Personal Blogs

This morning I watched the bird, my bird, the bird who I have shared a house with over the last twenty years being gassed; gassed as a prelude to the fatal injection. Of course.

Vets are very human, if they have to slay your animal they never talk about money; you see the killing and you are out the door, the bill lands later. And they don't let just everybody watch pets die. Vets know a bit more about death than doctors.

It was a horribly beautiful sunny day to be killing fowl. I went clutching a box. A box that contained a scratching, squawking bundle of life that smelt of death. Neither bird nor box is with me now.

After the killing I walked out into the weak March-sun, watched the mums, and the dads, and the dogs, and the kids. And realized that...

My wife hates me because I don't care...?

I'm not sure what she means; am I not behaving in the way that the caring  do? Or is  it that my reactions are different to her's? or does she blame me because I was a part of the deed?

She is mourning, so she blames me for...

My wife has had her sickness benefit taken from her. We knew that this was going to happen, we've talked, long-time, about our plan for the event. She could have fought it but we realized that we had no good long-term outcome. Right doesn't matter here, she can win, once, once as long as she wants—it'll just start all over again. Eventually they will win.

This fight, even if won, would ruin us. Two people against ten thousand, where they can fail, in any way, at any point without being wrong; we fail just once and we lose. Only the stupid fight such battles.

So we said that when it came, as it has, we'd give up every supposed luxury that scroungers should do without, we'd do the best that we could to maintain ourselves as humans.

One of those luxuries is the OU. 

I can't seem to concentrate on anything. Well strictly that isn't true; for once I'm too concentrated on something—the Turing Test. I've developed something of an animus towards it. Which would be fine, if only I had some scrap of logic to back-up, what is, just, a feeling.

Defining what intelligent behaviour is/should look like even without the possibility that we might use, in essence, trickery is hard enough. What do we call that? Emulation, or is it simulation?

To totally change viewpoint let's look at magic. We know that Darren Brown does not possess magical powers, he tells us so, but he seems to do things that defy natural explanation. This is my problem with something passing the Turing test—I might not see how I'm being played. Does that matter?

Maybe I should concentrate on the feeling. 

More philosophy, more thinking and more obsessing. 

here. .

my part in it

For the AI course. Always a good moment, not, "the books have arrived!" but still. Looking busy so far, folks are always nice here so I won't say that we look like a nice bunch.

Over the years of this trek of mine I’ (wow, I'm so used to writing HTML that I escaped what I didn't need to) ve come to judge my feeling about a course by how active I am in the forum. Everywhere I have succeeded I have written screeds.

We are all different I suppose. I've only talked to one of my tutors, once, about something non-course; I don't do tutors. (Although all of my tutors have been excellent) I don't do much beyond the units and TMAs; I almost never dip into all the other stuff (cds, videos, mind-maps etc.) that come in the box or are links on the web site. Maybe I should have?

Why do I like the forum so much? In the end it all comes down to: if I'm on top of my course I have something to say. Or maybe that that I love arguing? Or maybe [bad spelling coming up here possibly] loggharea. (yup, no spell check—addicted to writing crap.)

Whatever. I intend to milk these, my last UG, courses big-time. For who knows when I will get the chance again?

I was messing around with the shared project on Java.net tonight, trying to get the dateTime package to work, when I had a sudden flash; I'm back where I started. Coding rubbish.

I started all this learning (of computers)  because I realized that I didn't really know what I was doing. I still don't, all I have is a more nuanced ignorance. I still write much-the-same type-of wrong things,

True, I write less code now and what code I write aspires to less grand-things. I've become aware of my limits; I don't try to be clever and I document what I'm doing.

I document after I have done, bad. Documentation, like testing, comes before code not after. I do write the tests first but I don't plan them like I should.

So all this has been a waste of time?

Certainly not, I coded a type-safe generic Java collection, it will fail on edge-cases, as these things are wont to do but it will work in most cases.

Everything that I learn allows me to build a better-something.

I will always write crap code. I should get over that fact.

Most of my public life is about making sure that other people get-along. Almost nobody notices this aspect me. When asked, "what does neil do?", the answer "creating relationships" never seems to loom large in their answers. 

The people I work with assume that what I do is what they see me do; they don't see me cover up their mistakes, iron out the differences between their wants and the wants of others'. They want now, they never see others. They never see that they could do this themselves.

They don't imagine that I schedule my time to make sure that the person who needs 400 desks the night before, doesn't interfere with the someone who, next morning, needs a complete empty hall.

I'm just someone who is there who doesn't seem to do much.

Often people have talks, meetings about and write reports about me,:protocols and pre-empts are planned, emailed, espoused and written.

I, of course, ignore such things. If I did it their way the world would fall apart. They don't even notice that I'm not doing what they decided.The writing/deciding is all after all for them, not something that I should be interested in..

Possibly such people are right: I'm a bit useless and not up to providing the figures that they need to pass on. Still I am human and some people love me.

Over many years I have tried to support art in Edinburgh, in my own hole-in-the-corner way. I have always had rooms for art classes, and, and this is the problem, have charged about what the class could stand.

In other words I have done the City Council out of their due. Still they claim to support art, I can't have done too much wrong? We know how that works.

Someone gave me a very special art-work the other day. 

So I have been paid, and more than paid, and paid too much. 

A life spent always wrong, well, I have my picture.

 You have no idea of the wonder, of having it, and it being given to me.

1. Wake up at 4:30 because I always do. Read Numbers until I lose conciousness
2. Wake up at 6:30 because I always do. Looked at the book, Kings, went downstairs for a drink of water and remembered that I'd hurt my foot, back to bed and fall asleep
3. Wake up at 11:30
4. Coffee & orange juice and a couple of fags as I peruse the news on-line and worry about my foot in the back-ground of my head
5. 12:00 online with eluminate. Youssef explained our options for the persistence layer of the shared project. He wanted to push the envelope with Maven and Spring, I had to agree. High learning-curve but one we are going to have to tackle sometime-soon anyway.
6. 13:30 Andrea joined us and updated us with the progress UI wise. They are being held-up because I haven't done my job with the core classes.
7. We discussed one of the difficulties of Youssef's maximal persistence strategy; un-pushed changes will be lost.
8. We agreed that Maven, Springs and neoj4 were the way to go. if we take a hit we take that hit.
9. We discussed TMAs
10. 17:00 I started to finish the utilities package.
11. Suddenly I started to get mad error messages when I tried to compile. Hmm, I needed to upgrade java to get onto eluminate, could that be the cause? Restart computer
12. That seemed to work but I don't like this much. Still I have things to do...
13. 21:00 finished the utilities package. JUnit tests passing, JavaDoc written, wiki written, committed, pushed, other peoples' code wilfully re-written...
14. Write this.
15. go to bed.

My inbox is a tyranny of my own commits.

Sense goes out of whatever aperture of, the, whatever structure you think you are, exhibits when you do a shared project. Windows mainly.

Still the Doctor was brilliant and I see my way to making the dateTime package work.

Yep, drunk.

I'm at work, for the twentieth day in a row. I'm about to start humping desks and chairs but for now I sitting at the click-face trying to repair my digital life. For yesterday the real went mad and I got angry.

I get angry on a regular basis of course but it is extremely unusual for me to show it. Sure I throw the odd strop but almost never in the presence of the git[s] responsible. Yesterday I lost it.

It all kicked-off about eight, we had a gas leak from a cooker in home economics, I switched the gas supply to the cooker off, safe. That didn't work for the head of home economics, or rather, under the new nomemclature - the curriculum leader of the health & well being faculty. She started shouting at me in the playground; in front of one of my minions and numerous kids, "You have to call Scottish Gas!"

"They'll just turn the supply off."

"We've had them in dozens of times..." .lie "...they will fix it..." lie "...you don't know what you are doing!" In this case another lie. Normally this type of shite just washes off of me, for various reasons this time it rankled. I held my hand up.

"Stop shouting at me!", Her face changed, as if I'd slapped her, she is used to shouting at people. I'll leave the rest of the conversation to your imagination. I kept my voice neutral, she did not.

I got my retaliation in first, I saw the business manager and, with my minion as a witness, told him that I wasn't going to make an issue of this but I was perfectly happy to ramp this to the top if she fancied a fight. As I left his office she bringed in, all elbows and spite. I haven't heard anything yet; they need me for a few days, after that it will be open-season on the neil.

We got Scottish Gas in, they confirmed that what I had done was correct and buggered-off. The department doesn't have any gas as of now, the heating engineer that I requested hasn't appeared.The gas can't be turned back on. So a big win for her. My fault I expect.

So I was a tad hyper when the next blow fell.

I'm going to have to set the scene I'm afraid. On Monday the S4 [year 10] prelims start, important stuff; we are down one exam hall due to dry rot. The other exam hall is being treated for spores this weekend, fine I'll have to set-up 150 desks Sunday night but I know that at bottom I have to ensure that the chips never come down, which means I don't get a life.

What I did resist is that they would do some plastering at the same time.You know what a mess plastering creates? So this seemed a wee bit much when you consider that it could be done any time. Things were tricky enough I felt.

But. They snuck around behind my back and arranged it anyway:

"Have you arranged any cleaning?" I asked.

"No", my business manager answered. I expect that my face changed in ther same way as the curriculum leader of the health & well being faculty's face had changed earlier in the day.

"But don't get stressed out about it", he added. I left the room.

Then came the third strike.

Now, because we were an exam hall down I had to set up one of the gyms with exam desks; exam desks that had to be moved between buildings; desks that had been an utter pain to get into place. So I was setting these out when a deputy head came in.

"We were going to use the other gym". They don't tell you vital stuff like this because I'm obviouly able to read their minds, the decision has been made, hard part done, the rest must be easy...

I'm going to cut this short too, the utter stupity of what followed still hurts; I'm supposed to carry 100 desks and chairs up a set of stairs, down a set of stairs and set them up in 20 minutes. So that the staff can play football.

I made a firm no, perhaps on reflection a bit too firm. I'm going to have to do just this in a minute, on my own, in the cold, because one gym hall is larger than the other. Lie, they are exactly the same size and I can prove it. But the funny thing with facts is that most people don't believe them when they get in the way of what they want to do.

At some point the business manager truckled in and offered to help.

"Touch one of these desks and I'll fucking kill you!"

He left.

You just have to turn them.

Today I had my day-school for M256—software development with Java. I didn't really know what to expect but I didn't expect to have to work through exam questions with a time limit.

I've always known that to revise for an exam past papers and timed attempts are the way to go; I have never done so. I lie to myself that this is pointless as I don't know the answers. Well today I had a tutor, other students and discussions. I learnt lots.

I reckon that today was worth about ten to fifteen extra marks in the exam. It also changed my perceptions about the way to tackle the exam. I assumed that I'd have loads of time, I was close to going over time on every question.

I've paid for most of my degree out of my meager wages and yet I don't take advantage of what I've bought. I never talk to my tutors, I rarely go to tutorials, the only thing that I get from the OU is books, TMAs, exams and deadlines. Today I realized that I am being stupid.

If you play this game use the tools that you have been given; talk to your tutor, take advantage of what materials are available and attend tutorials. The last being the most important.

The thing that we miss, us OUers, compared to brick univercity users, is that we we don't get feedback from the others suffering our pain. This was made plain to me the other day when Graeme gave up on his teaching.

Everybody felt that he should have carried on but he had lost confidence. Nothing that we could say made any difference. For me the penny dropped when another maths teacher said, "it was three years before I taught a good lesson but I knew that my friends were in the same place."

Today I learnt loads, not just because I had a tutor on hand, it was more that I could see where my fellow students were going wrong and they could see the same in me.

The OU is distance learning but I think that the 'new' distance learning gets wrong what the OU gets right—people, and talking to people is very important; nay vital.