Personal Blogs

2011–07–18

lightning…

I was on holiday last week—a peaceful week of maths, gardening and drinking had been planned; and not too much messing with computers, some of course.

My holiday started Friday afternoon, my mother-in-law was visiting, we had a risotto with the first home-grown peas of the season and a garden salad [pretty good I thought], I had an afternoon bottle of wine and then we watched the exciting thunderstorm from the front door. Right up until the lightning hit the scaffolding in the playground about twenty-feet away from us. [I live in a playground].

I’ve never been that close to a lightning strike before, the sky flashed, the scaffolding fizzed and the noise—thunder, crack-crash and power. We didn’t think it was so much fun after that.

Now, I’d remembered to unplug the computers but…when the phone, the broadband and eventually television shut down. Oh dear. You need to unplug your phone-line too it seems.

It’s one thing planning to not use your computer when you have one to use, it’s quite another when you can’t. And my wife was cut-off too! This was serious.

technical support

Is always a bad-beast to deal with, but when you aren’t online, don’t have a landline, have only freeview crap to watch on television; when you can almost see the money leaking from your mobile as the muzak plays… I won’t regale you with the whole sorry saga of the hellish mess that I was sucked into.

My wife and I spent a lot of time, and money, in wifi-enabled pubs, her on the internet, me getting drunk enough to vent a proper fury upon the hapless employees of the useless for my plight.

After a couple of days and what seemed like a hundred phone-calls the truth dawned—it was all lies, people will say anything to get rid of you. [That rubbish about recording calls to provide a better service is just that—rubbish. All they want is an oppertunity to make you an unwilling YouTube star.]

So I gave in and bought a dongle. And then I, drunkenly, watched that eat my money too. Like me in my cups it was a slow and greedy thing.

The new hub arrived today [Ten days, six days after promised], I can hear thunder in the distance and I’m fretting. How close do I let it get?

Still, not too bad a holiday—at least I wasn’t interrupted by the phone and I achieved a third of my ambitions, in a spectacular way.

More than I usually do.

well, why I blog[2]

My school has an embedded police-person, he said to me once, “my first partner told me to slow down…if you are walking too fast you aren’t watching”. Life is like that—it’s easy to let it go past without enjoying it.

Every morning and evening I walk along the canal, dodging the joggers and cyclists who don’t see what I see—the wild-flowers, the bees, the kingfisher, the perch, the big pike, the day spring arrives, the day autumn comes…they are going too fast. That’s [partly] what blogging is—looking, properly, at your life and remembering it for future reference.

Let’s take my M208 as an example: reading my posts back I see a pattern—a nagging sense of dissatisfaction with myself. Why? Aye, there’s the rub—there’s the looking and then there’s understanding. If you don’t read your own stuff back and reflect then you’ve missed half the point—blogging gives you a platform to make you better. So…

Partly, I think, that it’s down to my lack of technique, I’m a great fan of technique. [I can do some of the working, but it doesn’t come naturally.] So far, with maths, I’ve been reliant on the technique that I learnt at school, where I understood nothing. Now I’m grasping at the understanding without having developed the technique. I feel unsafe.

Developing technique takes time and effort, I haven’t made the time or the effort; I think that I need to. I could just ignore this and still pass, but that’s what I’ve been doing—‘working’ the course rather that working at it. I’m doing this [OU stuff] for me, if I fail nothing will change except my conception of me.

That’s a reason to blog—I might have come to this realization of what was wrong without it, but I suspect that I wouldn’t have. It’s easier to be honest when the person you are trying to lie to is your own words.

2011–07–02

better…

For the first time this year I’ve got my baseball boots on—summer has started. I had a tutorial this morning, lovely Groups. Getting to my tutorial is always fun; It goes in stages:

1. I walk along the canal to Tolcross[ish], very bucolic—ducks, swallows, reeds, swans, dogs and the bikers who seem to be trying to end my life.
2. I get to Tolcross[ish], the city, and head for the Grassmarket, via the West port, the second-hand-bookshop region of the town. Here I buy my old maths books, but I don’t tarry
3. Then there’s the Grassmarket, a seething mass of tourists and drunks even at nine-thirty on a Saturday morning. Full of light and pubs
4. The Cowgate—a shaded urban-canyon where strange pale-people stagger around looking around for the night-club they think they’ve just left
5. You swing up towards the High Street where the world streams past
6. You do the maths

Afterwards we go to The Task and have a drink and a catch-up chat.

After a slightly torrid-time personally I feel healed, and ravenous for maths.

Done something incredibly stupid, listened to the Red Army Blues.

I won't be here for a while.

Sometime this month, or next, I'm going to hit 10000 visits to this nonsense. I'm not sure what that means. Either in itself or to me.

I'm not in Jon's class of course, but still 10k seems a lot. I don't look at it that often so it can't be just me.

There's a big part of me that's ashamed that I even know the number or what keywords will throw up [] my site when you search on google.

There's another part of me who wants to be heard. Because I do have something to say; I don't know how to say it or what it is. I've spent a good part of the last six years trying to articulate something that I can't quite grasp.

If I ever do manage to state it, it will be because I'm here, at the OU, amongst friends and fellow learners, amongst people who value knowledge, not for what it can do for them but for it own sake, amongst people I love.

Maybe that's what I want to say? 

I spent tonight not revising, I spent my time in a more productive fashion—hacking JavaScript/HTML/CSS. I feel happy.

And since I didn't get my blog post finished, I'm going to spend tomorrow doing the same.

Plenty of time to revise after the exam.

While I'm waiting for my Mousakka experiment to turn into cardboard I thought that I'd rant about Typography for a while.

It bothers me that peoples' blogs here are so hard to read. That's down to bad typography. Not peoples' fault

My blog may be a stream of stupidity but it's easy to read. That didn't just happen—I was taught. So you can learn how to do it. Why isn't it built into this...mgoodulee..whatever it is?

&

Here's my recipe...

1. Go to a tutorial
2. Drink a couple of ciders
3. Decide on something, stupid?
4. Put on your wife's gardening-gloves
5. Garner your nettles [they grow round my house, you may need to go a distance.] by squatting in the rain

When picking the nettles, think about the size of your head, about double that will give four portions.

At this point we need to deal with the dealing with nettle-stuff. We're not in parsley [Kansas] territory anymore—no stalks are wanted here. So plunk it into a sink and prepare your scissors.

Have another couple of ciders, until the dirt sinks to its level. What's wanted now the young leaves, so snip these off into a collander, discarding the old, the blighted and the dodgy. 

Drain the sink, remembering that those little bits of green that block bthe plug-hole will sting you! 

Now it's time to make the soup.

As this was my first attempt at the nettle I decided to be basic. So ingredients:

• Two, small, red onions
• Two, smashed-cloves of garlic
• The bits of potatoes that were left over from a previous making of chips
• The stalks of the parsley that is trying to bolt
• Shop-bought stock

 You can adjust these according to your circumstances.

Sweat stuff down, sweat the nettles, blitz, swirl in the cream, all the usual soup stuff.

Then have one bowl, do lots of carrying stuff, have more cider and worry.

stuff's good

My wife and I are listening to Supertramp [search it yourself]her, quote:

"once upon a time we listened to ugly people making beautiful music, now we listen to beautiful people who can't hold a note sing [stuff that comes out of the other orifice]

Simon Cowell is one of the richest people in the world. He got rich by ruining, part of, the world for the rest of us. Moral: none.

 x