Personal Blogs

I don't listen to music when I'm doing a TMA [mostly] but I always choose a song that I'll play when I've finished one. Loud. Very loud.

My wife claims that I'm, "addicted to torchers". She may be right, for when I've dealt with the wallpaper Paloma is my girl this time. And if that ain't a torch song then this isn't one either. Mind you planet-wide searches for a mate aren't gender-specific, it's just that girls get called torchers and boys get called losers.

Fair enough I suppose.

I've just read this at WTF. [For non-nerds the trick is that it will run constantly making the CPU throw out heat, but as it runs as low priority so it doesn't slow things down when you are working.]

One of my more-fraught duties is to ensure the the building is at a comfortable temperature for the inmates to go about their business. People hate me.

I've been doing this for over twenty-five years now so I know that it isn't possible; no two people are comfortable at the same temperature. Or at the same temperature, if the weather outside looks different.

People will complain on grey windy days about being cold, these same people will complain the next day about being hot because it's sunny outside. The temperature inside the room will be exactly the same; I know that it's the same temperature because I have a whirling thermometer that I use to prove it. Well, I used to prove it to them, nowadays I know that this is a waste of my time: people are funny about heat, logic and reason will not sway them.

The crux is control—the feeling of having it. The ironic thing is that although everyone thinks that I control the heating system I don't. My job is to try and persuade people that they are in control, when they aren't.

Unless you have a brand-new school you're going to have a mix of legacy, out-dated, misconceived and state-of-the art.

My main boiler house [I have three] is the size of a two-storey cottage. There are three huge boilers, a DHW boiler [Domestic Hot Water], two extracts [extractor fan systems] and three calorifiers [hot water tanks that double as immersion heaters.]

There are three control panels: two eighties pieces-of-rubbish controlled from who-knows-where through a phone-modem, that I'm not sure works, and a modern computer-controlled panel where it appears that I have control.

There are twenty pumps, ranging from much bigger than the one you have at home, to the much-much-much bigger, and they're all paired.

There are seven heating zones all controlled by three-port-valves [actuators really] by something that nobody from the heating engineers, through the control guys to the high up engineers in the council don't know what. I'm assured that it all works off sensors, I know my school, I've never seen one of these fabled sensors.

My feeling is that it's all controlled by the temperature difference between the flow and return. It's pretty telling that none of the professionals have ever told me that I'm an idiot.

My fear is that this is all controlled by a clock that is essentially the same as the one you use to set your central heating.

This wouldn't be so bad, if I could turn it off and on. I can't, I have to make a phone call, which may, or may not do anything.

Then there's the problem that I have hospital radiators. Hospital radiators are big old beasts; once they're hot they are hot. You can't take heat out of the system once it is in. Also you can't put heat into system at any speed.

When I arrive at work I'm usually wrapped up really warm; peons like me don't require heat. When I arrive the heating hasn't cut in or is cutting out. I know to dress for the weather. Which makes me a bad judge of when said heating should go off/on. Never mind that I'm not sure if it is possible.

So I have no control over the heating.

Still, I, and the people who work with me aren't complete idiots; we installed dummy controls in every room. These controls don't do anything, they aren't connected to anything. I guess that complaints are ninety-nine per down.

All problems are problems with people. Tackle those first.

I will never willingly leave Edinburgh again in my allotted span. The only thing that might tempt me to leave is the coming home. I’ve walked, car-red, flown, boated and, best of all, trained into my city. It has always been fantastic. There’s something about the way that Edinburgh works that will cosh your head as you enter it. Either you get that strange-straight division of town and country, or you are in town looking at something geological or you walk up so-so-many stairs to appear in a place that Disney would love to copyright.

I'm sitting here upstairs feeling like Doctor Sheldon Cooper. My wife is talking to one of her online mates.I'm being annoyed because I can't find, on-line, the Greco picture that her and I got thrown out of our national gallery for.

We didn't realize. I think that I was winning about the brush-strokes, she may have had a case about the meaning. We maybe made a bit of noise. The staff who ushered us out were pleasant.

Tonight I had to drop the bombshell—Murray had won, Sunday was off. Didn't go down well. It seems that nothing that I can promise will compensate for a part of my life that she hadn't actually cornered.

My wife always wins.

Except for this time, I'm going to watch every point. I'm utterly saddened about the state of my head but...

"Come on Andy!"

[I'm sitting at work trying to force myself to do some maths. So I'm going to write this instead…]

It's the first week of the school holidays here in Edinburgh—it's time for us jannies to get down to all the big/wee jobs that can't be done in term-time; Danny wanted to plaster a ceiling as an appetizer.

This involved us in lugging out the scaffold that lurks in a cupboard at the bottom of the school. This scaffold is a mass of aluminium Lego™ : frames, ladders, poles and platforms.

I'd almost forgotten that it was there. For most jobs we work off ladders, of various kinds, so I never use it. The jobs which it is good for are the jobs that I dislike and get others to do for me. But the thought of Danny trying to plaster a ceiling whilst wobbling along a canted baton caused me to remember that we had it.

What we didn't have was the manual. That never stops boys.

Once we'd managed to get, what looked like, the requisite number of pieces into the wanted-place we started to assemble the thing. It was a no-goer. No matter which way way we tried to build it, either the platforms fitted and we couldn't cross-brace it, or we could cross-brace but the platforms were too long. We were scoobied. We'll not quite.

"We're only a wee way off, lets raise a couple o' the wheels", Danny suggested as we considered things from a distance.

"Then everything will be slanted."

"Aye, but ah'll be able to work aff it."

I had my doubts but I didn't have any suggestions of my own, so that's what we did. I'd felt safe in the assumption that no normal non-edjit would feel comfortable working on the horror that we were going to have built.

"Ah dunno, it looks awfy shoogly", I said when we'd finished. The thing looked like we'd strung ropes between the Twin-Towers of Pisa. Nothing was horizontal, or vertical.

"Nonsense, look…", Danny pounced forwards and gave the scaffold a shake with a tattooed paw, it wobbled alarmingly. Before I could object any further he'd monkey-scrambled to the top of the scaffold, and was shaking his hips.

The scaffold wasn't falling down, but it was moving in time to whatever head-music Danny was gyrating to, "Danny, that's not safe."

"Well I winnae be doing this when I'm working, ah'll be fine", he made a pair of big eyes and rolled his head at me. "Besides it's only one-and-a-half-lifts, it winnae kill me if ah fall."

"I might. At least put in a back-stop rail so that you don't end yersen stepping back to admire yer work." He was perched on the edge of a half-platform.

The back-stop wasn't to be. What we managed was a stop at one end and a trip hazard at the other. Still Danny wasn't to be dissuaded. I said much, but he wore me down, I gave up, after all it wasn't me who was going to be injured.

"Right! OK! But when we take this fucked-jigsaw-of-shite back to the bowels, we're going to learn how to build the thing properly. I'm not having this fiasco again." I threw my arms up.

"If ye must, if ye must", he said in a distracted fashion, whilst poking a plaster-saw into the ceiling above his head.

That scaffold is the state of my maths. Danny didn't kill himself, perhaps I won't.

 

My dad and his best mate and my mum and her best mate married each other. The best mates emigrated to the US of A when us kidlings were still -lings. Because of this flit there's an odd dynamic when we get together—time machine.

For us kids: we've spent many holidays together, in our heads we have snap-shots of our growing-up process. We didn't see each other often, but when we did, we spent much more non-fragmented time, than the norm, with one another. They were girls, we were boys. Which might have mattered.

For the 'dults: They pick up where they last left off. They behave as if nothing has happened in the mean time. They talk about a shared past, they drink more, they have the kind of fun with one another which we, as offspring, think that parents don't have.

When I wended my way to Anderson central this afternoon to meet the group I was a wee bit wary. I shouldn't have been.

Everyone was white-haired and much wee'r than they once were, there was a bit of wobble-of-hand about the filling of the wine glasses, but the minds were still sharp. And there was Paula.

Paula and I had much fun poking our parents, we're good at that. Paula and I remember too much.

My parents, and her's were showing all the signs of intoxication. Both of us believe that as responsible progeny, we say nothing in this regard.

We had our photo taken together. If our parents die we won't see each other again, maybe. We looked over

Our parents were doing awful thing to steak, in a kinda half-assed drunken fashion. Which was beautiful, for they must have fun.

I said goodbye in the same half-assesd fashion that I alway do. I've lost somone that I wanted to be my sister.

I have boots that lace up either half-way or to the top. I've just realized the draw-back of the half-way option.

I was coming back from the shop, laden with goods, when the laces of each boot decided to get together. It wasn't thirty seconds, but it felt like it was as I was going through the falling process. I had enough time for the sickening realization that I was going to be hurting soon to sink in.

"Jings!"

I lay on the ground looking at the unbroken cider bottle and the battered cheese that I still clutched in my paws. Trying to judge just how bad this was.

[I taught myself to say jings instead of f%^& many years ago, when I started working in a school.]

"What's happened?" My wife rushed out the the door, I'd made something of a clunk as I fell it seemed.

After she'd ascertained that I wasn't too damaged; a bleeding hand, two bleeding knees, a well-damaged ego [wee boys who had been playing footie in the playground were sniggering] the recriminations started.

"For twenty years now I have warned and warned. The irony is that  this time you actually had them tied. Tied in bows that wouldn't be amiss on a four year-old's party dress..."

I like to make my wife happy.

Danny and I were sitting in the office, the business manager was walking past the window, clutching his bottom for some reason. Whatever the reason, it was the last place in the world that he should have been doing this.

"Holding them up are we Bruce?" Danny shouted to him. Bruce came over to the counter.

"You pair are having a gir-affe, there's nothing wrong with my arse."

"You did ask your wife then?" I smiled pleasantly at him.

Whump! The look on his face told me all that I needed to know. He shook a fist at me.

"Right, I'll challenge you pair to a run round the school, we'll see who wins then." This was a wee bit infantile.

"Yeh but you've got an advantage there..."

"What advantage?"

"You aren't carrying the weight of a normal pair of buttocks." Danny made a whipping motion with his arm, "kkk-tsssh".

"I have buns of steel!"

Without missing a beat Danny came back with, "that's not what the head says". Pretty sharp I  thought. Bruce laughed, he could see that we were clearly winning here.

"You're a pair of bastards, remember that I am your boss. I'll get you sometime." He smiled and stalked off heron-fashion.

We'd prepared the next bit in advance, we sang our ditty...

"Woke up this morning and my bottom was gone,

Ooooh, oooh canny find my cheek-cheeks

Where's my bottom gone?

Where's my bottom gone?

Faaar down ma leeegs"

[Sung to the tune of chirpy-chirpy-cheep-cheep]

Today we rehearsed the dance to accompany it. I've arranged with the media studies department to video it so that we can put it on YouTube.

I was a wee bit knackered this weekend and not up for any maths work, but I felt that I had to do something. So I decided to have another look at the wizard book [Structure and Interpretation of Computer languages].

I've dipped into this before, a couple of years ago [pre-degree], I didn't get very far then. Now I know why—I wasn't ready for it.

I didn't have the maths, a good handle on recursion, a knowledge of data structures or a grasp of abstraction. Amongst other lacks.

However hard I might have worked on it I wouldn't have been able to take much from it. And I wouldn't have worked very hard at it.

That's something else that I noticed, I work at things in a different fashion today and I'm no longer put-off because I don't grok things immediately. When the time comes when I do want to understand this book I'll have the discipline and work-routine to do it.

I didn't work hard at it yesterday, but I knew that I knew how to and I now know that I will someday.

I did a fast skim of a couple of sections to get a look at the thought-space. If I'd intended to work on it, then I'd have gone back, made notes, done the exercises, created my own exercises.

This book isn't beyond me anymore. I was slightly surprised by that, should I be? I suppose not.

Since I started my degree I've noticed that I'm mentally sharper, a lot less ready to rush to judgement, "is that really true?", more prone to think about concrete ways to support what I think.

I'm also more likely to leave things to the last moment, over-think simple stuff, have profound episodes of despair and I've become an expert at displacement activities. [For example this blog ]

Some students come the the OU with all the needed skills already in place. Most of us don't. And because we came for knowledge we're probably unaware that in our search for it we are developing our powers to acquire that knowledge.

We should also be aware that there is a social downside.

The other day I had to re-organize a room with a teacher. I explained my faces/borders conjecture of desk arrangement and suggested a layout. I was right [well, it worked], she was delighted with the result but there was something in her eyes. I will never be invited to her house for tea. She thinks I'm a nutter.

Swings and roundabouts.

A classic example of how I never say what I meant to.

My wife and I are watching a documentary about how big business made us fat, [quote] "...one and three-quarter million chicken wings are eaten every day in the USA."

"What happened to the other wing?" I asked.

"What?" My precious asked, I should have known that I was on dangerous ground.

"Wings generally come in twos, one and three-quarter million is an odd number. Have they genetically diddled with the chickens?" There I should have stopped.

"If they bred chickens that only had one wing it works, but that's not the way that they do things is it? We want wings ergo the more the better. One and three-quarter million is deffo divisible by five, that would be my number of wings."

"The thing might not fly, or it might fly in an odd way, mashing itself into walls...", I was told to stop talking at this point.

Her face was a picture of a strange pain, "will you shut the fuck up!  And, please make sense, any number that ends with a zero is divisible by two."

 

Today I spent doing the final bits of a bad TMA, and trying to ensure that somone would not be sacked.

What do you think that you are good at? Almost certainly you aren't good at that. I'm crap at almost everything, except for the one thing that I really suck at: dealing with people.

Which I had to do today. A fellow alcoholic [binge-drinker] went off the rails. I spent today on the phone talking to people; liars.

I saw what happened. The fix is going to be hard, and may not be achieveivable. We are in the grind of a mill that we will never understand.

So st00she