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.

I’m beyond tired and very fed up with life at the moment. I’m beginning to realise that freedom and stress are quite closely related. Stress makes you do the things you need to do to get things done. But there is nothing worse than the stress you get when someone else is in charge and you are running to their call.

I am listening to a lot of tapes from the business support team and most of these are recordings of the people who have succeeded in spades building the business. Mostly millionaires who have become free by applying the business pattern. The pattern works and leaves you free. What I can’t understand is why people are so scared of it, there’s nothing to it.

I have been dream building a bit recently. Just thinking about the things I really want to do with my life. Mostly playing with the kids and playing the guitar. One of the messages from the business is that if you want something enough you will do what you have to do to make it happen. Dreams are very powerful motivators, but of course the English find words like dream ever so slightly off key. I have decided that I’m going to the holiday in Florida next year, the ticket is mine, the only thing stopping me is myself.

Others have their dream house, boat, charity. Whatever floats your boat it will float if you want it hard enough.

If anyone reading this wants to dream big email me.

[email protected].

I love working with Unix again. Get a load of this:

for i in `grep -il ‘^#[ ].mine.’ sh`
do
    if grep -lqE ’^[ ].mine.|^mine.’ $i
   then echo $i 
   fi
done

This finds you a file with a line that isn’t a shell script comment but contains the string mine with a full stop at the end of it. If the mine string has a space or a tab in front of it or is at the beginning of a line then print the file name out. I’m using this to identify files that have the hard coded schema mine in them so that I can do a bulk update and put a system id in there:

cat «EOF | ex $i # $i is the file id’d earlier
%s/(mine)./1${DOMAIN_ID}./g
EOF

Just try doing this on an NT system.

Have fun children, there’s loads of other things to talk about but I’m too tired, spent all day at an out of bounds first aid course.

Many years ago I was involved in left wing politics and I remember having a lot of arguments on street corners with people who used to say that there couldn’t be a society where people shared things because greed was human nature. For some reason this came back to be a couple of days ago, probably because I had been reading some stuff about Buddha (The Marvelous Compainion), and I have recently been to the oral transmission of a prayer called The King of Aspiration Prayer (it has other titles too). A great part of this prayer is saying that one will not stop striving to liberate all sentient beings and all of the usual things a bodhisatva has taken an oath to do.

So what then is human nature? The self sacrificing of the christian saints – is this human nature? Having doctors cut you open to feed demons, like Buddha did, is this human nature?

Yes. There are an infinite number of sides to the coin of human nature, kindness and meanness are both there. You should choose kindness, which comes from the root of kin, where you treat everybody like they were your family. All meanness does is hurt you as much as you hurt others.

Personality types

Just did a survey looking at the different kinds of personality, based on Aristotle’s groupings:

Sanguine : Happy go lucky, fun loving

Phlegmatic : Easy going, takes things as they come

Melancholy : Introverted, detail person

Choleric : Control freak, gets things done.

Guess what? My scores weren’t biassed strongly toward any one but I came out sanguine. This was a surprise to me as I see myself as an introvert. Rosie pointed out that I am the one who is the troll for the Billy Goats Gruff under the bed while she reads the story, or the sea monster at the swimming pool.

Weird.

Illness

Had my first cold in nearly a year and have taken a couple of days off, will drive to Nottingham tonight to avoid getting up early. Still not 100% and I have a phone interview tomorrow. Ho hum.

Love to all.

Hello, this document is produced by using a my brand-new ViaVoice software; I hope that it makes sense and doesn’t come out complete rubbish.

Today has been a very difficult day: I’m extremely tired and went to some training on a new piece of software called Dimensions which is a source code control system from Merant ( the originators of PVCS). Though, to be honest, I’m completely bored with all this IT nonsense and would rather have been picking my teeth with a pickaxe or maybe cutting my toenails with a sledgehammer. I found the way that this had been implemented to be very interesting and the tool itself so be pretty useful but I’m so bored with software now I can barely bring myself to be even vaguely interested in it. This isn’t true, of course because I still enjoy writing software but I find that my dreams no longer contain it, at least they don’t contain the kind I’m writing for a living.

After work I went for a wander to PC World in Mansfield, (I have to say that I was very surprised there when ViaVoice managed to understand Mansfield and even capitalised it correctly). I was originally tempted by a book on JBOSS, which looked like it might be of some utility in my EJB project. However, I thought the ViaVoice stuff would be much more useful. In fact I’m enjoying myself immensely talking to my computer and watching everything appear. One of the most amusing things was when it scanned my existing base of documents for words it didn’t understand and it came up with all this swear words from my novels and whatnot, so of course I had to add them in, and record them for posterity so that it would know what they sounded like. This very amusing if a little sad.

I’ve just spent probably 40 minutes working training ViaVoice to understand my voice I was reading excerpts from Alice in Wonderland, some quotations from various sources, including some very cynical ones from George Bernard Shaw. The worrying thing was that when I was doing this one of the people in the next room to me was going in and out and probably heard me reading Alice in Wonderland very clearly into the microphone that came with my copy of ViaVoice which might mean that he or she thinks I’m complete fool. This is not unusual in my experience as in fact being a complete fool something I’m very good at. I no longer worry about these things, because I no longer worry about appearances except inasmuch as it may offend or upset people, or perhaps embarrass my family. I also think that perhaps smelling like a goat wouldn’t be very good idea simply because people wouldn’t talk to you.

Another interesting thing I found is that when I sigh a bit it prints h. I’m not sure about this because I sigh a lot, particularly when I’m tired.

Dharma

I spent at least some of last night reading Gampopa’s The Jewel Ornament of Liberation, which kept me awake until quite late. Had also trying to learn classical Tibetan which is a lot more difficult than it might first appear. The alphabet is phonetic and quite a few of the characters appear almost the same to Western eyes, just very subtly different. This is actually quite interesting; and for once I am doing something which feels reasonably intellectually challenging. I’m not sure how far this will go and I have ordered some books on to better and which may help me with this. I mention this in a previous blog so I’m sorry to be a bit boring about it.

I blew up the Tibetan alphabet and some of the exercises from my book on classical Tibetan in order to make them easy for me to see. I’m definitely beginning to need glasses for close work which is a bit annoying. Quite often now I find have to put my glasses on in order to be able to keep concentrating as my eyes start hurting. I’ve had a headache off and on for several days and think it’s got something to do with the fact that I have not been sleeping enough because I keep getting up at 6 am in order to do my meditation practice. Something has to give but it isn’t going to be the meditation practice so I probably need to start getting to bed a bit earlier.

Yesterday I listened to a very interesting CD: The Strangest Secret which is a recording that a man called Earl Nightingale made back in 1956. The interesting thing his I found an awful lot of parallels with what I’ve come to know of Dharma and Buddhist teachings. You are, in fact, a product of your own mind to a large extent, circumstances are a back drop. Basically if you carry on thinking like a failure you will be a failure, if you get into the habit of thinking like a success you’ll be a success. He recommends putting a goal on a card and reminding yourself of that goal every day when you wake up, and when you go to bed, even when you are doing most things. If you start thinking about your goal all the time and not thinking negatively or like someone who was already been defeated then when the opportunities come you will be able to see them and take advantage of them.

Winbiz

I am slowly making progress talking to people about the business, with any luck Rosie and I will be able to start making real progress in the next few weeks. We have managed to organise child care has for the meeting in Bradford, which means that we will both be able to get the full benefit from it. I have done a small PowerPoint presentation in order to explain things to myself as much as anything else. The standard way of doing the explanation is to use a white board because it is less alienating for the people who may not be technologically savvy.

GRTZ

And making some progress with this story, probably try and use the ViaVoice software to make creating it a bit simpler, although I have been struggling to create his document as am still learning how to use it. I sent the first chapter to Roger, we had a little chat about it but he was very busy, I think the main point he made, which I agree with, is that I explain things too much. For example, the corporation that owns our protagonist is called Big Corp and their burgers are called Big C burgers, which I go on to explain is what people used to call cancer. Instead, it is probably better to take the Douglas Adams’ route and leave things unexplained so that the reader can find them out later and let the writing work on many levels. Of course, I would be being extremely arrogant if I thought my writing was anywhere near as good as his.

I have described the story to a number of people who found it very funny so I reckon I need to abbreviate it more and explain less.

Goodbye, and love to all.

11:50 pm: so much for an early night!

Well, I got paid yesterday, so the bank will get off my back for a while. The consultancy I have CV’d want a phone interview mid Feb so we’ll see what happens there. I’ll have to tone down my apparent arrogance I suppose, but then I have done a lot in my career. I don’t want to leave the team where I am until end of March because it would really damage the work and professionally I can’t leave before then.

After seeing Lama Jampa the other week I was brimming over with confidence and said to the maras (the demons that get in the way), bring it on, and they did! Still functioning OK and managing to work on the things I should be but it’s been hard hard hard. Working on learning classical Tibetan from An Introduction to Classical Tibetan by Stephen Hodge but left the book at home this week. It recommends A Tibetan-English Dictionary: With Sanskrit Synonyms by Sarat Chandra Das and Tibetan English Dictionary of Buddhist Terminology by Tsepak Rigzin which I have ordered from Amazon. This will take the usual 4-6 weeks. Really interesting read in The Handbook of Tibetan Buddhist Symbols by Robert Beer as well.

I’ve got the first chapter of GRTZ written and you can read it here (right click and save as if you want to print it out). I don’t think it’s funny enough yet but set it to Roger for his opinion.

Have fun, children.