iUniversity

Well, it had to happen really didn't it? Everything else these days has an 'i' in front of it (even Vegemite for a very short while) so why not tertiary education? Today I was updating my iPhone view iTunes on my PC and noticed a tab heading I'd not noticed before. "iTunesU" so, I decided to have a look, see if there where any freebies of any value available. Turns out there are a host of open university lectures available as pod-casts via iTunes. I've downloaded two so far, one from the UK open university program called "Start Writing Fiction" in 6 episodes, and another from Yale entitled "Dante in Translation". I've listened to all 6 of the UK eps and the first of the Dante so far. The UK one is excellent, if somewhat short. It's presented by published writers (none of whom I've heard of, but will look up now) of various genres. Dante is going to be a whole lot harder to listen to, the lecturer rambles aimlessly, and in heavily accented English... Italian I think (well, it would make sense) but the Divine Comedy is such an important work that's always fascinated me, so I'll take this opportunity to study it.

We should, hopefully, be getting our baffle plate for our fire place on Friday. When I told some of the locals today we still didn't have one, they were horrified. Allot of them seemed to think it amazing we haven't frozen to death yet. Just about every other house is now in full wood burning mode, but I have to say while it is cold, it's not life threateningly cold... yet. I would have thought Tasmanians would be more able to cope with the cold than me.

I submitted my edited version (with one extra paragraph) to my pre-editor tonight with one hour to spare on my self imposed deadline. Not something I was ever good at in school. I got high marks, but that was just from exams. Fundamentally, I was a lazy student, so if I even put in more than a half-arsed effort at an assignment, it was extremely rare for it to be handed in on time. Amazing how age gives a change of perspective. I feel allot better about the story and how it's going after both the feed back I got from the first draft, and from hearing yet more evidence from published authors (via the UK open university thingy) that's it's perfectly normal for an author to occasionally get nagging feelings of doubt and unworthiness. A few of them said, they never felt their own writing was any good till they passed it on to a trusted friend. I'm thinking of asking another friend (one I've actually met, unlike my current editor) to be a secondary pre-editor. It may be useful to get more than one perspective.

It's odd... I'm actually thinking of formalising the study I'm doing at the moment. Applying as a mature age student at a University as my wife has. The strangest thing about it is, I'm actually thinking of doing an ARTS degree. Me! The merest speculation never even considered the possibility of letting the thought cross my mind to do an arts degree back in the days of my youth. But then, really, what would I do with such a silly piece of paper. At least the course my wife is planning to do has potential earning capacity at the other end. For me, an arts degree would just be an expensive wall decoration, as would any degree for that matter. I don't need one to write, and I certainly don't need one to fix and build peoples computers. Computer Science graduates (with one notable exception) have always made by far the worst of any of my employees in the past. Something to toy with anyway, would be nice to have a degree I guess, even a "BA", everyone else in my family have uni qualifications. Kind of makes me the disappointing family embarrassment not to...