Personal Blogs

No decent, right-thinking human being should glory in the death of another human. I was tested today, I passed. I was utterly unmoved.

Much of what is wrong with this world today involves that thatcher person. She re-introduced an idea that isn't new, bolsheviks and nazis both used it: terror. She attacked people, people who other people might have atavistic instincts about, "the enemy within".

Much like the current government are attacking the undeserving poor, or the lame, or just anyone who they pay; a sub-section of society, one that most of the voters don't identify with.

The worst thing about the whole thing was that personally she wasn't very evil, she just didn't understand what she was doing.

Somwhere today I read that she, "rolled back the corrosive collective culture".

Collective culture, that is people being nice to people? Isn't it?

So bankers not fucking the world for their own profit and not even saying sorry, the government who can spend billions to prop up bankers bonuses pick on anyone who gets...

You know the gig

So while I won't delight in your death thatcher I think you were a horrible thing for the world...

I am gone

arb

nellie

I'm woefully behind with my maths course—no units done and a TMA due in the next couple of weeks. Not panicking yet. If only because a couple of the units are, mostly, about something that I've done before, done during the building blocks of software; a course now sadly gone.

Which got me thinking—does the OU do computer science? The sad answer is no. I'm doing the degree, a discontinued one, that most nearly approximates to computer science in real-world terms but it isn't really computer science. And when I've finished my degree there's nowhere for me to go in the OU.

My current courses are number theory and software development, number theory is about the most computery science thing that I've done in ages. Most of my computer courses have been about writing code or designing systems, which I want to be able to do but which has never been my main focus. I can always learn to write code and who really wants to create a system?

Don't get me wrong—I have learnt a lot, it's just that I've realized that if I want to take my personal madness forwards I'm going to have to do it outside the OU, bereft of the discipline of tutors, exams, TMAs and fellow students. Which is a wee bit sad.

Still, I expect that I'll always have a course on the go here. So all that is needed is that I stand on my own brain for once.

I hate snow.

Today I worked the full two shifts, six of the am to ten of the pm. Most of these hours spent on my lonesome in a playground with shovel and salt, my sole soul mates.

People who crossed my path either complained about the weather or suggested that I'd consumed more than the calories allocated to me for the day. I wasn't really sure how to take that...

Today has been a day of odd, strange, clouds in different skies. Before the sun was up the clouds were puce limed gold on a royal blue cushion; as I walked home the same but different clouds hung under the the darkest of star-flecked black-firmament.

I hate clouds

Mortal tired.

I have a maths TMA to get away tomorrow, still two and one half questions away from completion. I have a day off but my wife and I fancy a walk in the woods.

Am I sick of maths? I don't know; TMA hell-time isn't a proper time to be thinking about anything but there's someone inside me saying, "you've proved that you can, give it up now". I lack the will to argue with him.

I understand but I don't grokk. Everything is so hard. Recently I started a computer course and it was, "wow! this stuff is easy". Have I lost the plot?

I need that walk in the woods more than the marks that I'll get. There's something wrong with my head that only open air and nature will cure.

I seem to have a problem with my work computer, it isn't behaving itself. Some security update? I'm too tired to chase it down tonight. I may even be doing something stupid.

I should be doing my maths TMA, the deadline for which is getting uncomfortably close. I sense a weekend of sweat, horror, red bull-shakes and despair.

I'm not too worried though, most of the TMA is just work; I don't think that I need to understand anything very much.

On the plus side the M256 team project is looking good. There's a great group of people on board, I think that we have a reasonable, and achievable plan and I'm fairly confident that I can project manage this.

I can't believe how much I've missed computing. Still there was a point last week when I almost chucked it all in. Pull the rip-chord, give up, stop striving. I don't need, "the piece of paper", I've probably gotten everything that I really need from the OU. I could stop. I can't really.

This is now in my blood. I can't imagine not having an exam to study for, a TMA to do. I could settle back into a comfortable uselessness, or a selfish bliss. I don't want that. I would hate myself.

I'm tired, angry, scared and entranced. I ramble and moan but I have a sense of my own sharpness. The OU taught me that. I'm not very clever but what you can always expect from me, now, is that I'll think. You'll always get considered thought out of me. Rubbish as that may be.

I may be wrong about the subject-matter to-hand but if you get into an argument with me you may be assured that I'm not trying winding you up. I have genuine concerns, I want to understand.

And I want to help you understand too.

Knowledge without insight isn't much use and knowledge without insight and understanding is even more useless.

Hopefully at some point of your life you'll fall in with a bunch of people who seem like they will be able to change the world for the better, for someone. It's always a group that changes the world for the better. It's all to easy for an individual to make it worse.

For me it was a certain primary school and a senior management team who were confident enough to allow me to use my off-normal-sequence skills to their best advantage.

Specifically I was to deal with the difficult kids in a way that they didn't expect adults to. Nothing was ever said of course.

We had one particular wee lost soul who caused us many problems. When he came to us the damage had been done but we tried. There was an unspoken agreement amongst us that however often we failed we would never abandon him. As long as the other kids were, and felt, safe. That was my job.

I knew that he was trouble the first time that I clocked him, the first time that I touched him was when I scooped him away from punching a wee girl, the look of horror and surprise on his face said it all, "nobody can stop me!". I let him punch me for a while and then just extended my arm, which he punched until he started crying.

School is about your friends rubbing the corners off your selfishness. This wasn't going to be the case in this case.

I spent a lot of my thoughts on this problem, starting after-school clubs so that he could interact with his peers in a different way. The clubs were a success (Warhammer, Chess, Pokemon, games right!)] they helped others but he always went mad and had to be exiled. All I ever had was a hold over him, a rather wobbly one, but I could make him behave. Which held him for other people too.

Then came regime change.

The day that the world changed was when he threw a plate at another kid, something that he knew was unacceptable. I was in the room at the time, I remember seeing his face as I started baring down on him; there wasn't fright on his face, he just knew that a trouble that he didn't like was coming.

An AHT ran into my face. She explained that, "We've decided on a different way of tackling this..."

He punched her in the face about a week later and was excluded. That was when I decided that I was no longer required.

Today I saw him riding on a bike along the canal and from the look upon his face I know that we failed him. That we would be I.

My wife aggressively shook me awake this morning to announce that there was a dead mouse lying on the floor of our spare room.

This was not an, "eek I'm scared" moment, this was a corpse management situation.

Usually we deal with birds and have a system, you put the deceased under a pot and allow nature to take its course. Eventually you are left with something that you can steep in bio-machine-wash, which will strip it to the bones. Then all that's involved is a sieve and a wee bit of peeling.

Mammals are difficult, they have fur. [We've never done an actual human but we are agreed that we are more like birds than hairy mammals and the pot would need to be huge.]

We decided that the first thing we had to do was desiccate the beast, which would give us options. There was some discussion about skinning the poor wee thing but we were both a wee bit too squeamish to do that.

Yet.

If you want bones sometimes you are just going to have to put up with doing things that are a bit weird.

Trying to read some on-line documentation [for sourceForge], all the while nagged, in a back-of-brain sense, that I don't know how to mash mods properly, whilst compulsively squinting out of the window to see if the weather will require of me to get up for a pre-dawn snow-scrapping experience of black/white/salt horridness.

Hi-def, stereo, Jeremy Kyle is my harsh mad-shouting soundtrack for this. At last count I have five hundred episodes on disc. Some day I'm going to meet him and I'm going to be more him than he is.

That folks, is how you start a book

nellie

Too many horrors to deal with? The answer is to catch up with your current course. It helps in so so many ways, I'm even thinking about talking my bank. ...em, perhaps not just yet neil....urggh

I've been deliberately not writing stuff here for the past week; my focus was focused on my maths and my work-work work.This was efficious, efficious in that I got about a quarter of the stuff that needed doing done.

So should I just stop writing crap at the fag end of a night when I am unsober? It's a balance.

I want, almost need, to project screeds of my rabid crap into the ether that is the www. I'd like to do other things too but they must always be secondary to my primary purpose—to inflict my descripton of my head upon you.