Personal Blogs

My maw and paw are approaching decrepitude. Still, they produce their works of art.

I don't remember at what age I realized that: as a pair, or singularly, my parents weren't normal. At some point I understood that my peer-group weren't being put through the same mill that I was. I also don't remember when I realized how blessed I was.

My mum and dad were entirely focused upon themselves and the things that they created. Coco and I were ignored until we had something sensible to say. Coco and I had such things to say early.

Someday Coco and I are going to have a conversation about our parents. I don't know how that will pan out. Actually I do, we are going to spoil them with the same benign neglect that they spoiled us with.

We love them enough to ensure that their lives will end with the same wondrous poise that they've lived their lives with thus far; dad will want to know something difficult that stumps me, mum will be retailing some scurrilous gossip, that I know a wee bit about.

They respected Coco and I enough to let us run feral, they can be comfortable in their dotage in that we will return the favour.

Coco and I haven't had children. In part that's because of the wives we have chosen; but it's also because we knew that we'd be needed to ensure that our parents had the perfect life.

I could kick myself for being so lax.

Danny poked me in the arm with a firm finger, "he's not OK", he pointed over my shoulder, we were at the back-gate having a fag. I turned and saw the wee boy eating his lunch in the bike shelter.

It was bloody obvious that we had a problem. No twelve year old should look so bleak and isolated.

"Have you seen anyone have a go at him?"

"No".

There is a process to go through. I flagged up the problem with guidance and explained to Danny what he should do when this happens again to some other poor sod, as it will.

I work in a good school, people care, I go through the motions because I know that it will make the right wheels turn ... still. Sometime you need to be creative.

Danny and I were having another fag.

"We're going to watch him?", I asked, twat that I am.

"What do you think?".

"We need to watch him."

The wee boy doesn't know it, and hopefully never will, but he has two, rather scary, old men watching over him.

See, that's the sod of the world: your fond imagining of what you think is going on isn't.

I'm lucky, I suppose, that in the normal run of things, it never occurs to me that people notice either me or my doings. In my head I'm almost invisible to others.

Today the school-nurse swaned up to my tank and asked, "neil, are you OK?"

"Yes, why?"

"As you came up the stairs you looked...", here she paused and made a gesture of a sweeping nature, "so desolute".

I was thinking about something else, what worries me is that she may be half-right about me.

I saw the Scottish Higher maths paper today. Odd thing I thought, then I thought about me and normal and had a rethink.

It certainly wasn't, the type, of question paper, that I sat nearly forty years ago—I know that because there were two questions involving the equation of a circle; something that we never studied in yore days.

There were a couple graphing questions that gave me a bit of angst at first glance—draw the graph of a derivative. But I wasn't doing the exam, so I had no panic, I got there.

I didn't work through all of the problems, but I did difficulty-rate them all.

Question seven seemed hard. It wasn't—it just poked into a blindness that I have: logs. For some reason I always need to work out how logs work when they dance onto my stage.

Perhaps more interesting was a question which I shrugged off—we were given a circle and a line which intersected, we were given their equations.

Next question we were asked to find another circle that shared that line as a chord, a reflection of the original circle through the chord.

I could see lots of ways of how to do this, [all rather reliant on the fact that we had a nice way to put things into the standard form, which I didn't check] but introspecting my way[s] I couldn't see anything fast. There must be a quick way to do this, otherwise they wouldn't have asked. Why can't I see it?

What I did like is that we didn't have that solid-battery [applied maths] of differentiation/integration questions that I faced.

Yes, I'm a pure maths man, but I thought that today's paper was a better test of maths ability than the exam that I sat of yore.

[There's a post to be had as to why I can do higher level maths, and yet I'm almost hopeless in some major areas of the subject.]

I always suspect a plumber who carries a bag full of hammers. I'm hopeful that our future geeks won't just know calcuus.

I would have said nothing. But we won! And we won big.

Following the Hearts is a form of masochism, you don't expect any reward, apart from pain.

But every centuary, or so, you get your reward [as my mum-in-law cries it, she means Heaven]. The hibees at work will be studying snails and their behaviour over the holiday weekend and will come up with excuses.

I see the, "it wasn't a penalty" excuse coming to the fore. To which I'll argue 5, that's five, to one, that's one, 1.

The next time I'll be in Tynecastle I'll be doing an exam, I need to get 100%, For that's the bar that's been raised.

The burgh will be busy tonight.

[This is a mid-think post about something that I will, maybe, write a more reasoned post about in my nonsense.]

For one reason or another I needed to look back through my blog posts—crivens, I have written loads of loads of nonsense, haven't I?

Anyway, I got interested in what I was doing/feeling this time last year—much the same is the answer. Is this a good thing?

Maybe, but in one sense very not—I can see that I'm falling [have already fallen?] into the same study-trap that I was in then: I'm not pushing myself hard enough.

For example, last night I was working my way through a group theory proof, I could see, in a general sense, what was going on. But I was skipping over details, you can't do that! Not when you're learning anyway. I wouldn't do this if I was reading code—then I would need to see what every line did.

The time has come when I either, need to get serious about maths, or decide that these maths is just a hurdle that I have to jump over in whatever way that I can.

If I decide the former [which I will] then I need to buckle down and start making this stuff mine. By which I mean that I need to be able pull together what I know in an organized fashion. At the moment there's too much, "oh, yeh I knew that" when I read the answer and not enough, "how do I get from there to there? What things do I know?"

I'm not explaining myself well here. That's the problem, I've worked on quotient groups for nearly three years now, could I explain them [and why they were important] to my wife? [She wouldn't let me.] Can I explain them to myself?

For the topology course I don't have the same problems, although I can see the problems approaching. [I just tried to explain something that I thought that I knew in the forums, fortunately I realized my error in time].

If you can't explain then you don't know.

Such a pest—everything that you know about them has to be proved. And the proofs tell you that everything that you know about them is true.

So waste of time? Not exactly, you need to be sure about these things. Obvious isn't always true when in comes to maths, or anything.

The proofs that you use for integers are pointers to the proofs that you will need to use where things aren't so obvious. That's what maths is all about—making sure that the bloody obvious is true or that you can prove the utterly unlikely and all points between. Or saying that the obvious is terribly wrong.

This is what I hate/love about maths—you can't hide from the truth. You can try, but some git will pull you up. And you are the first judge of whatever crap you're selling.

The number of units and TMA questions that I have to do by mid/early June. As of tonight that number is now 7. Good?

I suppose, but I've learned the hard way to expect that the simplest of things will shower me in bile before kicking me in the soft-parts.

Take this week:

• I'd over-coped—4 men for a 3 man job
• There was a chance that I'd get a long-awaited holiday
• Exams were on, always an all hands-on-deck
• We could cope with any one being off

Guess what happened?

Yup, all 3 were off.

I pulled a 13 hour shift Monday, did all the setting up for the exams by my lonesome, and, when one of my minions limped back in, he was weeping sickness from both eyes. I sent him home, I still have to think about what my hands are doing.

But, there can be no denying that 8 > 7, for N is a well-ordered set.

I had a haircut today. However much I run my hands through it and however much hairspray my wife sprays on it, and accidentaly sprays in my eyes, I look like a member of the waffen-ss.

Couple this with what my business manager describes as our [new] fascista gear [black combats, black tee-shirts, steel toe-caps and hi-viz bomber jackets] and I see a wee issue.

How gay are we?

The thwack of doom.

Such is my eagerness, that when I have a TMA away and not back, I phone my wife to see if they have flopped through the letter-box. Today one arrived—M336—the groups course; the one I, supposedly liked.

I knew that I'd done badly, but really...

I should be gutted I suppose, as expected it was the worst piece of work that I've ever done, am I just not up to this?

Well...

Today I pulled a twelve hour shift, we won't go into the why of that, but I absolutely had to do something that I've been resisting for a while. That, something, would be using a crappy Access database that I was once proud to have coded.

[The thing is flakey beyond normal belief—it popped up many ToDo dialogues and one that actually said "hello!". I had a look at the code, and realized that I was just going to have to gentle the thing through it. There was no option of any quick fixes. It got done, but I was cursing myself.]

After. I was standing having a fag, watching the pair of blackbirds who seem to be nesting somewhere in the school when it came to me—"I could build a better thing than that now". I remember angling my head and slitting my eyes.

You have to remember that I'm tired and not thinking straight.

I fired up the command prompt and ... what do I do now?

After a couple of hours of fretted typing and much consultation of the docs I went to see what the blackbirds were doing: having a fag in fact.

I was ragging. I noticed that my headteacher was still in my building so I approached.

He didn't actually say this, but he said, "you look happy for the first time in forever".

That was because I had been programming.

Or was it me a-scurry-in-my-head because I got a bad mark?

If I'm fat/thin/ginger/some other problem group that the government wants to tax into health, and have ten times the chance of catching some disease, some disease that we all agree is awful, should I worry?

That rather depends on what my likelihood of catching it is without any external factors. If it's 1 in a hundred I may worry, if it's one in a billion, then...

I want you think about one thing: how many of us have ever died because of a terrorist act? Is it worth the suffering, pain and the rather-casual racism that has become OK to stop such a very few deaths? And has caused so many more dead...[I have a good metaphor, but the world being the world .and me not being brave...think of the ground-space that the two towers occupied.]

I was brought up as a pacifist, I'll never go to war, rather easy now-a-days. We need another generation, the word that they will be called has not been coined, but I know what they will do: they won't go to war, and they won't let others go to war in their name.

I always tell myself that we will win. My job is to help that happen...

My wife and I went to buy plants, the stuff that maintains plants and the stuff that makes them grow better. We went to B&Q in short.

Everyone there is, at least, semi-geriatric, so things move... slowly. [Not that this is a bad thing.] So we pottered round, smelling herbs, agonizing about buying Euphorbia and filling our trolley. Finished, we to the 'tills'.

Which was when I saw them; the four be-chained-multi-pierced-black-tee-shirted-with-a-logo blokes drolling over the chain-saws. They sell chain saws here?

Do they sell chain-saws to anybody?

A bearded ginger-monster caught me staring and winked.

This was B&Q, I wandered over, leaving my trolley and my wife. [Who tasked me for this later.]

"What do you want one of these for?" I waved at the sinister collection of objects that are designed solely to rip.  It has to be said that now that I was near I could see the attraction—these were serious pieces of kit.

"To chop your legs off..."

At which point I was lost for words and having issues.

"Nah!", he slapped me in a matey fashion on the shoulder and showed me a perfect set of teeth.

"We do trees mate, these..." he waved more impressively than I had at the chainsaws, "is only good for cutting yer grass".

2012—03—23

getting back…and problems

Because I’m, again, marooned, in my other building, on a Friday night where I can’t post to my nonsense I will format it as if I was posting there; and fix it tomorrow.

Tonight we have the PTA race-night. Which is OK as they are all getting drunk and I condone that type of behavior. They tend to interrupt a janny trying to focus on his maths and there are, what might be their, strange yoofs gathering outside. Still, I’m always up for nonsense…and the quashing thereof.

how’s maths?

Slowly-slowly this week I’ve been ramping my maths back up to speed.

I’ve been on back-shift: but every day I’ve tried to do a wee-bit before, during and after work. Some days it hasn’t panned out. Most days I’ve gone to bed with a fear in my heart.

I made a decision last week—one that I think was the right one—to just do something. I think that it’s paid off. Here is the balance sheet:

• Woefully behind at work: disciplinary action hovers over my bonce for my massive undone
• I have a tutorial tomorrow, the venue has been changed, I might not even be able to find the place—never mind do the maths involved.
• I looked at the course-fora for the first time in ages today, I didn’t have the bottle to open up a single post, nevermind reply
• I’m a whole four weeks behind with the groups course. For the first time ever I can’t read Nilo’s stuff, because it’s like a blade turned into my failure.
• I’m still behind on the topology course
• The end of the financial year is coming up, there is everything that I haven’t done.

still…

Been here before, will be again. I’m alive, I have food, drink and drink-drink and a better life that 99% of the people on this planet have ever had…

The problem is, that, often, in your day-to-day the above doesn’t make you feel better, when you have been massively blessed; to be thwarted once or asked to pay seems to be an imposition of the worst kind. All you see is that others have more, others who out-shine you with their…, others—cheats & scoundrels all, do better than you. Just others.

Tonight I found the first diagram in the topology units that actually reduced my understanding of a concept. [Although these diagrams have been on a cusp for a while.] Something that I’d predicted.

I don’t care about others. Any more.

Now, it's just me.

{obviously I will edit out the many mistakes that I've made}