Personal Blogs

I've been horrered by edjits lately. They do stuff that I didn't want in a piss-poor way.

Yesterday I had to ease some windows that had suffered the attentions of joiners and painters. For they were not closed.

The joiners hadn't done a good job, unfortunately I knew what their mistake was. I decided on a fix. Hadn't really thought it through.

Which is why I found myself standing on a ladder struggling trying to hold a big, heavy window in place.

A big heavy window that was irreplaceable and might fall on irreplaceable kids.

I was terribly panicked.

Life is like that, sometimes you are on your own with something that you can't walk away from.

There was a moment there when I wanted to die, as soon as people arrived I wanted to kill.

I woke up. I woke up on my own into a total darkness. I'm not even  sure that I woke up at all.

I did all the things that we don't realize that we do when we wake up.

There are the questions that we ask ourselves: Where was I? What had I done last night? What was I wearing? How did I feel? Was it light? Was I late for work? Questions that we answer without the slightest thought. Usually.

Was I in danger? Is a question that you don't usually ask in the morning. It was the question that I was asking myself now.

I felt myself stretch and I heard my bones click. Which made me feel a bit better.

Then the lights came on...

This week, alongside exam nonsense, I needed to clear rooms so that the floorers could get at...well, the floor.

This involved moving cupboards, cupboards full of books and assorted other crap. Often you have to empty stuff out of the, said, cupboards as they are far too heavy to move in their loaded state

One of these rooms was the head [or curriculum leader, or whatever they are called now] of computing's. So I had a look at the books. There were many about Prolog.

We'll leave aside the oddness of why these books were there, but it got me thinking. Prolog is a declerative language, I want to do M366, it probably makes sense to learn it now. So I stole a book.

[June will be OK with this, she's a mate who knows my tendancies around books that interest me.]

So I downloaded an, I'm not sure, implimentation, interpreter, compiler...? Anyhoo a something.

I wrote my first programme today. What did I notice?

I need a different mind-set to the one I usually have, you have to let go in a different way.

It was my attempt at defining a recursive [I want to say function but I probably mean...] predicate that really brought home the differences between Prolog and the usual way I do things. In Prolog you need to write two functions, that have the same signature, and both get called. This is mad!

Which means that it is something that I should be doing.

I've puzzled for some time over the bit of the book which explains why this has to be, still at sea.

It started slowly, a few black flakes that disappeared randomly. Soon it began to get heavier, and it started to lie. It was lying on...

That was the problem, it fell in what looked like the way that regular snow falls but it landed in a peculiar way. Two flakes that seemed to be near to each other when falling, for the want of a better expression, fell very far apart from each other. Or at least random apparent distances from one another.

The world soon looked like a haphazard lattice of black dots, above and below, near and far, moving and stationary. The snow was getting much, much heavier and I was losing the ability to discern individual flakes.

"You'll have to clear a path", a voice behind me said. I jumped and suddenly I was facing him about fifty feet away. Him was my ex-boss and he had an orange plastic-shovel in his mitts.

Next thing I knew he was beside me and the shovel was in my hands.

"But...how...?"

"Surely I don't have to tell you how to clear snow".

He was gone.

Great! I made a tentative poke at nothing with the shovel, there was a terrible smell and nothing that was black [or white] moved in the least.

"...", in frustration I slammed the shovel into where the ground would be if this was our world. It felt like I'd tasted an electric shock, I fell, or bounced, down hard.

I lay there sobbing. My legs felt damp, I was freezing, my hands...my hands felt snow! I raised an arm, my hand was covered in what looked like soot. Soot that rolled down into nothing.

I grabbed snow with both hands and rubbed them together. The soot was now on both of them, and behaving the same. So there was stuff that worked properly here.

Which gave me an idea.

Even the numbers weren't there. My feet weren't hanging over anything. I took a step, it didn't seem to change anything, but how would I tell? I had no point of reference.

I sat down, so I had been standing on something. I could see my boots, I looked at my hands, they seemed normal. I ran opposite hands up and down my arms, I felt my face, again normal.

I was too scared to look inside my head for answers. I felt like crying. Why? Why me?

I saw my boots?

I was wearing clothes; combats, a tee-shirt, a...hi-viz jacket. Why? Why?

I thought about what the other mes had said, "it's about your mind making sense of something that doesn't".

I was at work then. Or my mind thought that I was.

In which case there would soon be litter for me to pick up, or doors to open or close, or some something that would give me an in to my predicament.

Hopefully.

The 'in' came soon, not something that I expected or liked.

I only have the specimen exam to go by but I think that I won't go too far wrong if I assume that the six part two questions will be based on the three blocks of each stream.

My plan is rather reliant on there being a counting problem in the geometry part. If there is, fine. If there isn't here's my plan B.

I think that I'm fine with the part two groups stream questions, maybe, I'll tackle these first, it worked for the topology exam. 30 marks; about an hour. No, I'm going to bump that up to an hour and a quarter. In the topology exam I'd prepared for questions coming at me in a certain way, which didn't happen. Things took longer than I'd thought that they would, I need to add in thinking time into my calculations.

Then it's all minds on deck, I'll have to garner all the groups marks that I can. I reckon that there are 30 on offer in part one. Say another hour and a quarter; I'll try to be non-sloppy, to be exact maybe?

Then it's just get what I can from the rest of the paper.

I should get over 40 with the possibility of a 55.

If there is a colouring problem? Then I need to squash the times down. This will work because I'm going to have more marks to play with, so I can drop more for individual questions.

I grade three should be manageable methinks. We'll see.

Landed.

They had carried two Tishes to four neils. [Tish is my wife.] Neither of the two Tishes looked happy as they clambered off their beaky friends. Neither the owls or the Tishes appeared to be aware of the other pair.

Now there was going to be trouble.

"Wait a minute, owls in this whiteness? Does day look black?"

It's the sort of cretinous thing that I say, and one of me had said it.

"Never mind that crap, what are you wearing? You look like a marsh-wiggle. You aren't fit to dress yourself..", she paused at this point, she'd clocked that there was more than one of me. "Yourselves...", she clocked the other her. Who was expressing similar sentiments to another me.

"What the fuck is this?"

I began to hope, four mes, two hers...

We were in with a shot.