BBC SPORT | Football | No Scots for GB Olympic football
Sounds like a case of withdrawing before we fail to get picked. The only likely candidate would be a Scottish manager, and even that would be unlikely.
First lecture was a bit of a waste of time, simply coming up with ideas of topics for the assesment for the Technology and Society course. It seems to be the norm that on the BTechEd you get to choose your method of assessment, or take your notes into the exam, or set the paper, or something to make it easy to pass.
Mildy interesting nontheless.
Graphics was good as ever, moved on to Planometric, was good to revisit something I couldn’t quite remember if I’m being truthfull. Folio exercise for next Thurs os to take a map of the Glasgow Uni campus and turn it into a planometric version. Thankfully he’s limited it to 20-30 minutes work.
Design, moving forward, thrashed out all the marginal values and even some ideal ones, got some star rating for how we perceive the competitors’ products to meet our customer needs. Which altogether means that we’ve pretty much got a Target Product Design Specification, whic in turn means we can at last start drawing some radios. 6 each to do for next Tuesday.
On ym way out I held the door for someone who was very friendly and chatty and walked with me from the St Andrew’s Building to the gates of Kelvingrove Park. I have no idea who he was, but I’m sure I’ll say hello’ next time I see him.
The evening saw the 1st statutory meeting of the SRC this year, which I attended. All very exciting for an SRC meeting, controversial topics such as the new constitution and a motion to vote on NUS membership, and another thing which I’ll not mention, at leat until the next version go the GU Guardian comes out, I’d feel a little uncomfortable doing so.
Then to the pub! GUPA has turned itself into a really popular club, and it was really hot in the pub which just led to lots of beer. Got home around half 12. M’s dad had arrived, I hope I didn’t wake him, he’s staying for the weekend.
I drove to college today, my lift having called in sick, it was pretty good actually, I like the freedom that having a car gives and I want to make more of it if I can, something I talked about later in the evening. Metal work in the morning as usual and I got the base for the just cut and formed, and even got as far as soldering it on just enought so it’s in place for next week. Next week is out last on sheet metal before swapping with the rest of the class who are on lathes and what not. I’m not looking forwardd to going back to that side of it, it’s not something I enjoy, nor feel confident while doing it - I suppose what I have to try to get out of it this year is to find out how to relate what we do in college to what we’ll teach in school (these things are vastly different, we learn nothing of any real relevance to schools in metalwork other than how not to set up a workshop) but getting the entusiasm for it will be a challenge.
A short morning session because Eddie Mack was in again going over machine safety, more of a lecture this time but useful nonetheless.
After a long lunch it was back down for woodwork, after last week’s performance I felt we should maybe put in a bit more effort and actually got a long way forward, more cutting veneers but at least we’re nearly at the end of that block (once you’ve cut 3 or 4 veneers then you know what can go wrong).
And then the evening, not really PDF but I feel like writing about it, remembering how to relax might become important when I’m a fulltime worker. We went over to friends of M’s through the uni surf club for dinner, which was awesome. Three couples and three courses, each based on cheese because of a lack of communication between ourselves. Excellent food though, I even enjoyed the mushroom starter. And then we went out to Bento’s for a drink or two, with the rest of the surf club. We resolved though to have a party at ours sometime and to make the most of living so close to beautiful countryside as we all have cars. One ot the people there I should say is doing a PGCE in Maths this year and is currently out on placement, it sounds pretty daunting going into a classroom for the first time knowing that in a year it’ll be your job.
And that’ll do.
We awoke in Arequipa and quickly left the hotel in an arranged taxi for the bus station. (more…)
Tuesday is a long day with not much achieved.
Started off with a talk from the EIS instead of a lecture about where we fit in with the law once we qualify, also got to have a look through the payscale for teachers in Scotland, always a nice thing to look at, something to look forward to.
Thena little time spent doing some designey things where we almost but not quite got a competitive benchmarking done, should be ready to convert into a design spec on Thursday.
And then, a demonstration of the high tech IT presentational equipment that is increasingly becoming available in 21st century learning environments a little chat about the fancy OHP that the department has bought that we are never likely to use in a workshop for the forseeable future. I don’t mean to sound so negative, it was good really, but I need to actually take the time myself to try and use some of the things to get enthusiastic about them.
A lecture on assessment, quite dry but definitely leading us towards the assignment (which is going to be a lot more work than the other assignments we’ve to do at the same time). Got to go and have a look at Opening Minds by RSA.
At last! Lunchtime drinking! I gave up trying to instigate this about two year ago. I’d become so used to it when I was doing electrical engineering that it seemed unholy not to go to the beer bar but it just didn;t happen on the BTechEd. I guess that says a lot about the Understanding Energy course. I’d rather not say negative things about lecturers so I’ll say very little here instead. Her questioning is all wrong (leads to very general answers) for the answers she wants (very specific points of view that not everybody neccessarily share) and there is far too much of her intimating her own feelings about the government compared to how much she actually talks about the course. A final thing is she should really check her notes at least breifly before getting them photocopied - to get three very basic formulas wrong within the first couple of pages is not great. It’s okay for those of us who know with enough confidence that they are wrong, but there are those who haven’t covered this area before so won’t know any difference. Perhaps it wouldn’t have been so bad if she’d at least noticed them when she read them out, but no.
It’s not good form to talk about people so badly but I’m at a loss as to how some people are going to cope with this course.
by the 8th of July we were back in Arequipa.
We’d been told the day before, by some of the people on our tour to the Colca Canyon that London had won the bidding for the 2012 Olympics. We used Morven’s mobile as an alarm clock on the 8th, and by chance Morven had a bit of signal and we got a message from her Mum saying that everything wa alright at home and not to worry. It wasn’t until we left our hotel we worked out what she meant. (more…)
The Scotsman have opened up their digital archive to anyone with an Athens login. It adds to the things that are already available for students, with SCRAN and EDINA both full of interesting stuff about almost any topic. For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, Athens is a system where online resources make their data/images/documents whatever available to students as long as they login through their university account. SCRAN is an image archive filled with masses of pictures to do with Scottish life, EDINA has a big library of films that can be used for educational purposes, but are interesting anyway.
Something I meant to write about for the last entry was how guilty we felt about our tipping. We had gone to a restaurant for dinner (set menu for about ?1 including a Pisco Sour) where there was a band playing traditional music - pan pipes and the like. As we were leaving one of them came over with his hat, rather obviously asking for our money, not really knowing what to do we threw some change in, it wasn’t until we got back to the hotel that we realised we’d left something like 2p - more of an insult than a tip. Tipping is such an akward thing anyway but when you’re using a strange bunch of coins, you were put on the spot suddenly and you’re not feeling great what more are you expected to do? Anyway, probably worked out in the end with the amount we gave other people who pestered us, we found it really difficult to say no. Now onto the next morning: (more…)
Arequipa is high up. Lima, where we had come from is at sea level, but Arequipa is at 2325m and we were feeling it. Altitude sickness is a funny thing, you don’t really know what to expect, you don’t know if it’ll affect you or not, you can’t really comprehend the idea of it until it hits you. And when it hits you it hits you hard.* (more…)
Should he stay or go? I feel sorry for him, he’s done really well for Rangers, every season he’s gone through periods like this and often enough he’s pulled it off and won trophies. I’m sitting here listening to Jim Traynor on Radio Scotland, what an objectionable man, I can’t stand him, yet I find myself agreeing with him, some crackpot is on mouthing off saying all the players should be out the door tonight. Sounds like the sort of person who believes in the death penalty and sterilisation for those on the dole.
Who would we have to replace McLeish? Does it matter? I get a lot less worked up about football than I used to, I would just give up on it all and start supporting the Glasgow Warriors but the cost of watching them is about the same as SPL games and it’s on telly less than even the SPL. Maybe I’ll start going along to Firhill.
