Personal Blogs

Seven hours of maths, not bad really, I couldn't have done that a couple of years ago. Maths has changed me, even if it turns out that I suck at it.

First off, an apology from my last, rather strange, post. I must have been thinking about something to make it raw HTML, some subtle point must have been in my mind, or I was just plain pissed and posted it in the wrong place?

Towards the end of my revision-session I went off at a wee tangent—I suddenly got interested in what a basis for vector space meant. I had a feeling that I should know, something about linear independence, there's a minimal one isn't there?, there are orthogonal ones, an orthonormal one…so I got out some of my old M208 books. How the hell did I struggle with that? I thought.

I suppose that this is just the way of things—you struggle to grokk something at first-sight, after a while it seems reasonable, simple and obvious.

Just when I think that I can't go on with maths, that I don't want to go on, that maths must leave my life, something turns up that says: you want to understand me to me.

This next week will be hard, will probably decide the class of my degree and is not a week that I'm looking forward to. But some past-me put the now-me in this position, and he was right to do so. Every day I walk amongst the damaged who stopped making the lives of their future-selves difficult.

Next year I do my two third-level computing courses [to be decided upon: Artificial Intelligence and Software Development are the current favourites].

I have many advantages when it comes to the computer courses: a four month run-up, I find computer stuff easy and I get to submit online so I can never again have a TMA lost by the post office again. I should be fine, there's a part of me who thinks that this is too easy.

When I've finished my degree I've promised myself a present, and that present is doing a single level three maths module.

I'll never be a mathematician, but I do love maths. More than I did when I started down this path of mine.

Can that be a bad outcome?

And your ability to describe, in some media, how you saw the things that you see'd.

Let's settle for words as our media, shall we? And let us take a very basic base case:

How did it feel the first time you realized that another person was attracted to you? Can you describe that feeling?

My guess is that you can remember, my guess is that you can describe that feeling, my guess is that you won't describe that feeling, my guess is that you don't like thinking about this.

• rice crumb
• soya mince
• 2 X mozarella - they're in the fridge don't forget them
• mung beans
• Corn Silk, the make-up
• gluten-free oatcakes
• lots of parsley and basil, of the type that has a pot, and looks like a real plant when you are drunk in a supermarket

How the hell am I going to be able to carry this stuff home?

My personal perfect job appeared in my work in-box today, a secondment opportunity. A secondment opportunity for someone who would assist, in a strangely non-defined fashion, to improve my council's web site.

It is two grades up on the pay scale and a chance to climb on a different ladder. If I got this secondment my life would change hugely; and the council's web site would bet better.

That won't happen, I have hurdles:

• I need my line manager's permission; and I am fer favourite blame boy, I would be missed
• Secondments are always a carve up—someone is a shoe in already

So I won't get this job, despite it being exactly me—I have a certifificate of web application deveopment. Jings, I am doing a maths and comuting degree.

I designed and built, and webmastered the best school site in the world. [Check it out].

Nothing that I do or achieve matters, why?

Today I submitted my final maths TMA of the degree. Whatever the results there will never be an other degree maths-TMA.

Apart from one question, I think that it was one of my better efforts. Which is immaterial, as it is what I feel that matters to me, here, now. In three weeks or so, when I've sat the exams, then pass or fail, there is no need for me to do any more sums.

For five years maths has been a large part of my life. I didn't mean maths to be part of my life; it is computers, or more accurately computing, that I wanted to study. So why did I do maths?

Because it didn't matter at the start of my degree: I could change direction if I didn't like maths, and it was still points to the end. And I knew that a certain knowledge of maths was going to help me. But by stages maths crept closer into the heart of my brain.

One particular moment stands out in that process. My tutor, Allan, showed to us, intro MS221ers, a brilliant proof about fibs [Fibonacci series], I can't remember the details but I remember being blown away. This was something that I wanted! To prove something that way...

Perhaps the greatest reason that maths matters to me and my head is that I met great friends on the journey.

I don't know how it is for you but for me it is only on the maths courses that I've met people that I love. People that I can sit in the pub with, people who I can vehemently argue with without them bearing a grudge, people who share my madness.

The problem is that me head doesn't dance to the beat of the maths drum; I've found it incrementaly more difficult to do maths, whilst finding it easier and eisier to do computing...

Been here before <sigh />

More maths then. <grin />

On my last maths TMA.

I've long since given up on the idea of a good degree, I haven't worked hard enough, I'm too stupid and what I set out to achieve, classification wise, was too hard.

Still as I struggle with, what will probably be, my last ever, maths TMA, I'm filled with a certain pride. I rather effortlessly proved that

∀x∀y((x′•y) + 0) = ((x′+ 0)•y))

For some interpretation.

I still have my first ever maths TMA [for MST121], not a pretty thing, I can see that I've come far since then. I'll never be a mathematician but I never wanted to be one. All I wanted was enough maths to understand the weird computer blogs that I haunt.

That job is done [-ish].

So I've done what I wanted to do, I didn't do it as well as I wanted to do it but I've spent four years doing something that I found hard without sneaking off. If I'd been able to do that when I was twenty...?

I will cry when I submit this TMA; I started out to do computing, maths crept in, maths has changed the workings ways of my mind; I am a different person because of it. I want to think that I am a better person for it. Which might, or might not, be the case.

Whatever. Without the OU this would never have happened to me. Which is why the OU is massive. For you, for me and for everyone.

Which is why we should shout loudly about the fact that it is going to be priced away from the average peon,

Today, aside from working work-work, I tried to tackle my last maths TMA—I was woefully hopeless. It took me the best part of an hour to see that I needed to complete a square.

Still I have a smile in my soul. I did all this to trap myself here in this place. Where I am useless.

I wanted me to be straightened on my own mental rack, I wanted for this to be hard. I wanted to prove that I was stupid. I wanted to fail, maybe.

I will fail when love fails.

[Lost the last post]

The people are me, say I; Naresh the young man behind the counter, say N and the wee-old guy, say WOG.

[I enter the shop and head to where the alcohol lives; the WOG is at the counter talking to N.]

WOG: ...in the sixties a lot of you Asians came over here to work on the buses...

[I drop some cans at this point]

WOG: ...and they worked hard. But your generation want to be doctors, or gangsters, or ...ha, ha... drug dealers...

[I make a face at N, I'm behind the WOG with an armful of cans, we (N & I) are both are having trouble not to laugh.]

[The WOG shuffles out, N and I laugh for a bit.]

I: So how how are your drug dealing/gangster plans going?

N: There are no openings at present. So I plan to impersonate a doctor, you see people getting away with that all the time.

[N has an Msc]

Terrorism's effectiveness doesn't come from the terrorist acts; it comes from our reactions to it. We need leaders who aren't terrorized.

That's sad. The people who we voted in care more about controlling and scaring the shoite out of us than they do about protecting us.

Just in case it matters ,I'm not scared, and we have many lamposts available.

We've made the decision to move the school's website to schools-online. There were other options but they all involved me being too involved which, although it was never directly stated, was the main reason for change.

I agree, the bus-count is one. [The number of people who have to be run over by a bus for things to fail utterly.]

Still I'm conflicted. Over the years the website has moved from being a rag tag collection of pages to something that was central to the school's life—for example we used to produce, at great cost in money and effort a paper newsletter, now we use the website. And as at present everything had to go through me I was becoming a choke point.

That is the great advantage of schools online, I can do the initial set up, June can manage the accounts and the staff can create the content.

My issues?

• The thing is ugly. Ugly in the aesthetic sense and ugly in the coding sense
• Because I had complete control various styles were consistently reproduced
• Because I had complete control various idiocies were not perpetrated

Actually it's probably nostalgia that is my big problem, I built something good; I grew something that changed the way that we do things as a school. And I think that I built well.

For example my wife recently got a mobile phone with an internet connection that was worth using, so I checked out the school site, it linearized perfectly [well almost]. Six years ago I designed a responsive web site!

Building that web site was the main reason that I took to the OU road, I love that site and I'm incredibly precious about it. It is time to give it up but...

I hate the idea that we are going to get an off-the-shelf solution simply because we cannot justify spending time and money on building something special. Boroughmuir is a great school; average, run-of-the-mill, these aren't our values.

The web site isn't the school and we can't divert resources from our core business of teaching kids, that I understand. And what we've plumped for will fufill the basic spec. Maybe I'm wrong but to me it feels like we've choosen the easy option.

Judge for yourselves here is my site, and here is a schools-online site.

Today I started doing something that I'm not sure what I feel about, a maths TMA.

For various reasons I haven't been keeping my real blog up to date, so I haven't been projecting my life-state into the ether. In fact I haven't been doing anything anywhere of consequence. So you probably don't know where I am inside my head.

Today I started what, might be, my last maths TMA ever, strange thoughts intruded. This has been a long road, and not the road that I thought I'd be taking when I first placed a foot upon it.

I could have done a computer degree, there would be little effort involved, but I included maths. And, do you know? Even although I was found wanting mathwise it was the right choice. Sure, it's been hard and I'm flirting with failure, still it was the right choice.

Tonight I solved a Diophantine something that I knew naught of six years ago. It wasn't a particularly difficult one but you still get that buzz when things go well. I'll miss that.

Sometime soon another part of my life is going to be closed down. Well, not closed down but the road will become obscure. If I were twenty I could head in many directions but I'm old and I'm going to have to pick one, That is not going to be maths.

Come PT3 in the post I'm prepared for tears.

Much of life is crap, is boring, is routine; a bog-standard human life. However high you fly however low you sink the life that was given you was vanilla. It's up to you how you decide to use it.

We tell ourselves lies, the biggest one being that I, the essential core of what I am about, has messed up because of what some others have done to us. In most cases.

I add the rider because, given power, you can indeed do horrible things to the insides of another human being's head.

Most of us have someone[s] who love us, they may make mistakes, mistakes that you remember, mistakes that hurt us, but excusing your performance based on a mistake that some loved-one made, with your best interests in forefront of their mind? That seems a wee bit slippy.

I deliberately didn't mention inequality of oppertunity above, because all of the great things about life are available to every human.

This morning, walking to work in the dawn, listening to every bird in the world singing their hearts  out, I saw three Canada Geese ignoring me on the canal.