February’s Project – A Piece of Pi

I’m a software engineer. Unfortunately, despite what TV and movies would have you believe, this doesn’t mean I can  automatically hack into government networks, intuit passwords, understand complex cryptography and forensic accounting, or apply field medicine. (I’m looking at you, Arrow.)

Among the many things I can’t do is system admin. I have a total mental block on it. Programming, fine. That’s building mental models of the world, deciding which bits are important, and writing the code to get them to interact with each other(1). But getting tech to behave? Zero to enraged in under 10 seconds.

I’ve been programming professionally for over twenty years. I want to shake myself up a bit, find a way to use my experience in a way that’s fun and creative. I need to pick up some new skills, or be left behind. I want to play about with some system admin somewhere I can’t cause a disaster. And there’s nothing like learning something new to give creativity a kick start. Enter the Raspberry Pi(2).

January’s Project – Levelling Up My Post-Apocalyptic Life Skills

I shamelessly stole the title of this post from this:

because I thought it sounded more exciting than “improving my knitting”. I’m not bad at crochet. I am comfortable making amigurumi creatures without any pattern at all. But knitting* – knitting fights me all the way. I suck at it it.

I used to knit when I was plotting, but I’d only knit squares of stuff on big needles with fluffy yarn that hid all the mistakes. If I wanted to allow my mind to wander and sort my story out, I couldn’t be constantly reciting a pattern in my head, or counting stitches. But I’d start with a nice round number, say 30, and every now and again some rows later, I’d check that I still had 30 stitches on the needle. I never did. And I never understood why.

This Christmas, my other half’s mum bought me a lovely kit for knitting a lace pattern scarf with alpaca wool. Now, I know how to do a  knit stitch and a purl stitch. But saying that means I know how to knit is like saying that I know how to play chess because I know the horsey can do L-shaped moves. So, I’ve been practising on some cheaper yarn until I get the hang of it, and thinking about parallels with writing and other creative activities.

Here’s 3 things I believe about making anything:
1. You really make progress when make a mistake and you learn how to fix it.
2. Once you get to a reasonable level of skill, it’s about balancing control and allowing the yarn (story or wool) to do its own thing.
3. Sometimes you have to recognise that a piece may not be perfect, but it’s as good as you can get it right now, and move on.

Listen With Your Eyes

You might have come across the term synaesthesia. This is when your brain wires together two of your senses so, for example, you smell colours or see music. It seems to be quite common in artists.  One member of our writers’ group has color-graphemic synaesthesia, and sees words and letters in colour, even if the text is printed or displayed in black and white.

The interesting thing is, language seems to have some synaesthesia built in. For example, there’s the bouba/kiki effect. Take a look at this picture:

Which one of these two objects is a “bouba” and which one is a “kiki”?

The Day Job

This post may go some way to explaining why there are no films about software engineering.  Although, this isn’t actually about software engineering. It’s about the stuff you have to do so you can do some software engineering.

Anyway, last week it was time to install a new version of my company’s development environment on one of the test machines. Let’s call the development environment ThatThing, (or TT for short), and the version I’m upgrading to version PantsOnHead. I’m installing on a brand new user account, and doing it via remote desktop for an extra level of frustration. All names have been changed because I need to pay my mortgage.

Me: Ok, TT, install version PantsOnHead.

TT: *sigh* All right.

A Year and a Day (and a Few More)

I came across the theory that it takes a year and a day to come to terms with the death of a loved one in “Anybody Out There?”* by Marian Keyes. The idea is that you’ve been through all the changing of the seasons, all the festivals and gatherings and rituals of a year’s cycle without them.

My uncle Kevin died about this time last year, so this seems like a fitting time to write about it. Actually, he died on November the 5th. As a date to go, it would have pleased him immensely for its appropriateness for a historian, and for the double-entendre of going out with a bang. He was 63. He spent his last two weeks in hospital in intensive care, and I was there (with the rest of the family, and my boyfriend, and some of my uncle’s closest friends) when they turned the machines off.

Tits or GTFO

Last month the Taliban shot 15 year old Malala Yousafzai for being female and trying to get an education. This month the parents of a 15 year old girl in Kashmir killed her with acid for being female and talking to a boy outside the family home (warning: upsetting pictures at this link). These are awful, awful things.  People are rightly outraged.  So why are women in the western world still complaining about sexism? Why don’t we just stop whining and acknowledge how good we’ve got it?

Well, things are certainly better. But.

Words and Music

Part 1: It’s all in the interpretation.

Writers get told this a lot. You know that old thing: there’s only 1 or 5 or 7 or 32 or whatever basic plots* (people count them differently), and it’s all about telling the story your way, using your imagination, your style and your personal experiences or truths.

I think this can be very nicely illustrated with music. Take the traditional folk song “God’s Gonna Cut You Down” (also knows as “Run On” or “Run On for a Long Time “).