LJ Adventures, Negatives and Positives, Slinky Linkies

[tcpip]

It has been lax of me, but I should make mention that tau_iota_mu_c stayed a couple of nights a few weeks back and was excellent company. Further, caseopaya and I recently dined with ser_pounce and wolf_in_winter; a great evening and a repeat experience has been booked. Yesterday spent a joyous discussion on basic accounting (and many other things) with splodgenoodles and tenbears. I now have an enormous bag of herbs courtesy of their garden.

Negative side. Current annoying state-owned corporatised service is earning my wrath is Australia Post. They managed to confuse my surname with my firstname and thus the paid postal redirection has been failing. Just as I have several boxes of books coming in from overseas. Annoying to say the least. Other annoyances include a work colleague who's incompetent, abrasive and ambiguous. Thank goodness I have some managerial authority. Anyone good at organising events? An (average) paying job is coming up.

On the positive side, I've put in notice at Borderlands. The loss of income is incidental, the gain of time is really, really good. Also have written an article on our "parliamentarians and councilors education" kit for Prosper Australia, put up the notes from my slides at the AUUG conference on open source economics. Finally, I've put up my presentation on Ray Kurzweil's Age of Spiritual Machines

US admits loss in Baghdad. A working (kind of) invisibility cloak. Can you tell as Sunni from a Shi'a?. What makes women bad at maths? Believing that they are bad at maths (top link of the week award to cheshire_bitten)

Comments

[purrdence.livejournal.com]

I do think attitude plays a large part in how well you learn something. I've too many students, who come in the first day and go "This subject is hard." That's the attitude they carry and don't try and then go "see? I did badly. I told you so."

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Likewise people who believe they can do something are often successful.

It's not a track I'd push to extremes (all the willpower in the world can't transcend natural limits), but rather will is the capacity to engage one's abilities to the fullest extent.

[purrdence.livejournal.com]

This is true. In the same class as the abovementioned self-fulling prophesiors, there are students that have come in with the attitude that they should give it a go and try their best. They may not be the best students, but I've seen a lot of improvement between the start of the year and now and their attitude has assisted a lot.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

It's always a great experience to discover what one is capable of. And a sobering one to discover limitations (and a wise one to acknowledge them).

This said, within the field of IT I love professing my limitations. It means I can ask someone else who does know.