money money money!
No - I haven't won the lottery or anything, but one of the guys at work has left and I've got his place on the on-call rota. This means just over an extra two hundred full pounds per month (before tax ...grrr...) and I only cover one week in six. Not a bad deal methinks! Plus I get a bit of exposure to some of the stuff I don't normally get to play with.
Of course I might regret this when I'm called out at 3am because the radiology system breaks down, or someone wants to buy some cheap wine.
Thats right - cheap wine! I had a look through the past on-call logs and found one from one of the guys who got called at 11:30pm by a nurse who was trying to access tesco online to buy some wine that was on offer and wasn't impressed that the shopping basket wasn't working. Hmm... last time I checked tesco's website wasn't being run by the NHS and I'm pretty sure that not having any wine for the weekend isn't really a valid reason to page an on-call engineer in the middle of the night. But that's OK because her manager didn't think so either, lol ;)
What else? I've signed up for two more courses, so since I'm already in the middle of one that means I'll have three on the go for the next three months, then it reduces back to one! Can I discipline myself enough for that long? I hope so.
Actually the discipline is partly why I did it - just to help kick myself mentally into shape!
The open university has two start dates a year for most courses: from February to October and from October to June.
Therefore you are forced to have some overlap of courses if you want to start a course at both times. The alternative is to only do one course a year which then takes about 4 years to build up to a diploma and about 10 years or more to do an honours degree.
Two courses a year only means an overlap of five months which should be fine for me. But for now I'll do this plus some smaller courses typically lasting 3 months each, hence the three-at-once situation I'm going to be in from the end of next week!
It's not so bad as it sounds since the course I'm doing now is only level 1 and pretty undemanding time-wise I figure at might as well get through as many as I can realistically find time (and money) for before the level starts to get too demanding to double up. It would be nice if I worked on a ship or something and did 2 weeks on, 2 weeks off because then it would be easy to do multiple courses. It would be like being a full time student for half the month! Then again it'd probably get pretty lonely doing it on my own for that much time at once. I suppose I should just be thankfull I don't have to work 60 hours a week.
So the courses I've got on now are about (I won't give the actuall titles because they sound so crap):
1, History and development of the PC and Internet and commercial/social exploitation of them. (level one 30pt course - not technical at all but quite interesting. Finishes in June))
2, Analysis, design and progamming (Level 2 30pt course in C++ just about to start, finishes in October)
3, Website design and management (Level 2 10pt course, lasts 3 months. Mostly HTML and CSS. Easy enough to learn by yourself but might as well get some credit for it. 1 of 6 courses that make a certificate in web development as well as counting towards my degree - 10 whole points! wow! lol.)
Looking forward to actually get my teeth into something as level 1 courses are far too easy if you already have experience involved in the subject area. There are no entry requirements for starting a OU course so level one courses kind of overlap the foundation year level at a full time uni.
I'm really just looking foward to when I can go for the artificial intelligence and robotics courses! Might actually have something interesting to write about them instead of this boring rambling - in fact if anyone has made it this far through this post I will award you a whole point for your patience ;)
Of course I might regret this when I'm called out at 3am because the radiology system breaks down, or someone wants to buy some cheap wine.
Thats right - cheap wine! I had a look through the past on-call logs and found one from one of the guys who got called at 11:30pm by a nurse who was trying to access tesco online to buy some wine that was on offer and wasn't impressed that the shopping basket wasn't working. Hmm... last time I checked tesco's website wasn't being run by the NHS and I'm pretty sure that not having any wine for the weekend isn't really a valid reason to page an on-call engineer in the middle of the night. But that's OK because her manager didn't think so either, lol ;)
What else? I've signed up for two more courses, so since I'm already in the middle of one that means I'll have three on the go for the next three months, then it reduces back to one! Can I discipline myself enough for that long? I hope so.
Actually the discipline is partly why I did it - just to help kick myself mentally into shape!
The open university has two start dates a year for most courses: from February to October and from October to June.
Therefore you are forced to have some overlap of courses if you want to start a course at both times. The alternative is to only do one course a year which then takes about 4 years to build up to a diploma and about 10 years or more to do an honours degree.
Two courses a year only means an overlap of five months which should be fine for me. But for now I'll do this plus some smaller courses typically lasting 3 months each, hence the three-at-once situation I'm going to be in from the end of next week!
It's not so bad as it sounds since the course I'm doing now is only level 1 and pretty undemanding time-wise I figure at might as well get through as many as I can realistically find time (and money) for before the level starts to get too demanding to double up. It would be nice if I worked on a ship or something and did 2 weeks on, 2 weeks off because then it would be easy to do multiple courses. It would be like being a full time student for half the month! Then again it'd probably get pretty lonely doing it on my own for that much time at once. I suppose I should just be thankfull I don't have to work 60 hours a week.
So the courses I've got on now are about (I won't give the actuall titles because they sound so crap):
1, History and development of the PC and Internet and commercial/social exploitation of them. (level one 30pt course - not technical at all but quite interesting. Finishes in June))
2, Analysis, design and progamming (Level 2 30pt course in C++ just about to start, finishes in October)
3, Website design and management (Level 2 10pt course, lasts 3 months. Mostly HTML and CSS. Easy enough to learn by yourself but might as well get some credit for it. 1 of 6 courses that make a certificate in web development as well as counting towards my degree - 10 whole points! wow! lol.)
Looking forward to actually get my teeth into something as level 1 courses are far too easy if you already have experience involved in the subject area. There are no entry requirements for starting a OU course so level one courses kind of overlap the foundation year level at a full time uni.
I'm really just looking foward to when I can go for the artificial intelligence and robotics courses! Might actually have something interesting to write about them instead of this boring rambling - in fact if anyone has made it this far through this post I will award you a whole point for your patience ;)