The Good Ship Narcissus

The best worst part of today was the crazy lady in the car park who decided she had to tell us that it was a lovely day and the lord provides for the righteous and it must be true because the bible says so, she has a book, it is written so it must be true.

FSM won.

Mum is terrible with these idiots, she stops and turns round and humours them, the best thing to do is get the hell away as fast as possible.

I told her that the Japanese have an old saying, don’t believe everything you read. I don’t think that’s the right source and I know it’s only half of the saying, but it was close enough. I need some practice at being an asshole and argumentative with some people again, it’s been a long time, 8 years or so.

Apparently I am a nice person and I should want my soul to be saved or something like that. Funny, I was only yesterday looking at Democritus’ theory of soul. It reminded me of the nitrogen cycle. I think that’s a really nice idea, and one i am adopting for the time being because it’s just too damn cool not to.

Philosophie should be read/taught in school alongside RE, and I wish they would stop teaching christianity as fact. Maybe they already did, but that was not the case when I was at school. So many wasted hours.

Mum found it shocking/funny anyway, story of the day and all that. I aim to colour.

I like this new photothingamy. Downsizing helps hide the k750i camera quality and my unsteady hands.

A friend of mine went to collect his provisional degree results today. We’re graduating in the same year, same subject.

He got a 2.1 BSc Hons, Computer Science. While I am happy for him I am sad for the value of whatever degree I get in the end. Despite 3 years of programming modules he can’t write a hello world program in any language without guidance. I think that speaks volumes about the classification mechanism in use. His other work did not make up for this deficiency, I have seen or helped with a fair amount of it. To his credit he worked hard, he just couldn’t grasp algorithms and was not patient enough to overcome this. I think a 2.2 would have been more suitable.

Conversely another friend is a web-radio sysadmin running a dedicated server abroad who has written code ranging from deployment scripts in Perl to Linux device drivers in C and toying with Lisp. He doesn’t have the same drive, organisation skills, etc. He’s also academically knowledgeable, having done several years of a Maths degree previously. He will pass the same course, just.

I won’t be collecting provisional results; signs are positive and it’s a journey during working hours to collect it that I can do without at present.

This also clearly shows why, generally speaking (optometrists aside), employers don’t take people on their degree alone.

“Wait, it’s a post-it note, and this is a real pen” *doh*

“See you” each one ends
Cordial innocence
Or hiding plainly