Sitting in my office at work, trying to get something done, the school web site, the project wiki, ...anything! I want to be coding but I don't have NetBeans at work.
So nothing is happening. I'm too tired to think properly anyway, so I thought I'd catch up on a few of my fellow students' blogs.
Chris, Daniel and I have shared courses and tutorials in the past, I know them of old. Dave I've followed online for ages. The courses that they are currently doing are ones that I've completed. So their take on them is interesting.
The groups curse I loathed. Well that may be a wee bit strong, the geometry was awful but some of the later groups stuff I liked. The numbers started off well but I lost a TMA in the post [the only TMA in five years that I didn't photocopy] and the exam went to hell in its usual manner. Frankly I did not cover myself in glory.
Reading their blogs I see, again, what my problem is: I'm not really a natural mathematician. I can do it if I have enough time and work hard enough but in an exam, in a strange place, put on the spot... I flail. Embarrassingly.
I could, through hard work, probably develop the mental-muscles to do maths at a decent level, it's just that I can't be bothered to work that hard. Maths isn't that important to me. Don't get me wrong—I love it and I regret not-one-minute of the maths side of my degree but, in the end, I can walk away from it. Not so computing, or rather software development.
For that is where I am now heading. After a day-dream flirtation with being a properly-bearded computer scientist, I now know that I just want to build stuff. Which is within my reach.
I loved M256 [software development with java], in part because of all the great friends that I made but also because I felt that I was doing something new. I'll never create a new proof in maths, I'll never have a single incite into the P = NP problem, I'll never make that breakthrough in AI. What I might do is produce a nice wee app that creates on-the-fly passwords based on a key-phrase. Well maybe that's aiming a wee bit high but I can build something useful.
I'm two courses away from my degree, and with two grade twos I'll get a 2:1, which should be do-able, this is computing after all. I couldn't make myself revise for the number theory exam; I positively enjoyed revising for M256.
Tonight I looked at a post-grad certificate of computing. It will have tooken me six years to get a degree, it will take me six years to get an MSc.
Addict, we know where this is heading.