Category Archives: General

Whereabouts in England

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Hi there again,

I’m in London again for the second time in ten days, and trust me you don’t want to know why I am here again.

But I was thinking of all the places in England I have been to and what took me there and what I liked most about them. Sadly the list is very short and as usual, I will keep it in bullet points…. enjoy

Ormskirk: small picturesque village, perfect for a uni town because its far enough away from distractions but near enough so you have somewhere to blow off steam when the studying gets tough. Not very much to buy except on the twice a week market days, sadly the town thins out horribly when the Edge Hill Uni is on vacation :(

Liverpool: nice city, very many sights to see. My personal favourite is the docks. There are loads of very interesting museums and art galleries if that’s your thing, you can even follow the life of the Beattles, right here. And then ofcourse there are the Liverpool FC and Everton football stadiums.

Manchester: one word..PERFECT. Metropolitan, picturesque, huge but not confusing like London which i will discuss in a bit, there’s loads of enormous universities so the city never thins out, not like that kind of city even needs a uni to be full. If I had to pick where I’d live in England, it would definitely be Manchester, as if that were not enough, it is the home of the greatest football club in history MANCHESTER UNITED!!!!

London: beautiful, splendid, wonderful sights, massive city with a very complex and expensive transportation system. Its the perfect place for the occasional holiday or the hard cracking business visit, but if and only if I had my say, I wouldn’t live in London. If you do come here however, you must see Trafalgar square, the Buckingham palace, London bridge, the Eye..oo i could go on and on but I’m sure by now you get it!

Bournemouth: was here on an away weekend with some friends, went clay shooting in a nearby town, wonderful place for a night out, a pebble beach even though I prefer the traditional sand beaches. All in all, it was a very ok kind of place…

SouthPort: I loved the beach and the pier. Southport is somewhere between a city and a town! Quite large and metropolitan, but without the hustle bustle of Manchester and London. Southport has lots of nice shops, interesting recreation, a park and many other sights. It’s the perfect place for a romantic getaway…if you know what I mean ;)

Well that’s it. I might be updating this list soon, possible with places outside England when I can manage!

Bye for now.

On dinners and things

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Now that my stay in Edge Hill is fast approaching its end, I think back on some of the ‘grander’ moments in my experience and I cannot help but smile as I am overwhelmed with nostalgia…Ok before we get too mushy, lets jump in and get this wagon moving.

Some of my favourite activities on campus (second only to the nights out!) were the dinners. In the past year there have been several dinners but I as an international student have sadly only been invited to two, but then this was more than enough!

The first was the Thanksgiving dinner in October last year, in celebration of the American thanksgiving festival. I can quite appreciate the need for this as we had a very ‘healthy’ American student population. A rare chance too see so many beautiful people all nicely dressed, the thanksgiving dinner was indeed a very colourful event. The most interesting part however, was the food! It was my first American thanksgiving dinner so as you would expect I was eager to try out the typical American thanksgiving dinner. I was quite impressed as my previous impression of the American diet was a picture of two large bright yellow arches with the word “MacDonalds” emblazoned below. Well it is safe to say that my previous impressions were wrong. I particularly love the apple pie though I wasn’t adventurous enough to try the pumpkin pie. The food even managed to taste a bit different from the typical ‘blandry’ that English cooking is popular for.

The second was the common wealth dinner. Another very colorful event saw students from different countries coming in their native attires. I came in a jacket, couldn’t even be bothered wearing a tie :/. And as you would expect, the Americans who never cease to amaze you when you least expect it all showed up in….T-Shirts and jeans! Anyway, on to the food, we had an exotic selection of delicacies from different parts of the world. They even made an attempt with Nigerian chicken soup which I am afraid failed abysmally to taste anything like what the average Nigerian would keep down his stomach, but we had to smile and act like it was a good attempt!

All in all, I’ve had loads of fun with the dinners and I do look forward to attending a few more before I leave if the opportunity presents itself! Let me know what your own experiences are with dinners and the food you’ve had to experiment with, or just drop a line to say hi ;)

Night in Ormy

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The typical English day ends with a chat with friends and acquaintances old and new, over a few drinks in one of the local pubs…or if you are a student in Edge Hill University, a night out in the town at The Alpine Bar and Club or The Styles. Of course a lot of the time it’s a decent combination of both :D

So whats a typical night out like in Ormskirk? Well first lets put Ormy in perspective. It’s a small market town about 30mins from the city of Liverpool. it’s home to Edge Hill University and surrounded by a few other towns. The night life crew comprises mostly of students, who cannot help but have a good time every so often to blow off the steam from the school work, though for some especially freshers, it seems like school work blows off the steam from the nights out!

Then we have the local league, people from the local area who just like the students need to blow off the steam after a hard day at work selling kebabs and things ;) .  And finally, we have the away teams which come from far and wide. The most popular of these are the ladies and lads from skelm (for Skelmersdale), a neighbouring town with a predominantly residential population, a bevy of pretty ladies and nothing of a decent place to go out! And so they all find their way to Ormy somehow! And then we are sometimes graced by the presence of the Liverpudlians, who have scoured the clubs of Liverpool and seem not to be able to get the kick from those surroundings and decide to make the 30 minute drive down to Ormy for their night out fix.

All in all, as the various participants in the nights events converge in their various venues of choice, you cannot help but look forward to a most interesting night with the best music and very often, cheap drinks ;)

Judgement day Nights Out

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Hello again,
The judgement day weekend was an intense one for me. I had a friend celebrate their birthday on the said day of apocalypse (weird!!!) after which a group of us went on to Liverpool for a most memorable night out! We were in several clubs over a period of four hours, as you would imagine in a city like Liverpool, the city centre was bubbling with activity until the wee hours of the morning as if there was a clearance sale market in the area.
As we went from one club to the next, I could not help but notice how most of the clubs were hurdled together in one area with several of them having their front entrances staring each other eyeball to eyeball in aggressive comradeship. I could not help noticing however, how each club had a unique theme and a very different atmosphere (almost an aura) that made the music sound different even though they were probably all playing tunes from the same playlist!
People were able to walk freely out from one club to the next and with the constant torrents of bodies walking in and out of the club entrances and on the streets, it seemed everyone wanted to have a taste of everything before the night was over.
Night activities here went on until people saw the sun thankfully at this time of the year that happens at about half past four a.m. allowing us just about enough time to get home, grab a bite, catch a quick nap and head off to the train station to return to the serenity of ormskirk. While riding on the train back home, I began to flash back and compare my nights out in Ormy with the nights out in liverpool; a world apart was the only thing I could use to describe them but that the topic of another blog.
Stay tuned for my next blog where I’ll talk about nights out in Ormy and other parts of England I’ve been to.
Cheers

Final dissertations and the like

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So I just had this intense almost two-hour conversation with my dissertation supervisor on possible dissertation topics. To give this a bit of background, I am studying for a M.Sc. in Information Security and IT Management. My professional background is in software development and I opted to study Information Security and IT Management over Information Systems or Software Engineering as would normally be expected. The reason for this was plain and simple grandiose thirst for adventure into the unknown… I must admit, it’s been one heck of an adventure!
So I’m close to the end of my course and I’ve had all my course work handed in, placement done and all that’s left is the Almighty Dissertation. Even the name gives me shivers, like saying Mufasa around the hyenas in Lion King – Dissertation, Mufasa eeek. Anyway let’s get back to it!
So my conversation with my supervisor centred on finding a topic for me to work on and what options I really had. Being the kind of tutor that he is, my supervisor consistently shied away from out rightly giving me a list of options for me to choose from and rather wanted to pick at my own mind to see what areas I was interested in. So we talked about security around identity preservation and theft with respect to chip and pin cards. Basically, your ATM credit or debit cards come with a small golden circuit box called the chip which is capable of holding small amounts of data such as your card pin etc. Hackers have learnt to create spoof cards which POS terminals authenticate even with dummy passwords and the like. The idea would be to research the chip and pin technology and architecture, possible security flaws and their exploitations and if possible recommend solutions to these flaws, maybe even develop a prototype implementation who knows!
Next we talked about the somewhat scary area of steganograghy which would probably see me trying to develop or at least research possible alternative ways of hiding steganographic data. Possible applications would include areas like concealing information in corporations like Sony for instance, which last week lost almost 100 million personal records of its gaming customers to hackers. The Sony issue in itself is a whole other story so I’ll leave that here for now.
Finally, also along the lines of identity theft, we discussed cross site authentication using OAuth (open authentication) and the possible security implications when your email is accessible via the same authentication mechanism as your login to a file sharing site which for all intents and purposes could be a malicious front to obtain authentication details from unsuspecting subscribers!
At the end of the day, I pretty much have my task cut out for me and I hope I will sooner than later figure out which of these three very interesting areas I want to take the plunge into over the next few months…either way it’s a plunge into a cold and dark ocean!

Work and Learn: The way to go with Edge Hill

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If you’re like me, then I am sure that your choice of a school or course of study is definitely going to be based on your chances to get a decent job with good career prospects after university. However, in recent times, especially after the recent global economic recession, getting a good education and attending a good school is no longer sufficient guarantee of a job. Today, employers look for graduates who have considerable work experience in addition to their degree. The reason for this is that as part of cost cutting measures, employers want people who can hit the ground running and be immediately productive when they get in. Also, even when the work experience is not directly related to the course, the work environment and its expectations are very different from those that exist in the university environment. Having worked ensure the employer that you would already have an understanding of the proper code of conduct within a working environment.
At Edge Hill University, work placements are provided on almost every course to enable the students gain relevant work experience during their academic programme at both the undergraduate an post-graduate levels. Work placement are like industrial training programs that enable students to work in real organisations on real projects or assignments to enable them develop both their professional skills and other soft skills required to succeed in the work place. Rather than leave you out in the cold to sort out a placement for yourself if you have the connections, Edge Hill University proactively source work placement opportunities for students to help them gain the necessary work experience. Placements typically last from 3 weeks to as much as 3 months in some cases more. On some courses, the placements are carried out in one stretch while in others, it is broken down and spread across an entire semester, year or across the entire degree program.
Edge Hill University continues to be one of the top universities for graduate employment in the UK, now in a time of recession and downsizing, those are the kind of odds you want to have on yor side when you pick a university!

Weathering the Weather

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If like me, you are new in England and you have lived all your life in the tropics (fancy scientific name for a country where the sun literally cooks you everyday), then you would want to know how to cope in England were the weather seems never to be able to decide which way it wants to go.

So here are my quick tips on how to stay comfy and healthy during your stay in England:

1. Listen to everything they tell you: YES, you really should listen to all the advice about how cold it is over here and pack that extra sweater or jumper. One thing I have learnt while I’ve been here is that you can never have too many warm clothes!

2. Layer-up: Even when it seems like the sun is up, the chilly winds can still do a bit of damage to your health. Besides for the trendy and fashionable, hiding under that large coat probably robs you of the pleasure of showing off your fancy outfit. Remedy: plan your light outfit to consist of 2-3 layers of fabric, especially around your chest and back. That way you can have the best of both worlds.

3. Ditch the fridge: you will probably hardly ever feel thirsty at first but the feel of a cold coke always does you good…NOT! It will only make you feel colder from the inside and put you at more risk than you want, so stick to the good old English tradition of a nice ‘cuppa’ tea and you’ll be just fine.

4. Take a coat: When you’re travelling, going for lectures that may run until evening, going out with friends or at least anticipate being outdoors for a while, take a coat along with you. Like I said earlier, the weather sometimes can’t make up its mind which way it’s going and you really don’t want to deal with the wrong side of it!

Stay warm and healthy, and you will love every day you spend in the UK!!!