Personal Blogs

My E student number puts me as a 1974 signing and my first course - T100 - starting in February 1975! 1976 was TS282 - Electromagnetiics and Electronics plus T291 - Instrumentation. 1977 saw me taking M251 - An Algorithmic Approach to Computing and T321 Telecommunications. We had to do two foundation course to get a degree so I went back to maths with M101 (first run of a course) in 1978. That makes three times that I had to tackle Calculus (forgetting when I did it at school). 1979 saw me cruising with TM221 - The Digital Computer - a new concept, ish, in those days.

I then dropped out of a couple of courses over the next two years and then decided that, with four children - a dog - and a job as a currency trader in the City - I was probably busy enough and that I would come back to it. In those days, the signup was for life - i.e., I could come back whenever I wanted to. That time came in 2016 when I signed up (if only I had known then what I know now - smile)  for TM351 - Data Management and Analysis. That was followed by TM352 this year and all topped off with TM470.

Well, was it worth it? Yes, because it gave me a second career  after I decided that 20 years trading was enough for anyone. Mind you, if I hadn't moved on from the BASIC that the OU taught me then I would not have got anywhere. I moved onto UCSD Pascal - and in the process made some good friends in the Computer faculty of the OU - big Pascal users at the time. My first software company did all of its work on trading room front end systems in Pascal and we had touch screens in 1985 so not much new there then! By 1990, I had moved on to coding in Smalltalk having been convinced early on that OO was the way to go forward. By the mid 1990s the OU was also teaching in Smalltalk so they followed in my footsteps. Unfortunately, they then moved on to Java and left me behind (but happy).

I finally retired in 2012 (at 67). It took me two years to sort out what I could and couldn't do in the OU - because I was dependent upon student loans, I had to meet their criteria. As I had done a single level 3, I could not go backwards and I had to stay within the same technology area to get the loans. Up until then I had some difficulty, also, in finding courses that could teach me anything, having been using OO techniques for 22 years by then. That's when TM351 came out so I jumped at the chance - and even learned a new language - Python - on the way. This was followed by another 1st run course (that makes three that I have done) TM352. Both of these course had problems and I didn't do quite as well as I think I should have done - mostly because of tricky EMAs.

So, where am I now. 11,784 words in the body of my TM470 report with 24,525 in total, including my project blog and my JavaScript code. It is finished, submitted and put to bed. One typo that I know about but, as my wife says, "don't touch it as you will only work on it some more". Will I pass? I got 70% and 81% in the first two TMAs and dropped to 66% in TMA03 due to lack of stakeholders and literature. I have done enough there. If I get a decent EMA result and thus a Grade 2 pass, I should get a 2.1 otherwise it will be a 2.2. I can live with that. Ely, here I come.

The EMA

I didn't find that the EMA was too bad. In fact, I have enjoyed the course overall. The only nasty bit was the fault of TM352 and its lack of preparation of JavaScript (of which I knew nothing at all). I never did get the geolocation stuff to work in either TMA03 or the EMA these so suffered accordingly. My project was to produce software that would provide routing information for US type freight cars on a model railway (railroad). I never did get anyone to join in with the planning or testing so I was left to build it for myself. I never could find any literature out there that covered this topic so was left quoting my own book collection (mainly one book dated 1954!). This left my tutor a little unhappy but I have addressed all of this in the report and, hopefully, that will be enough.

Final Results?

Leaving the City at 40 years old was my choice but I believe that, what with the Big Bang in 1987, my days were probably numbered as I was "old school" and there was a mass clear out of my type of trader. As it was, my summer school in 1978 got me programming some trading related calculations which eventually grew to me leaving to start my own front office software company. As this is pretty much what I did for the next 20 years, it was a lucky break as, without that knowledge, I would have been an out of work trader. I was also able to build up a reputation as a good Smalltalk coder which gave me lots of consultancy work going on from when I finally retired from that area. This consultancy work still brings me in an income at the age of 72 so, ultimately, I am very grateful to the OU for all that it taught me.

What is next?

I have more work to do on the freight car routing as I plan to use it on my own model railroad. It works and meets the target set for TM470 but needs some more work now I have lost the constraints of the course requirements. As it stands, it is a well structured client server system with a modern No-SQL database as a backend. The visual interface is on a 10" Lenovo Android tablet so is really handy to use about the railroad (no being tied to a screen and keyboard).

I have some work to do putting together a web site for a friend who is an aviation artist and I have my regular consultancy work. My wife has put a brake on any future formal study as she reckons, and I agree with her, that I should be able to relax in my retirement and not get worked up about another assignment that is difficult. I would like to improve my electronics skills as that would be useful for the model railroad. I have found an MIT online course on "Circuits and Electronics" but this doesn't have any deadlines so I can stroll along as I wish.

Conclusion 

I have "enjoyed" these last couple of years and I will miss the regularity of working against targets but I will be pleased to take the stress out of my daily life. I did get to visit the OU campus for a day of student consultation, which was fun. My recent studying has been worthwhile and is all being utilised in other projects. I will do one more wrap up blog once I have my results for Tm470 but I don't expect that to be until late November. I will just have to sit here with my fingers crossed.