I'm a book magnet!
Jan. 6th, 2004 05:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tcpipI arrived in NZ with a couple of travel guides. Somehow, the Wellington City Library was having a sale when I arrived. I left the country with over twenty books - including the very sad, yet extraordinarily well researched,Victims of Memory. Personally, I find it very sad that MPD/DID therapists could engage in such behaviour in the first instance. I suppose there was a lot of money to be made - and the wages of sin are very high indeed.
A brief PS2 review (ROTK), a programming task, and writings.
In a sort of mental preparation for the writing tasks I've set myself this year, I spent the better part of two days playing the latest gee-whiz PS 2 game, the Return of the King. Oh, what a disappointment. The worst of hack-n-slash linear narrative. The game is surprisingly short and any length is only because some levels are annoyingly difficult by sheer wait of numbers. Merry and Pippin don't even get airtime. This is lazy game design. Back in the good old days when memory was short and one couldn't pad out a session with movie clips and clever rendering they had a thing called game play and complexity. Check out Sword of Aragon if you doubt me. Now there's a real computer game.
I have started - with the good and very hardworking Peter Gossner - a Tetum-Bahasa-Portuguese-English programming engine. This is going to be really difficult - three different language families and Portuguese grammar is a pain, as anyone would know who has studied it. Nonetheless feel free to chip in with any bright ideas.
Because I'm plain silly I've set myself 3000 words/day on "useful" material whether it is the final dregs of my thesis, journal articles, books, transcribing old essays, study notes or coding . Today I made that target with relative ease - one old essay transcribed on the form and content of magic (heh, designed for RPGs but with too much philosophy of science and sociology, a narrative version of my computing experience (seeming that employers don't understand the resume version), the aforementioned preliminary program notes. I have also received confirmation to write an article for New Politics on (surprise, surprise) Dr. Jim Cairns. How about that?
Tonight I'll finish the work for connect.ie, the Sesami website. On other work related notes, far too much of my time today was spent filling out that ridiculous "job seeker diary" (which they don't check anyway but I have this sometimes ridiculous commitment to honesty). I'm trying not be cranky about it all, but seriously people we're not supposed to be living in tough economic times - things are supposed to get better, right?
A brief PS2 review (ROTK), a programming task, and writings.
In a sort of mental preparation for the writing tasks I've set myself this year, I spent the better part of two days playing the latest gee-whiz PS 2 game, the Return of the King. Oh, what a disappointment. The worst of hack-n-slash linear narrative. The game is surprisingly short and any length is only because some levels are annoyingly difficult by sheer wait of numbers. Merry and Pippin don't even get airtime. This is lazy game design. Back in the good old days when memory was short and one couldn't pad out a session with movie clips and clever rendering they had a thing called game play and complexity. Check out Sword of Aragon if you doubt me. Now there's a real computer game.
I have started - with the good and very hardworking Peter Gossner - a Tetum-Bahasa-Portuguese-English programming engine. This is going to be really difficult - three different language families and Portuguese grammar is a pain, as anyone would know who has studied it. Nonetheless feel free to chip in with any bright ideas.
Because I'm plain silly I've set myself 3000 words/day on "useful" material whether it is the final dregs of my thesis, journal articles, books, transcribing old essays, study notes or coding . Today I made that target with relative ease - one old essay transcribed on the form and content of magic (heh, designed for RPGs but with too much philosophy of science and sociology, a narrative version of my computing experience (seeming that employers don't understand the resume version), the aforementioned preliminary program notes. I have also received confirmation to write an article for New Politics on (surprise, surprise) Dr. Jim Cairns. How about that?
Tonight I'll finish the work for connect.ie, the Sesami website. On other work related notes, far too much of my time today was spent filling out that ridiculous "job seeker diary" (which they don't check anyway but I have this sometimes ridiculous commitment to honesty). I'm trying not be cranky about it all, but seriously people we're not supposed to be living in tough economic times - things are supposed to get better, right?
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no subject
Date: 2004-01-06 03:21 pm (UTC)I have no doubt that if J-Ho had his way, there'd be a 6 month time limit on Newstart benefits, a la the USA, along with a significant drop in the minimum wage.
Yep, the Job Seeker Diary (requiring between 4-10 job contacts per fortnight, depending on whether or not the interviewing officer hates your shirt colour) is an absurd piece of work. On the other hand, its requirements can be adhered to with all honesty preserved intact while automating the bastard with a cron job. That way you can spend your valuable human time applying with more vigour for jobs you really want and have the best chances of getting.
If you're techy and smart (which I know you are), you could run up a script which:
Benefits being a good mix of jobs applied for and Seek emailed confirmations of an application being acceptable in lieu of Employer Certificates. Also, procmail/filter your Seek mail to a separate file and you do some funky text filtering, and end up with a report for handing into Centrelink in lieu of the diary with all the same info they want.
As a Unix guy, you've got all the tools available to make your life easier. It's masochism not to use 'em to make your job searching more productive.
no subject
Date: 2004-01-07 12:31 am (UTC)The cron job is a good idea, and nice and simple - but with one fatal flaw - this included the first several weeks from my return from East Timor and during that time I didn't have a 'puter... Well, not a unix one anyway...
no subject
Date: 2004-01-06 04:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-01-07 12:53 am (UTC)Since when have you picked up Tetum and Portuguese? ;-)
no subject
Date: 2004-01-07 05:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-01-07 02:14 am (UTC)That sounds like a good idea. I should try it, though perhaps starting with a smaller minimum limit and working my way up.
How would you translate programming (or maths/stats problems, which I'll soon be diving into) into a word count, though?
no subject
Date: 2004-01-07 03:24 am (UTC)I've found with a morning and afternoon session of 1500 words each, the numbers pile up pretty quickly. Maths/stats is a lot tricker. Given that some maths equations can be at least converted into boolean sentences then you should be OK.