OS, and I’m using it now to type this posting.

So go on, love your laptot… at least until the iPad prices are released!

Torn between two lovers…

…feeling like a fooool! as the old song used to go.

I was worryingly excited about the launch of the iPad yesterday.  Not only was it an Apple product, it was going to solve my ultimately disappointing experience with netbooks, and solve the problem of whether or not I should purchase a Kindle/Sony e-reader.

So why, after the initial euphoria, was I not hammering down the door of the Apple Store this morning (despite knowing it’s not going to be available for at least another couple of months).

Well, for one it’s the price.  Most commentators seem to be saying it’s a bargain, and compared to the Kindle DX, the closest equivalent product in the Amazon store it does seem to be.  But the cheapest model is coming in at $499, with the UK vat and other premium the general feeling is that it will come over here at £399 – that’s a lot of cash, even if my personal circumstances weren’t as uncertain as they are now.

The other question I’m asking myself is ‘Can I live without the iPad’?  I could not function without my MacBook, or Big Mac at home, and increasingly my iPhone, though at the moment it’s acting like a petulant schoolkid when out of Wi-Fi range (you want to access BBC Sport website to see how Andy Murray is doing – Computer Says No!).

So I’m conflicted, and saying ‘wait until you can touch one’ isn’t an option for me, as I’ll fall helplessly in love and want one – it happened with the iPod touch and iPhone.

And financially, I could buy a small Kindle (Kindlet?), and put the £200 into a fund for the a new Mac Pro in 18 months time.

Or wait until the Kindle is officially launched in the UK, which can only be a matter of time… can’t it?

Some local photos

I went for a walk at the weekend, enjoying being able to walk without slipping everywhere was an interesting change.

I took some pics on my iPhone.

That went well!

A quick post, though I should be fast asleep I’m still not tired. The outreach session went really well. The pupils were enthusiastic and asked reasonable questions, the project plans created actually looked how I expected them, and the raffle (you had to be there, but there was a good reason for a raffle) went well, with a clamour for even the ‘dodgy’ prizes.

There were a number if technical glitches which maybe took longer than they should to solve, and I maybe left too long at the end for the evaluations to be completed. But overall it was a good experience, thanks to all of those who helped, and sent me ‘good luck’ messages.

Something new..

Despite the constant change at work, it’s not often that I get a totally new teaching experience.  Like all good professionals I update my lecture notes, and teach new things, and the coming semester is going to have a lot of that coming up(!), but tomorrow is something new for me.

The university, in common with many HEIs (Higher Education Institutions) in the West Midlands hold outreach events with local schools and sixth forms.  This is an attempt to demonstrate to students what university life is like, and hopefully take some skills which are can be of use for their remaining time in sixth form.  These are called ‘Masterclasses’, not by me you understand, but the marketing department which looks after this sort of thing.

So tomorrow I’m teaching a group of 25 upper-sixth form students how to use Microsoft Project, and give them a feel for what being a project manager is like in the real world.  I’ve got some nice presents for the students in the form of pen-drives, and also some really duff prizes for a raffle I want to use to demonstrate the concept of risk in a project.

Sounds easy?  The organisation which has had to go into this has been incredible, from booking rooms, obtaining temporary logons to machines, making sure that the students are kept fed and watered, and given a tour of Millennium Point, which I have to admit can look impressive with some of the labs including robots scurrying around and lots and lots of machines.

Let’s see how the day goes – no doubt I’ll tweet as the day goes on.  It would be useful for me to reflect afterwards – but that may be a personal introspection!

In other news, preparation for my PhD work continues apace, with accommodation and trains booked for the first residential period, and a steady influx of emails from the administrator.  Communication has been excellent, and I have enough pdf’s of information to keep me busy for a very long time.  As mentioned before, the PhD has a taught element, with a very stringent requirement (and high pass mark) required to progress to the second stage.  Any doubts that I had about the academic rigour of this route have been well and truly dashed.

Finally, in other, other news, the new Open University course (T215) has also ramped up, with my students being allocated, course website being made available and (gulp) access to some Cisco Academy online tutorials.  This course really looks well put together, there’s a lot which is new and innovative.  I’m really looking forward to tutoring this.  I’ve pontificated before on why I think having a foot in two academic ‘camps’ is useful, though now with my external examining position and studying at another university I guess I’ve got two feet and both arms in different camps… maybe that’s pushing a metaphor too far!