aesmael

Mainly that I at last was assessed at my placement and came out better than had been my expectation, a tremendous relief. Even to say as happened last time with different person that I might proceed into the full librarian degree.

Very surprisingly to me, was rated quite competent. I thought I had been passable at best. If this keeps up, may have to accept a reassessment of myself as 'not entirely incapable / worthless'. That could be nice.

Still, that assessment aside there are still some things which need to be taken care of before I am done. Two last days at placement. A final cataloguing exam next week. Two last assignments to be turned in. It is mainly the assignments I worry about, am stressed by. Assignments have never been something I handled well, so if I fall down anywhere it will be there.

We hope, hope.

Thanks to not sleeping I finally managed to complete a project I'd set myself a couple of weeks ago.

I'd wanted to increase my familiarity with HTML, for reasons of school / work benefits and also especially on account of wanting to, so I set myself the task of creating a bundle of pages which held my stories. A sort of book, an anthology of my work shaped like a website.

I am always surprised at how long HTML takes for me to put together. Especially as once I learn the tools for the task the actual putting it together goes rather quickly - most of the time on this project has been reading up on the subject itself, and only the past few days attempting to sort layout. I am pleased to have learned a teensy bit of CSS for this too, but only a tiny bit of skipping ahead because I want to avoid use of any deprecated elements or attributes if I can.

And now it works. Not any glaring errors I have seen. Pleasant to look at, but not spectacular in even an understated sense. It works, though, and I can call the first version done to enough satisfaction for me to say so. First version, which I have playfully* decided to call v0.1, is done. Nine and a half very small stories and nine poems; eleven and a half stories if you count the version with erotica included. That seemed so few in collection, and they so short, I just had to give a correspondingly low version number, to show how far and how many places we have to go.

Jayde, I ended up excluding. She's something different and does not intersect with this at present (later, that changes). And all my larger stories, those are yet in a state of incompletion. There is at least one, maybe a couple of others I might have included, but they would have required further organisational thought to find their places and I wanted first to establish a version of this story bundle as something that works and exists.

And now it does, and I am happy with my little accomplishment. I did have, starting out, a vague idea that I might share this with people as a sort of writing sample or collected work. May as well go through with that and offer a copy, either version, of this little thing to them as would like one. Everything included is available on my journal already. And this makes another incentive to keep working on other stories as I want to work my fingers in them, shape them, tell them, and now having another place to keep them too, somewhere to arrange and enjoy what I have made, that I have made.

*and sleepily, but don't forget the playfully!

When I was younger I would question people about their positions and beliefs, asking them to justify, provide sources and motives. Frequently annoyed, upset, angry. More than once pushed people to tears when I would not relent in questioning them.

Eventually I realised from observation how much this sort of questioning hurt people, never mind that it was also unproductive. I worked to stop hurting people in this way. For a long time after my diagnosis I blamed such behaviour on having Asperger's Syndrome and believed myself innately clueless and hurtful. I felt fundamentally flawed for having hurt people in that and similar ways.

[The past tense was used above, but doing so is only partially truthful. More so with time.]

Unlike this earlier post I am not being sarcastic.

I tend to accumulate to junk on my system - trying out shiny new toys, then discarding them or the old tool, but not actually removing the files outright. It is something I expect a fair few people do. Back in April the latest version of Ubuntu was released, not quite with KDE 4 in the Kubuntu version, but with the option if people wished.

I'd been using KDE and GNOME alternately for about a year at the time and was quite excited at seeing how KDE 4 ran, so naturally I went and installed it. Seemed shiny at first, rapidly grew less interesting and after about a week or so I stopped using it.

Finally, tonight, I decided to be rid of KDE 4 until it is included in an official Kubuntu release. Logged in to GNOME. Opened Terminal, and ran the following two commands:

sudo apt-get remove kde4

sudo apt-get autoremove

I did this, then logged out, intending to restart and log in to Vista. Well, that just got me a bland background and a pointer, so I hit the power button. If you know where this is going, shhhh, I'm telling a story.

Starting up, of course, we get loading again, and we come to a text login screen. Of course, because I never did edit settings to give an option to load Vista after startup; that requires restarting the system after an OS has loaded. So I login, and run the following command:

X

Aaaand we are back at the bland screen with nought but moving the mouse around to do. Time to restart again, except that involves powering off and gets us back in text. Meaning I am going to have to work with the command line until I can get a graphical desktop back.

Fortunately I am not scared. Had to do this once before when I inadvertently filled the hard drive to the point it was unable to load a graphical desktop. That was simply a matter of locating and deleting the offending folder. In this case I suspect the problem is that I made KDE 4 the default window manager, so now I need to find and change that setting back to GNOME. Possibly. Could be very mistaken. Looking into finding out, now.

So this is fun. Earlier tonight, was a bit listless. Now I have a problem to solve.

Right now, Melantha has open the manual for Bash. And how am I posting this? From a different, desktop, computer. Unfortunately although I fairly sure Ubuntu comes with a text-based browser installed, I have yet to get it to run despite occasional attempts over the past year and a half. Hm. Perhaps not so encouraging. Let's just keep going.

Edit: Problem solved.

Things I want to do:
Write
Learn Chinese
Learn programming
Improve mathematical skills
Read (books, fiction and non-)
Read (webcomics)
Play games
Watch stuff I want to watch
Learn to play keyboard instruments

Things I feel obligated to do:
Read flist, respond as much as I am able
Reading of on-line materials

Those lists are probably quite incomplete. There is a lot of overlap too, such as RSS feeds and webcomics I want to read, but for which this desire translates into a sense of obligation and taking on more than my capacity, so that there is no time left for me to do anything else.

I think one part of creating such a state of affairs is finding out how much time I should be setting aside for the things I want to do if I want to make them worthwhile. I doubt any of those would seem worthwhile to me at, frex, five minutes per week.

Disorganisation, poor use of time is a reason I have not been doing things I want to / think are important to do. It may take an hour or two to catch up on people's journals each evening but that still leaves plenty in which I do not do other things. Often I take to refreshing the page every half hour or so, casting a gradually wider net of subscribed things from which to pull reading material. An aimless sort of state. Does not help that posts of any length tend to take hours in composition. I seem to be a very slow writer. A very easily distractible one.

So it is not a lack of time, at least in that I do appear to have time available for many or most of the things I want to do. I just find myself not knowing how to choose between some as options and daunted by the prospect of attempting others. In an attempt to make this easier I intend to determine how much time is required for the especially skill- and learning-based activities. Maybe I can make a spinny wheel thing for the others.

Am getting anxious typing this, the previous paragraph especially. Feeling as if skin too tight and wanting to scream frustrated, to think of trying to make a choice between activities and actually doing them.

The other part of this (assuming there are only two) is getting away from these feelings of obligation about activities I do not necessarily wish to be pursuing at the time, this feeling that I must keep up with and read everything I subscribe to and not even cull that selection so long as I possess the capacity to make pretension of reading it. 'Read LiveJournal' is not what I wish my default activity to be. More than that I am wanting to be able to easily move on to other activities or even go to those first.

This is hard, akin to fingernails on chalkboard (akin, not the same). May just have to accept pain as a consequence of doing what I want until I become accustomed to it. Much of this is due to slipping into the easy. I tend to be engaged in other settling activities when I open my browser, such as eating something I do not want to get on the keys, and so settle on flist as something to keep myself occupied while doing this. But that tends to lead to reading the rest too, and once I have done that I am well settled into a passive mode. It becomes difficult to shift out of that into actively doing something. Even other sorts of reading are stressful to switch to because of the way I have things (mentally) set up.

Catching up still seems useful to me. I do in fact want to read what other people have posted on their journals and to respond if I have responses to offer. However, it does not seem to do me any good to be where I start. I think it would be more useful for me to check first my email (as something which may actually require timely attending to), responses to my own posts (included in email), and subscribe to notifications to any posts I may want to follow (again, covered by email) so that I do not have to scroll through the page to find them and consequently am less likely to slip into reading the whole thing. Then, move on to the doing of other activities with the reading of the 'friends page' later in the evening.

This still runs the risk of being 'caught', by friends chatting or links or something catching the eye. Less, though. Maybe even easier to slip away from. Friends, of course, are not something to avoid normally, but hopefully would be understanding if I were doing also something else. Tonight I was excited by the prospect of finishing this reading early and being relatively obligation-free for the evening, yet indecision and stress at the prospect of choosing has led to my doing none of the things I thought I might. Also to writing this.

I think having some sort of framework to operate in would help me with this. Once I know what the various things I want to do will require in terms of time invested I can arrange to have that time available and an awareness of it. I think this level of structure would actually help me to be more flexible once I have named and measured bits of time to rearrange. More clearly seeing what is being traded off against what and where.

And of course there is homework to be fit in and hopefully later employment.

This is a comment I made in reply to a post of gentle_gamer's. It happened because I was having difficulty writing the reply I originally wanted to make and started thinking about why. This was hard too, but at least I knew roughly what I was trying to say.

"It is a mess in here. Someone needs to do some cleaning."

I have been struggling to write a reply to this post. Trying to put together words to say something. Doing this, something which might be a realisation happened.

Possibly I am not as good at talking - communicating - as I think I am. It is very difficult for me to say things directly. Gaps in typing this for apparently unnecessary reasons, to tap on the keyboard or look around or retreat inside for various lengths of time, often when the next thing to type is known or is classed as 'should not be difficult to find'. The previous sentence is not what I was trying to say, although it is reflective of it[1].

What I mean is, attempting to communicate directly with someone is very difficult for me. Most of the time I spin words together, poetic flights and allusions which hopefully carry implicitly what I mean, although since so often they are misunderstood this is doubted. The possible realisation is that much of my communication is pulled from a sort of library which is then assembled in a way which seeks to approach or reference the intention behind my communication but does not often match it. So I do this, which is like the 'classic' idea of aspie-type people compositing speech from television, radio, etc., albeit in a non-standard way and trying to... not do it, to speak in a direct manner, is far more difficult. Often that fails and I end up talking about what I want to say, instead ("I want to say how wonderful the colours in this painting are" vs. "The colours in this painting are wonderful").

This comment is another example, in which successive iterations of a communication attempt are made and refined. I hope this comment will be understandable to people but I cannot really tell; I am not actually sure I am typing English words rather than some other arrangement of letters (but I think I am).

At some point in the past I think you told me I was speaking too fast for you to follow well. If I were doing this I would be very slow indeed, but it would be nice for that to not be a problem.

I want to write about this and place considerations of it and other aspie/autie type things on my journal, but do not know how. Perhaps reposting this comment will help.

[1]as something allusive of what I am trying to say but not actually holding that meaning. The previous sentence was postponed due to being considered nonsensical in original context.

I think this is not always true*, but I think it is also true far more often than I have been realising.

*'true' here meaning something like 'an accurate description of my functioning'

Holidays and when we go back there are assignmenty type things to have done. Consequently lists are being made, tools for guidance.

The first is a reading guide to be produced for an audience, naming at least 25 authors on the subject of my choice. Have to choose a subject by next week and currently am undecided on which of four ideas to go with, so I am going to put each here and see how much material I can find by the deadline. Clearly, if I can only find enough to use for one, it would be inadvisable to choose another. If anyone has suggestions for these, that would be quite helpful.

Early crime fiction

1. Christie, Agatha
2. Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan
3. Poe, Edgar Allan
   

This is the one I am especially uncertain about. The first idea I had was to contrast modern crime fiction/mysteries with early examples of the genre.

Crime/Mystery stories across other genres

1. Fforde, Jasper
2. Pratchett, Terry

Simple enough, stories which are classed of a genre other than crime or mystery yet contain strong elements of same. Stories like Pratchett's Watch books or Fforde's novels of Thursday Next or Jack Sprat.

Alternate envisionings of human sexuality and gender

1. Egan, Greg
2. Le Guin, Ursula

I am having difficulty defining this one, which suggests to me my idea is currently too fuzzy. I think I am after alternative functionings, such as found in The Left Hand of Darkness, Schild's Ladder or Distress.

Fictional autobiographies

1. Dickens, Charles
2. Wolfe, Gene

Clearly enough, fictional stories which are framed as an autobiography. I am most hesitant about the names on this list since I have not read the two stories I am thinking of, David Copperfield and The Book of the New Sun.

Let's see how much I can expand these lists over the next week.

The other is a shopping list. Last night soltice showed me this. If she had not, I would have spent today looking for it. The other project in need of doing is after all the creation of a book, blank, fit for a person to write in. So those items are what I am going to have to acquire.

Clips, paper, wax paper, cloths wet and dry. It says "[i]n addition to the rest of your book making materials" but I have yet to see a page on the rest of the site explaining what they are. Other items mentioned: bone folder, linen tape, mull cloth (this is looking less acquirable, wonder if substitutions might be made - better see), awl or needle, thread and needle, beeswax, glue, spine board.

I am not after the same result as this tutorial, so there are a few alterations I can make to the method which will hopefully be easier. Still, I would like to try this method in full at some point.

Here is a video demonstrating yet again that mutation and selection can produce complexity without design.

I find evolutionary algorithms fascinating and hope someday to play around with and write some myself.

    Those are tasty. Star Wars: Attack of the clones, less so. I prefer stories where I don't have to roll my eyes and ask "But why didn't they...?" Although that is fun too.

    I have not written anything since my last writing post, however I did update my silly studying wiki. It is not so good but hopefully I can fix that as I learn. Perhaps tomorrow will see both activities happening. We shall see.