When there's a journey, you follow a star

First I was miserable because of my Metrics test mark. Then I was miserable because I couldn't work out how to determine the stability of a dynamic system with two lags. Then I was miserable because my Mac failed while I was working on that problem.

Now I have a courtesy Mac while my other is off for diagnostics, and I've solved my problem, so I'm not miserable any more.

I'm astounded that Steve Jobs hasn't yet managed to acquire the copyright for boyfriends. They'd be a perfect fit for the Mac brand - they're aesthetically pleasing, status-enhancing, fun to use, solve all your problems and smell nice out of the box. Admittedly they don't always JustWork^TM, but then, neither do Macs always JustWork^TM if we're perfectly honest about it. If Lord Jobs doesn't move soon on this one, Google will acquire the BoyFriend copyright instead, and then where will we be?

It all seems so surprising

This morning I noticed I had too much stuff in my menu bar, so I decided to clean it up a bit.

That was a few hours ago. Since then, the poor little Mac has been having a hernia trying to obey my instruction to quit Tunnelblick (the highlighted one).

While I waited for neoMac to cool off a bit so I could use it, I read some recipe books. I'd kind of like to make stollen for dessert tonight, but the day is definitely too cold for breadmaking. I've found that when the kitchen is below about 15°C, it's impossible to keep a yeast sponge warm for long enough to properly activate the yeast, never mind trying to rise the actual dough in a reasonable time. Yet people have been baking leavened bread, and in colder climates than ours, since long before the invention of convenient heating. How'd they do it? Leave the dough next to the fire? Or did they do an overnight rise? And what about the activation problem?

Far in the distance

This week's Metrics assignment has us doing a little analysis - using Hölder's inequality to prove special cases of the Cauchy-Schwarz, Lyapunov's, and the fact that E(|X|^p) ≤ E(|X|)^p (this is sometimes referred to as Jensen's inequality, but in fact is merely a special case of the same).

It took me a little while to get all the connections working again - MATH 312 was two years ago - but after I'd woken up the necessary bits of brain, I was most disappointed to realise that these proofs are all just one step away from being completely trivial.

Sometimes it seems as if studying analysis was some perfect state of being, which, having lost, I must strive not to recall too vividly, or risk dying from disappointment.

Angels in flight

Karori Cemetery, 20/02/08

It's either this or that way

This morning I suddenly got serious about the first essay, which is 3000 words due on April 16. I've chosen a question, borrowed two books from the library and arranged to see Sandra tomorrow about finding some more reading material. The question I'm doing is the only one (of the three) that makes any sense to me at all:

Defend OR critique the main arguments of political process theorising and its ability to explain ongoing social movement activism.

One of the things I must remember to ask Sandra tomorrow is whether we can possibly do both - evaluate, rather than take a particular side of the argument. 3000 words is an awful lot of space for a single perspective.

In today's lecture we had a guest speaker - a woman from the Association of University Staff, our resident trade union. She was a little bit dull in her style, but she told some interesting stories. I don't know that the class's questions to her were very good. We all left it up to the usual few loudmouths to carry the can for us. Hopefully next time we'll come up with something a bit better (there's another guest lecturer on Thursday, IIRC).

The first journal was returned today. I got an "A/A+", whatever that's supposed to mean, and (more interestingly) a full page of handwritten comments on my responses. I haven't read it properly yet, but I always like having comments. It's at least something to talk about, an excuse to make contact with the lecturer. I'll make sure to read the comments before I see Sandra tomorrow.