I did not expect that brick wall to pop out of nowhere.
Long story short, personal issues are causing me a lot of grief at the moment, but to quote Nanny Ogg, I aren’t dead. I don’t know when I will be back, though. Eventually, I’ll finish Part 5…
Tag: frustration
Black & White 3: The Platform
This is Skimbleshanks. I name all my laptops after cats in Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, and the prior ones have been Macavity and Mistoffelees. This is part of my larger computer naming scheme, the poems of T.S. Eliot, of which I’ve had desktops bearing the names of wasteland, prufrock, and hollowman. You can also read dad jokes right here for entertainment.
I bought Skimbleshanks in 2013, and even though I bought a top of the line gaming computer at the time, it’s starting to show its age. The nice graphic card burned out because the laptop had a heat problem. The ports on the right side of the computer don’t work because, in trying to release a busted DVD drive from the slot, I accidentally dropped it, forcing the little USB receiver that goes with my mouse which I had left in a USB port to shove the motherboard to the left. Most recently, I managed to spill water over the computer. Thankfully, it only killed the keyboard letters z, x, c, v, m, period, comma, right shift, and enter. That’s why there’s a second keyboard in front of the laptop.
Alas, money to replace anything doesn’t exist, so I’ll just have to deal with Skimbleshanks’ quirks and hope it doesn’t get worse. I hate not having a job.
(LJ/Dreamwidth readers: The crossposter I use for both these services does not attach the featured image, so you will have to click through the link at the bottom of the post to see the image.)
Prior entries in this series:
gray
I’m sitting here at the computer trying to figure out something to tell you all. I figure I ought to post in the middle of the day because it might get more comments, but that’ll be for another time. Tonight, it nears midnight, and I have a deadline.
The biggest thing I want to talk about, I’ve promised somebody I would wait until the right time, and the right time is not now. It will take patience, and some waiting. Waiting is.
Got my H1N1 flu shot today. One less worry. Also dropped a class. Also, one less worry.
Things have gotten a bit better since the implosion that was earlier this month, but I still get shaky every time I look at my precarious financial situation. I guess I ought to be happy I have a job, even if it’s only part-time and doesn’t pay overly well. But it’s hard to reconcile that with sitting down with budget numbers and wondering just where you’re going to come up with spare money for things like regular maintenance of the car and clothing and replacing the laptop and saving to move out. Add in the really stupid mistake, and yeah…it’s no wonder I end up in a minor panic when I look at my finances.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m thankful that I have enough of a job to mostly afford my bills and wonderful and outstanding parents, but … as the clock ticks down to the thirty-first rotation around the sun, I can’t help but think that it wasn’t supposed to be this way.
An Alexander day
I swear, Mondays account for 53 and three-quarters percent of all my extensional crises. This was another bad Monday.
Anyway, to explain my topic, it comes from the children’s book Alexander and the Terrible Horrible No Good Very Bad Day, in which the main character contemplates several times about moving to Australia. I’ve thought about it too, and so really shaky days are Alexander days. And today was just one of those days.
Part of it was triggered by getting money out of my bank account to pay for gas, and realizing I have ten dollars to get me through a week and a half after the gas was accounted for. That wasn’t happymaking at all. Of course, this is a common lament these days not just for me but for everybody. It means, at least for me, that once NaNoWriMo is over, I need to just start throwing resumes at anything that comes up that might even remotely have anything to do with what I do, even if it means relocating to a far away city. I’ve given up hope that the company I currently work for will offer me a full time job at all, and I’m just barely making it on what they pay me.
Of course, the long term cure for some of my big issues is to move out from my parents’ house, so I don’t have to justify half the stuff I do them. But that’s neither here nor there, and frankly, I’m just barely scraping by with the bills I have, and if I save anything, Social Security will crack down — they already have, which makes a tenuous situation that much worse. (It also makes it impossible for me to take on other part-time work to try and get a bit of spare change — health care. But I’ve been over that rant before.)
And then to top it off, Monday night is the night of my SQL class. Now, generally, computer classes don’t bug me, but this one for some reason does. And I think I figured it out. Not only do I shut down when faced with instructors I can’t stand, this guy’s teaching style and I don’t match well. He provides notes, but the notes aren’t helpful if you have trouble paying attention in lectures. And that’s how I learn — by seeing, and by doing. And well, really, we haven’t done much. So it puts me in a jam about studying for quizzes and tests. I think I’ve studied well enough and I get blown out of the water.
On today’s quiz, I guessed like heck and then spent the rest of the time doodling xkcd-esque stick figures all over my exam. When I handed it in, I offered a strange smile to the prof. Dunno what he’ll make of it.
Anyway, tomorrow’s gonna be a working day, so I’m trying to get some rest.
NaNo count holding steady at a bit over 18.5, but Monday and Tuesday != good writing days.
Frustration
First of all, I’m on swine flu watch, as one of my groupmates was pretty seriously ill yesterday, and my teacher forced her to stay in class until the midway point while he lectured (when he had first told us we had a quiz and the presentations and then she could go) and then we all shared a mic in giving our presentation. I’m hoping that she didn’t have the flu and thus, I won’t get it, but…this year, you can’t be too careful.
Anyway, if you didn’t catch my edit yesterday, this is what you missed:
So the quiz got postponed. However, our presentation didn’t go overly well today. The Star1/Star2 problem we were having I pointed out in discussions, but our main programmer couldn’t talk Access into doing what we wanted. We were fairly dinged on that one, but it was an Access toy database problem. But here’s a big hint to professors: when you require 3-5 tables in the assignment, it’s not fair to chew us out for including 3-5 tables when we could have done it in one.
To explain, here’s our Entity Relationship diagram in our presentation:
(You can click on that to make it bigger.)
Here’s how the prof said we could (and should!) have done it.
| id | name | married to? |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | John | 3 |
| 2 | Jeff | 5 |
| 3 | Jill | 1 |
| 4 | Jim | 6 |
| 5 | Jacob | 2 |
| 6 | Jean | 4 |
Besides the fact that this table assumes poly relationships aren’t acceptable (which, of course, in the US is true, but not in other places in the world), I’m not sure how you’d handle marriage dates, as obviously John and Jill would share a marriage date. And since our assignment said not to track divorces, I guess if John and Jill got a divorce, then we remove both their entries from the table. But what happens if Jill meets Johann and he sweeps her off her feet and they get married? Would I need to re-enter Jill at that time? Wouldn’t it be easier if her record already exists?
And that’s still not excluding the fact that the prof told us to use 3-5 tables in the assignment. I was pretty sure we could do marriage in two tables, but that still didn’t meet the three to five requirement. And as for the poly thing, he said we could make our own assumptions when I went up there and asked about things like gay marriage. So we made an assumption that poly was okay. Grr. And interrupting the flow of our presentation by asking us questions in the middle of it? *sigh* I dunno, I guess it’s a teaching style, but it seemed a little rude.
Grr. yeah. This is still eating me today, but i’ll try to drop it.