Personal Blogs

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?

Will be another bad day for me, I wish that I could bet upon such things.

We had meetings, conditions were agreed upon, assurances were given. Guess what, they were lying. Each, all and severally. By commission and omission.

I've spent the last three days cleaning my school, the promised cleaners have been, as I thought that they might be, imaginary. Tomorrow Danny and I have to clean a building that workies are still working on, tomorrow I will get into a swearing argument with joiners because they feel that fixing the windows, that we never asked to be fixed, is more important than that kids can be taught Tuesday. [They will mention their boss.]

They, the joiners, will assume that elves clean up after them.

The joiners shouldn't be a problem, they've fucked me off so I'll be mouthy, and only the mad would tackle Danny physically. We have all their kit locked away in a somewhere that only we can get to; their rage will be meaningless.

It shouldn't have to be like this. It always is.

Come Tuesday the teachers will trockle back with a particular Anderson in their periscopes, they will be looking for fault, I will be dragged before the powers that are and be judged lacking. For something.

I was trying to explain all this to Danny when we were having our fag break, he felt that we should be thanked for all our work, of which there has been much. Which I thought was rather sweet—he didn't see. I could discover the cure for cancer, I'd still be a nil in the eyes of my workmates. Nothing that I can do matters—it's only what doesn't happen that's important. And I'm never included in what they actually want.

So why do I put up with this? Some people keep newts...I keep teachers. I resist flushing any of them down the toilet.

Mostly.

Supposedly I'm on holiday, but what with one thing and another I find myself at work-work, with no intentions of doing work-work work, why should I? So I'll write this instead.

I posted my TMAs off about four this afternoon. As I was walking back to the school in the sunshine something that had been worrying me suddenly became clear. About ten minutes after it would have done me any good. Still, I now understand something about quotient groups that I knew, but didn't quite get.

These TMAs have been a nightmare, a nightmare caused by me not having done the work and being forced to rush things. With maths [and computing] TMAs you need time to come up with the best solutions, sometimes to come up with any solutions.

The groups TMA was particularly bad as I had a whole unit unit book unread, and I was relying on what I already knew, or thought that I did [hence the quotient groups debacle]. The one good thing here was that I suddenly grokked the standard form and what it was for on Monday night. Which allowed me to shoot through a whole lot of questions that had been worrying me. [There's a post about the new notation that we are using forming in my hind-brain.]

How will I have done? Not sure is the answer—I think I was in the right area most of the time, but because I was rushing...

We'll see.

Tonight I'm taking the night off. Tomorrow I start the long haul to catch up and get ahead.

On another note it's likely that I'll hit 20, 000 views today or tomorrow. I think that says more about you, dear reader, than it does about me.

I found myself pissing around with tracing paper today—not a good sign. I have almost half of a TMA to get to fair-copied by Wednesday, last post, one unit barely skimmed and another, rather hefty unit, completely unlooked at.

I'm going to have to cheat here. Not actual cheat, I just have to use a bit of me that works in a different way from the rest of me; the bit that sees patterns, the bit I shouldn't use when it comes to maths.

[This sounds a tad stupid, if not hubristic. Essentially what I do is make good guesses, guesses that I can chase down to answers without a proper understanding of what's going on. Then I work backwards, which is often easier.]

This isn't the maths part of me, but if I can't properly work my way—when it comes to plane figures, symmetries and groups—I can at least see right answers. Or, I can work my way to them in a way that I wasn't supposed to.

I see patterns because I play games. I think.

But I don't see patterns as well as I think, otherwise I wouldn't have to be messing with tracing paper quite as much as I fear that I'm going to have to...

I finished my topology tma today [fair copy]. The thing is a mess, but will be submitted, as is, tomorrow. Time is something of a problem, for me, just now.

'tma away' is always a wee bit of a wrench—you know that you could have done better. This one has been a huge annoyance to me; I know what I wanted to achieve and I came up way short. Many of my solutions lacked elegance, some were grotesque.

I always say that if, you are coding something and you can't see the whole of the code on a single screen you have a problem. I'm getting like this with maths, and this tma fails to jump that hurdle.

I think that my answers are correct but I came to them in a shitty, verbose, fashion. Everything was an expedience.

I hope that I'm developing a personal style with maths, if I amn't I'll give up. If you can't bring you into what you are doing, is it worth the effort? But aside from a couple of questions, I seemed to be brute-forcing my answers [taking all of the cases and dealing with them monkey-poke-fashion]. By the itching of my palms I knew that there was a neater way to do this stuff.

My trouble is that I'm lazy and impatient all at once. The only way to achieve elegance is by knowing what you are doing so well that you can look effortless, to others, when doing it. Pissing around at the last moment just won't cut it.

In the end, as ever, I'm bitching about me—comfortable with that, now for the, trickier groups tma...

I had my first real go at this course tonight. I may not be in as much trouble as I thought that I was. Well, I haven't looked at the TMA yet, but a lot of this is stuff that I've done before, albeit using a different notation.

There will be tiger-traps along the path, and on another-track some of the topology stuff is still, very-much, up in the air. But there may be a light at the end of the tunnel that isn't shining from something that's going to flatten me dead.

Things are still tight. Very tight. I did eight hours of maths today, not enougth. I'm going to have to do this again, and again, for the next two weeks. Still, mustn't dwell on my troubles.

M338 is a schitzophrenic thing of a course [so far] for a maths bod. It leaps between rigour and a mental-wavy-handidness that I find unsettling. It will eventually be rigourous and make sense I suppose, but it isn't turning out like I thought it would when I signed up.

What I desired was a greater insight about groups [Galios is my personal maths hero] but at the moment I feel like breaking out the protractor, straight-edge and dusting-off my [non-read] copy of Euclid.

I haven't looked ahead, but I have the suspicion that about one book in two is going to drive me mad.

Still, you can't pick and choose with maths, or computing; what you'd assumed was a boring arse-of-a-bag [cul-de-sac] turns out to be the road upon which you should set your feet.

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".

Quickspend, that time of the year where you have to spend your budget or lose it. Accountants have done us no favours here. Because they aren't actually bankers they get away with this.

I earn about 20k, I've spent double that over the last three months. Almost all on stuff that, which while it isn't useless, I would probably not have purchased if I had a choice.

The boxes outside our office are self-replenishing however hard we work at clearing them.

Today I came into a problem that I knew was going to happen—I got a load of chemicals delivered. Serious 5 litre bottles of trouble, how-so-ever I read the COSHH docs I know that I'm flirting with actual-danger. I can't think where I should put them.

I can't flush them away; I did mention that they are serious chemicals didn't I?

What was I thinking? Well I'll tell you what I was thinking. I was being harassed by someone who was good at sales, who sold this stuff. On a regular basis. So I bought.

Most of this is meant to go down toilets, which is where it will go. Come this weekend I won't even be able to afford a single beer, but I'll be pouring a thousand pounds worth of liquid into a latrine.

We should hate accountants more.

I understood around one word in three. It was a case of the biter bit—this is what I put others through I suppose.

"The people who built this knew what they were doing, despite the arses who use it, it's still safe. You realize that there are three DMZeds?"

"What, why?"

"I suspect that they had factored in that they were dealing with morons. And by the way this is system that is way beyond you".

"All I want is to do is to get to the eMail server"

"It's in it's own DMZ".

I didn't know what to say.

"And did you know that there are man-in-the-middle proxies on every server?" Oh, fuck.

"umm, you sure?".

"Do you want me to give you the username/password for your bank account? Neil you are a waste of fucking space, you know not to do this. It only because you never have any fucking money that it doesn't get stolen."

"Did you?"

"Yes"

[He destroyed everyones data from the proxy]

"I cleaned up your crap by the way. Your footprints are bloody everywhere. Neil you are worse than an amatuer, stop this, you aren't good at it."

At which point I knew what was going to happen; we don't pay each other, we owe each other code. I'm good with code.

Apparently I'm worse than useless with networks.

The baptists.

I'm exhausted. And they are going to leave this building in a state. Yet again an unpaid Sunday.

Which they would damn me for.

Someone had left the toilet window open. A pigeon had got in. Along with something else, a something else that had ripped the shit out of the pigeon.

Now all that was left was an eviscerated carcass centred in a wild-scattering of gray feathers. A sad little collation of bones and gristle lying on a stone floor at the top of a cold-cold tower. A wee thing gone and un-mourned.

I hunched down onto my hunkers and looked at the wee thing, there was a gelid wind blowing through the window, the one that had been left open. I zipped up my fleece.

It was just a pigeon but I felt a desperate sadness. We were all going to end up here: dead; dead somewhere that we thought might be a home.

I heard a noise. There were a couple of pigeons sitting on the window ledge. The male doing his mating strut. You have to admire their optimism, or their stupidity, or whatever.

It's not in us animals to be sensible about our finality.

I left the window open.