Author: francis

Just started my new job. I’m in total brain dump mode. I feel like the aliens in Red Dwarf that sucked peoples brains out through a straw. The guys here use messenger (and some of their customers use Yahoo as well) so I guess I will finally get round to finally using messaging services. I’ve been holding off; mainly because I have always felt a little overloaded with email anyway.

Just posted this (but I’ve also added and moved some stuff for euphony) on http://battlinbog.blog-city.com/read/607125.htm:

It’s so good to see a different side of the gender debate. I was also really interested in the “war against boys” that you link to on your resources. I remember very clearly becoming confused when I first started looking at gender issues many years ago, and rejecting the hatred of men “thing” without being able to articulate what should go in its place.

As a human being I’ve often thought that the alleged “opposites” male and female are not opposites at all; we are the same species and have essentially the same interests. I do hear a lot of women say that men are very different from them but my own experience after one failed and one very successful marriage is that women and men need to talk to each other and also (the hard bit) listen. It’s really that simple, but it’s work and people are very lazy (read: self-centred?) about relationships. That’s where the problems come and then get extrapolated into general distrust based on gender; which is quite ridiculous, really. If you look hard at what your friends of the same gender do they are just as unreliable, devious, kind, inconsiderate, loving etc. etc. but it isn’t treated with the same intensity because sex doesn’t rear it’s intense ugly head and complicate things, giving incidents and accidents of relationships a significance they wouldn’t otherwise have.

I live in the UK and it’s well-known that boys are doing badly but nothing’s being done about it that I can see. My son is 9 and very intelligent but I can see that he, and a lot of his peers, aren’t getting the mental nourishment they should be. This is partly because of the obsession with SAT scores.

Another problem is that we now seem to live in a world of powerless victims, where everybody is a victim of everybody else and nobody is responsible for anything. This is quite bizzare and will hold us (human beings) back until we get over it. It might be a product of 50 years of relative peace – when you look at what my parents’ and grand-parents’ generations had to face a lot of this petty stuff didn’t make it into their lives because mere survival was where they had to put their energy.

I’d like to have a longer chat with you some time. Keep up the good work. I read your open letter and found a lot of interesting food for thought: it’s interesting how changing where you start from allows you to draw totally different, and more balanced, conclusions from the facts. I bet the men-haters don’t like this but they need to think about what you have to say.

http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/dilbert-20040506.html

(BTW Elbonia is where Scott Adams talks about other countries in a way that doesn’t offend anyone)

I was reading http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/0000000CA518.htm. I loved the line [Michael Howard] jumps on any bandwagon that seems to be going somewhere, then promptly falls off on the first bend. I think this describes most of our political elite. What I find amusing is that the lack of credible opposition was also a feature of the whole Thatcher era but everyone seems to have forgotten it.

At Powergen we get copies of the local Nottingham newspaper. Over the past couple of weeks we’ve had:

1. Students nearly drove me to suicide
2. Let’s fine youngsters who are causing trouble
3. Police swoop on yobs on stolen motorbikes
4. Lots and lots of gun crime stories

I worry about the journalists who write for this rag. They are what would used to be called reactionary and very backward looking. They promote some kind of victim culture where all people do is whine about how bad the world has treated them and call for someone else to do something. Why not:

Confront other people’s lack of consideration (in a friendly, open way)?

Show others how you feel and actually talk to them? Most people are very reasonable and contrite if you approach them in a spirit of friendliness and openness, allowing them to realise that they are perhaps in the wrong without shouting it at them.

No, just complain to some raggedy-arsed journo who uses your whining story to paint you into victimhood. Then the Chief Plod can start screaming for fines for 8 year olds. The other problem with victimhood is that it doesn’t move you on; you just stay a victim and the “other” person stays an enemy – not a lot of use, is it?

I didn’t see, anywhwere, calls for creating community programmes that would give these kids a positive focus. Oh no, that would mean doing something other than complain that someone else isn’t doing something, but you don’t know what. That said, a positive approach could mean spending some cash, and it’ll all be in the wrong fuckwit budget. For example, I know that one of the local schools has a brand-new sports hall that they can’t use because heating and staffing it is too expensive. They lost half of their playing fields getting it built and it’s a white elephant. Oddly, this hasn’t appeared in the local paper, maybe I need to go on a victim hunt for them.

I’m not defending louts – I can’t stand them either. But if people have somewhere to go and something to do they might stop being loutish and excluded. How does fining kids achieve anything? Well, I suppose it allows Chief Plod to be seen do be doing something, but solving nothing. Solving problems, being kind, being human; it’s not hard, but it’s not fashionable.

Another blog – gender issues without the anti-men thing

I found http://battlinbog.blog-city.com really interesting. In particular have a look at the article he links to: http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2000/05/sommers.htm.

Counting down the hours before I can move on to my new job next week. Very lonely and bored. Have been suffering from a cold for the last couple of days. I have this thing where I wake up in the middle of the night when the fever breaks: it was about 2 am. I feel OK today, just a bit blocked up. Think I will go for a walk later to clear my head.

We were about to go live tomorrow on our shiny new database and there was a problem with the backups. The job that unplugs the pluggable tablespaces didn’t run because the DB was down for a hardware upgrade; the job that puts a new business copies of the tablespaces over the old ones ran; the backup backed up this inconsistent database; the database is broken and this was to be the first live backup – whoops! Oracle support dialled in and said they had never seen anything so broken, the headers on the files are all wrong, not just the pluggable ones; everything.

The upshot is that I won’t see the last three months of work go in before I leave, which is a bit frustrating. On the other hand the pressure’s off, which is great!

Going for a goodbye meal at the Royal Thai in Nottingham tomorrow. Last week we went to Sagar; I liked it but it didn’t bowl me over.

Borrowed Deborah’s copy of Public Enemy Number 2. Loved it.

By the way, does anyone ever read my stories? Just curious.

SATs

My daughter has done nothing for the past term other than be trained to pass her SATs. As she could already do this standing on her head she’s bored out of her mind. With the amount of attention that the school pays to them and the amount of cramming that is going on to help the less able students the results are meaningless. The first thing her secondary school will do is retest using a different method so that they can place her in the correct classes for her ability. The whole emphasis is meaningless and makes the tests pointless.

One of my friends said that their child went through exactly the same experience.

All that is being measured is how good the school are at cramming children with dead facts. It’s rubbish!

Medics

I am getting very worried about becoming ill in the next few years after talking to a friend of mine who is a newish hospital consultant. When he was helping examine some candidates recently (for the first time) he decided to be guided by the person who was the experienced examiner along with him.

He thought the first candidate was terrible and in his day wouldn’t have got through. The other examiner thought the candidate “quite good”! This individual was the best of the bunch! Basically they now have an “educationalist” approach: an answer has to be near enough (as in sub continental distances) and is then spun into being correct. This is wonderful when the individual is calculating how much painkiller to give your child, isn’t it? Please realise, it isn’t their fault, either – it’s the government minister(s) that encouraged this change in practice who will be long gone when this comes home to roost. The current system seems to be letting everybody down and the individuals responsible won’t be around when there is a reckoning. Good eh?

Just to add some icing on the cake: one of the examiners in another room would not pass one of the candidates because he or she was just awful and on their second attempt. What did they do? Got another examiner, later, to pass them.

Are you scared yet?

When I get old these are the people who will be looking after me. Like I said, their lack of training and proper testing isn’t their fault, but it will be me and my generation who pays the price. Hopefully the mess will be sorted when my kids start falling to pieces.

A long week getting software into a stubborn target system. 3rd time lucky. It was infrastructre all the time but I had to convince the infrastructure crew to look again, which was 90% of the effort.

I’m a bit strung out; haven’t meditated for ages and losing my faith slowly. I don’t feel any sense of loss. Since the last blog the whole thing has unravelled for me.  Yet I remember losing my depression and getting a lot of benefit from it.

I need to talk to the Lama and try to make sense of this, but want to wait until I have returned back home. I have realised that I was pretending a lot of things to myself but now need to shake myself out of intense apathy about everything.

Going to a Winbiz conference this weekend: that should do the trick!

Went to see some old friends this week. They’re very content with what they’ve got, even managed to organise a small holding. I’d rather have my kids. tho’. It’s funny how your dreams come true when you want them enough.

Sleep is calling.

I had a bit of an epiphany yesterday when I went for a walk in the beautiful sunshine after work. I was thinking about how there seems to be a lot of special days in the Buddhist calendar, you know, auspicious days and not. If everything is empty then why is any time or space any more auspicious than any other? I need an answer to this, I think.

That said, I can see that movements in the sea of karma means that there are times when a little push or touch would have a big effect and others where massive effort would have no effect but why would it necessarily be every so many days in the lunar month? There is a kind of odd rigidity in this which I don’t think Buddha would have wanted. I need to talk this through again.

As I came back from this walk, talking to myself as usual, the whole of the world around me seemed to pulse and move with fantastic detail. I wanted to lie down on the gravel path I was walking on and swim in it. Very odd, beautiful moment.

As the Buddha said: The end of all gathering is dispersion; the end of all building is ruin; the end of all meeting is parting; the end of all birth is death

I went to Lama Jampa’s Easter teachings in Flumseberg, Switzerland. I really liked Switzerland and the Swiss, I think their taciturn reputation is undeserved. I liked the way everything was so clean, even the smokers would stub their cigarettes out in ashtrays and put them in metal bins. It isn’t perfect, nothing is, but maybe I’m just tired of the UK.

Lama Jampa’s teachings were, as usual, extraordinary and very deep. I can’t discuss them here because the Vajrayana is a hidden teaching. He described it as being like electricity. You can be properly instructed and plug the teachings into your life, or you can try it without guidance and stick your fingers in the socket.  I know which I would rather do!

Work’s been a bit weird because I’m leaving but still have a load of things to do. While I was away an emergency patch was done to one of the modules I was working on and I had to reverse engineer it into my changes. I couldn’t start up the test environment, which was working fine when I went on holiday, because of an extra row in a table causing configuration problems. Never use dates as part of your primary key, children, at least not if they have a time stamp (mind you, any kind of primary key on the table would have been good). Lost a day over a one-line change because of this.

I am underwhelmed by the umbrella company I am working through at the moment. They have switched to a web-based system for entering the expenses with about a day’s notice. They forced me to use it and it didn’t work. Then when it was fixed they didn’t bother to drop me an email saying it was. I was probably a bit agressive because they were wasting my time. The other thing is, of course, this system will reduce their costs considerably by making me spend more of my time on it; so are they dropping the proportion of my cash that they are taking? Well, what d’you think?

Rather than name them or slag them off I would rather say that most of the people I work with use Parasol, and they are very good, also charging a fee rather than a percentage and if I am forced by circumstance or choice to freelance I will try them next time.

Winbiz

Making some progress towards signing some people up. Just persist, the rewards are there if you believe and persist.

Books

Just finished reading Robert Kioyosaki’s The Business School for People who like helping people which is about the Network Marketing way of becoming free. For those of you who recognise his name he’s the author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad. Highly recommended and easy to read. I think you have to order it from his website http://www.richdad.com/, or through me.

Just finished Conspicuous Compassion by Patrick West (ISBN 1-903 386-34 9). Very interesting and sad as well; his thesis is that in Britain we are becoming serial grief junkies, trying to forge some common bonds where none exist at the moment by insincere and selfish public grieving for celebrities and royalty. I recommend this book for a sobering take on the tabloid hysteria and the nonsense of apologies for historical incidents. One of the points he makes is that the nearer it gets to the present the less likely there is to be an apology. He writes a column in http://www.spiked-online.com/, as does Mick Hume, a writer I respect as well.

Nothing like closing on an apparently contradictory note.

Had a couple of jobs in the pipeline. One with a very interesting IT based company in Warrington, the other with a bank in central Manchester. The bank were going to pay more but we seemed to have some kind of mismatch on the 2nd interview; I am glad that I didn’t have to make a decision in the end and got the Warrington one.

I’m going to be much happier with fellow technologists. The bank also lend money to high risk people and have a debt collection arm. I wasn’t too happy about this. Not that I don’t think people should pay their debts but that I don’t like usury and poverty as a kind of norm. This is better, methinks.

I’ve been playing with thinlet technology as a possible replacement for something like Oracle Forms, but not yet managed to get it to talk to a database properly. Mostly my problem, just finding the time to join the bits together.

Have fun and don’t eat too much easter chocolate.