a better day

things look a wee bit better today.... it's been rough (life felt like it could really all tumble down and break into pieces when i accidentally broke 2 of my pyrex bowls which travelled with me to Germany and back again to the UK on monday evening; the broken remnants of what used to serve as my mixing bowls reminded me that nothing lasts forever.).... i can't work in the office; the human traffic passing through the doors will by default pass through my wee space... whoever's talking to whom can be eavesdropped even if i have no desire to listen to any of what is being said to whom. i don't know if the banging through the walls to make 2 new doors in 2 weeks' time will alleviate this.

today, i decided that working from home is best.... programming necessitates my full concentration even if i am hopelessly bad at it (i am easily distracted) and yesterday's further attempt failed miserably. i had the wrong loops going and the wrong indices for the variables in a loop.... ERROR messages kept telling me how crap my script was. worse still, Dave, my supervisor, thinks this time-normalising script shouldn't be that difficult to programme.... i hate it. i HATE programming. i hate that fact that i know i am not trained as a programmer nor a mathematician and that someone else, who is both a mathematician and has done more programming than i will ever do, thinks i ought to be able to do better or get it done quicker. don't get me wrong. i like my supervisor, i think he's a rather rare specie. the annoying thing is when you are used to doing something, or when you can do something well (even if it was eons ago) you often expect others to be able to be just as good. it's terrible!!!

so i started all over again.... tried a few ideas i had from yesterday's miserable attempts and Dave's suggestions....

expressing ideas in Mathematical language is rather different compared to expressing normal daily conversational ideas in verbal utterances or words..... in the former, you formalise ideas and generalise them into symbolic representations. in truth, i have always wondered how people (physicists, engineers etc.) do this. i did learn some of this in doing mathematical proofs in college/first-year in uni, but i never really knew how to extrapolate the essence of it. now i am beginning to see a little of how it is linked; take the idea from one specific case and generalise it so that it is applicable to other similar situations or contexts. it is very much like learning in a very general sense. we do that all the time... or at least we should hope to do so; to learn from past experiences so as to better prepare ourselves for similar events in the future...

anyways, i think i got something to work.... in retrospect, yes... perhaps something like this doesn't really need to take as long as i have taken to get it right (roughly a week or so?!)... as long as you can concentrate hard enough on the problem without feeling crap about yourself.....and i suppose it helps if you LOVE programming..... i don't. i am happy when things work. but i am not crazy about the kick i get from getting things to work.

posted by ~overacuppa~ on Wednesday, 5 May, 2004 at 19:25 hrs