Shite.
Right.
Same fucking total whiteness, this time with actual black beaked birds heading my way.
"We can escape", someone said from behind me. I turned around. I saw a me with an index-finger straight upon his nose. He did something snakey with his arm.
"Notice how now you can hear them?"
"And yet they don't smell"
I disliked the sneer on my other face and I'd had enough of this crap, so I threw myself backwards. Which as I discovered later may not have been the best thing to do.
Is ECO week in the school. However we were at home to mister cock-up today. Well, I was.
What had been planned were a series of assemlies on litter and the kids' propensity to cause the same, which would culminate in a litter incident in 'their space'. I got my weeks mixed up.
Still it was priceless. All week we have been saving 'clean waste' to scatter. Today Duggie and I had the fun of flagrent littering and watching from on-high the kids' reaction to a room in which they were going to eat their snacks in being a monumental pig-sty of garbage.
They reacted much as I expected, an initial sense of shock, then they just sat down around it. To my joy two kids approached me [out of 1200] wishing to clean it up and keen to do it. I shook their hands and told them we had it.
However, something that I'd long assumed true turned out not to be the case. I thought—given that the floor was chocka with kibble, that every kid would just add to the pile. I knew that rubbish, they didn't add jot-one squat to it. In a certain way it was as clean as if the kids had never been.
Next Thursday we will repeat this experiment, best outcome behaviour will have changed, worst outcome we are where we were. In which case we will try something else.
My feeling is that something else won't work either.
At some point between leaving the house on Friday and post-Merlin last night I lost my cash-card, stupid sod that I am. I also lazed out on Saturday, I didn’t put all the exam desks away. So today instead of spending my time in the warm, watching tripe on the TV, in my PJs, drinking tea and playing at finishing my TMA I had to go out into the freezing world to blag a twenty-spot off my folks and schlep desks and chairs in a freezing ex-church. Plays fuck with a TMA I can tell you.
Too often this is my world, Sunday night, a mess of my own making, a straggle-flock of shite-headed failure and the undone. But buildings own me, I have a church, an ex one for sure, but it and I and we are a pair. Today I did something I rarely do.
The ex-church pretends to be a theatré nowadays—it has lovvey lights and every window is blacked out. I was squatting on the stage feeling freezing when something told me to open a blackout.
By a strange chance I watched the sun setting in King David’s eyes. We forget that this world is magical at our peril.
People of a certain age will know this one. Notice how we don't notice anything else but her face. Now see this, potentially one of the greatest vids ever, and yet they don't follow through. Why cut away from her face and the piano?
I don't care how clever you are the most arresting image to a human is another human's face.
I've spent most of this morning testing the, "they all have a dodgy wheel" postulate. And I can confidently claim that this is a piece of crap.
If you load it asymetrically you will find that it acts "wonky". I'll leave it to the applied mathos to 'do the equations'. But if your trolley seems to be going where you don't want it to—then it is your fault.
The sky was the lightest of light blues, where it met the horizon it was a washed-out washed-out lemon flecked-red. Cut-out seagull silhouettes floated amongst the shebangs of squabbling pigeon flocks. The canal was in the process of becoming frozen. In an odd way.
It looked like it had frozen and then had been mashed up—a crazy straight-edged 3D jigsaw of polygons. I assumed that a barge had gone through. But as I walked on I began to doubt this. There were places where it was just beginning to freeze and the pattern was repeating; it was seven of a Saturday morning, nobody normal was moving a barge.
I squatted down and had a think and a fag.
Water is funny stuff, I don't suppose that we'll ever understand it. What occurred was that I was interested, stupid arse that I am I still ask questions. All I ever had is the need to know.
On my hunkers, looking at a canal, spouting smoke into the vacumn and pondering ice in the huge silence of a strange dawn.
Manyana I'm going to have to create the wireframes for the new school website. I decided to be trendy, I went for HTML5 and a fluid layout to be mobile/tablet friendly. I quickly ran into problems.
Once upon a time I was good at developing web sites, I'm the equivalent of an idiot now. I'd forgotten a basic—every browser is shite.
Basic stuff doesn't work everywhere, CSS3 support seems to be deliberately patchy, mobiles are just a mess. However low you aim some browser will choke, and will probably choke in a different fashion tomorrow.
Once upon a time I could serve well-formed XML to IE6. I'm no longer that boy. I thought that we might have moved on, I've found that I'm struggling out of a different mire.
Still a mire.
I rarely do this, but everyone does. You, as in you who are reading this, may sleep in, I doubt that it stops your world. For me it is a rather bigger thing—nobody gets into the building until I apply a key to the door.
Every day I wake up in a panic, have I slept in? Usually I wake up early and consult my alarm clock and all is OK.
Today I woke at four, checked my alarm, and...must have pushed the wrong button. For...
It was six, exactly the time I should have been applying a key to the door. Engage panic mode.
De-engage panic mode. Panic never helps, so I just walked fast to work. I got there about twenty past to much mock. I had to kick on, I had a rather full agenda. It was about eight when I got a break.
Then the raptors hit.
Tomorrow I have to get up at the back of four [of the morning] to set up the exam desks that I had to go back to work to strike tonight. Tomorrow I have to stay at work until seven [of the evening] so that the parents' night is set up/put away right. Tomorrow I have a meeting about the migration of the school's web site.
Tomorrow I'm going to have to put up with many moans from people who haven't had their web pages smartly updated with their boring crap, tomorrow I'm going to have to explain to various people that £30 an hour is our break-even point when it comes to lets, "but it's for charity" [that would be a sponsored gap year], tomorrow I'm going to get into an argument with a deputy-head who is going to be annoyed that I haven't done something that she didn't ask me to do.
Tomorrow will be a hellish day. I'm not sure that I care any more, I've had a life-time of crap like this. Situation normal I suppose.
Tomorrow I'm going to suffer even more pressure to attend a meeting about the security for the new build. This is a piece of flagrent piss, they won't act on, whatever is the least divisor of an iota, of what I say—this is an exercise in 'share the blame'. Or more probably, given that they are all saying nice things to me, blame neil.
The people that I work with use me in two ways, they take credit for what I do, because, by some magic they caused me to do this, or they scape-goat me. Why do I put up with this?
Because they are flabby, lazy, bald, fat, thick, time-serving, self-serving twat-fucks who take not a jot of joy from their existence. They victimize others as a prop for their egos. Someone must be less than them otherwise what was the point of their struggle?
I sit in my bedroom with a solitaire board. I know joy.
I'm approaching nine stone [from below] because of this. I have a weight problem that is off the normal sequence.
I'm a vegetarian and a Ceoliac, when I was diagnosed, a couple of years ago, I was under seven stone. Bad if you are six foot tall. Since then I've struggled to little effect to get my weight up. I assumed that if I upped my calories all would be well.
Not so. So I needed to do something stupid.
Tonight I'm eating brown rice porridge [this is nice, boil the rice to mush without too much water] flavoured with a three-bean chilli and cheese. I drank a litre of cider and tried to talk to my wife Now I'm off to bed.
Actually I'm going to make some tea with lots of sugar and carnation milk, can't hurt...
That we can't export our executions. After all we out-source our torture to more-or-less the same people. We need to kill people who work for public bodies in their droves. They are usless.
It is utterly wrong that someone whom the public hates should escape because we have a legal system that gives them a fair trial.
Heads must roll here.
Is covered in sheets of A4. I'm designing my unlimited register machine Object. I think that I have the general idea of where I want to go. The details are fuzzy, as they should be.
The beauty of javascript is that inheritance works a wee bit backwards; it's prototypal. You don't extend an object, you give its ancestors what you want offspring to inherit, kind of. So as I learn more I can add to my original Object without worrying about the chain. This isn't O-O
I can code in an Object-Oriented fashion, I understand the concepts; I can also code in a functional fashion. I still like to javascript, where I can choose either way. I want control in every sense. I see the advantages in both paradigms, I see the weaknesses too.
In the end this is silliness, I'm creating a model, I don't really intend to create a controller or a view.
Funny eh? I know how to do this properly, I have no intentions of doing the right thing, I just want to hack something that works because I'm having fun.
The fact that I've covered the floor in A4 and am worried about what I'm doing is progress.
Of sorts.
Of limited interest but in the grand traditions of this site I offer some muzac. Remember that we are only a link in the generations of fighters for right.
Should we all link to music?
I live in a hundred-odd year old cottage in a school playground. It used to be a tied house, as part of my job I had to live there. Then it became a regular council house.
Hundred year old cottages in school playgrounds come with some problems: they cost a fortune to heat, people think that they have the right to knock on your door at all hours and you have to put up with sharing your house with animals.
My wife and I both grew up in houses like this so we're kind off easy-osy about the animals. But things sometime go to far and you have to call in exterminators.
And having some cheeky mice sods nesting in the pot-pourri on your living room table is definitely too far. The first we realized was when what seemed like a million tiny rodents started scattering themselves everywhere.
I'll give you a heads-up, nothing you can buy as a regular Joe is going to remove the wee beggars, you need to call in the professionals. And by professionals I mean a small independent bod who knows what they are about.
The guy that we use is a chirpy-chappy who likes to chat about his job. I like chatting to workmen about what they are doing, it's how you learn.
Today we bemoaned the change in bin collection times, discussed the fact that the bait the the council uses hasn't been eaten by Edinburgh mice for years...
Yes, that's what I said. Mice seem to have a genetic memory as to what killed their ancestors. They stop eating bait. [Which is why the stuff that they sell in shops is rubbish.]
"What bait did I use last time? Aniseed or chocolate?" I couldn't remember. Notice it was the flavour that we were interested in, not the type of bait, that has changed.
"I'll use the gel anyway..."
A decent exterminator can tell where the mice-runs are, heck even I can, I've talked to enough of them over the years. I know the signs.
So the gel gets applied to the 'squeeze pints', it gets onto the mouse, which cleans it off rather like a cat would clean it off.
The house will be clear by next week.
Chunk Power: Use Threading Building Blocks for Parallel Reduction
Using parallel_reduce instead of an array on a mathematical algorithm yields significant improvement with acceptable precision. Find out more in Jeff Cogswell's walk-through of why and how. Then email us atfeedback@go-parallel.com to let us know what you think.
You think that it's easy being a geek, let me tell you that it is not. Coffee and painting it is...
Dark clouds and an utterly still, sky-mirror with leaves canal. There was a gelid sense of peace as I walked to work this morning.
Now it's all warm noise and bustle.
I need to go and clear desks...
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