A Secretive Serpent
Izzie must be a most mad and masochistic creature. Not sufficient to be engaged in a battle with a toxic toad, the serpent refused to abandon her Camp Nano plans to devote resources to the war of words at work. On the one hand it was rather draining but on the other the determination to continue was a way to stop her meddling in sacred territory. To chicken out would have been to let her win. She had to make do with second best by taking over half of the 54,000 word count.
But there’s more. This serpent is a glutton for punishment. A certain cat introduced Izzie to a feast of freebies in what can only be described as Hogwarts for wannabee geek and freaks. No magical ability whatsoever is required just the desire to learn stuff for the sake of it.
Still not quite worked out the business model of this most marvelous Magical Academy
This is no fluffy bunny new age stuff but seems to be proper courses with real homework and very well structured lesson and course materials.
Managed not to be too greedy and signed up for only four courses. But one just happened to start during the last week of Camp Nano
Lazy Izzie figures that it should be no problem at all to slack off until Monday 3rd September and then do a big catch up. Skimmed through the slides and pdf files and was surprised to discover how much of it seemed to be indecipherable gibberish that made sense only to geeks or geniuses. Turned out that the lecturer’s spoken comments on the course videos were the key to decoding all those creepy mathematical magical formulae.
That was when the proverbial really hit the fan. Not being a creature who does much lurking over at Youtube or watching music or movies online, had no idea just how completely and disgustingly sucky our Vodafail ISP could be.
With snappy zappy speeds of around 10kbps sometimes dipping down to half that and around ten 20 megabyte videos per week, it was going to take a good five hours just to download the infernal things. Had already discovered that trying to make sense of the lecture slides without the running commentary was not a serious option.
But worst of all while the stupid Portkey was proceeding at this pathetic snail pace it was near impossible to visit any other web pages. Everything was taking forever and half the time there’d be those infernal DNS and all sorts of other FAIL messages
It was like being transported back to the dark old days of dinosaur dial up. In some strange way the exhaustion and frustration of the world wide wait is much more tiring than doing real physical work like digging holes or lifting boxes.
Three evenings of this was enough to turn Izzie into a blubbering wreck. But then the little green light flickered and the voice of reason said that learning is supposed to be fun and the difficulties should be in the message not the medium. No point in getting into a murderous rage or risking a stroke for something that is just supposed to be a sort of Sudoku on steroids. And anyway now that it has been confirmed beyond all possible doubt what a useless bit of shit the little black wifi dongle is, then the only logical alternative is to just download the stuff at a snail’s pace, not bother with the assignments and wait for the course to be repeated in some six months from now.
Like with the recent encounters with a certain toxic toad, learning to let go has certain side effects. It switches off the primitive irrational fear motivated brain cells and lets the useful problem solving ones return.
But there is a certain human trait shared by this serpent that the elusiveness and seeming impossibility of a goal is precisely what makes it desirable no matter how useless and pointless it may be in the grand scheme of things.
The solution turned out to be reasonably simple. Simply got a bright shiny new usb storage stick and tried downloading the videos during the weekly visit to Petunia’s place. With a much more civilized speed of 200kbps it took less than two minutes per 20mb lecture.
Still a week behind with the downloads but figures that the time in the Lair is better spend watching the ones we have over and over rather than wasting time trying to add new ones to the stash and being unable to do anything else at all during the process.
Apparently it is useful to have some familiarity with discrete probability for the crypto course. Still not taken a proper peek at the refresher video. Been too busy catching up with all the other stuff. But it was sort of spooky. Such a sense of deja vu. For the last time that Izzie had anything to do with this kind of maths was back in September 2001 in Goblin College.
There was a mid term statistics exam on Saturday 8th September. The organizers stuffed up big time. Not only were they late opening the hall but when the lecturer announced the house keeping matters at the start of the exam (which included an extra ten minutes to compensate for the stuff ups) the microphone went into a serious feedback loop and howled like a rabid werewolf.
Even the geeks and nerds got rattled by that. Had every intention to put in a formal complaint about this series of stuff ups. But the events of a few days later proved rather distracting and put this trivia into its proper perspective.
Everyone else makes a big deal about tenth anniversaries. Izzie goes for elevenses and sixes. There is a cycle of 6,11,6 and 5 years making a total of 28 years where the days and dates repeat. There is a bit of a twist with January and February sometimes due to those pesky leap years. That means that only the intervals of 28 can be guaranteed to be identical.
There is something about an anniversary occurring on the same day as the original event that invokes the first one more powerfully. It feels sort of the same
And there were just so many creepy things to remember from 2001. But the toad has been keeping the Izzie so busy in the present that we have been deprived of the depressing indulgence in remembering most of them. Maybe that is a good thing and maybe that is part of the attraction of the distraction of all those interesting online toys.
In the meantime, there’s lectures to watch and puzzles to solve. Still waiting for the Eureka moment where all the pieces of the jigsaw finally fall into place
It is so so true what a certain Cat has observed. The very fact that some new stuff to be learned is ‘insanely challenging’ is precisely what makes the end reward so great if one can persevere and finally put two and two together.
And it's not like Izzie will ever use this stuff. It is maybe a harmless way of harnessing the hunting and hoarding instinct.
*slinks off to sign up for more hairy scary courses^
But there’s more. This serpent is a glutton for punishment. A certain cat introduced Izzie to a feast of freebies in what can only be described as Hogwarts for wannabee geek and freaks. No magical ability whatsoever is required just the desire to learn stuff for the sake of it.
Still not quite worked out the business model of this most marvelous Magical Academy
This is no fluffy bunny new age stuff but seems to be proper courses with real homework and very well structured lesson and course materials.
Managed not to be too greedy and signed up for only four courses. But one just happened to start during the last week of Camp Nano
Lazy Izzie figures that it should be no problem at all to slack off until Monday 3rd September and then do a big catch up. Skimmed through the slides and pdf files and was surprised to discover how much of it seemed to be indecipherable gibberish that made sense only to geeks or geniuses. Turned out that the lecturer’s spoken comments on the course videos were the key to decoding all those creepy mathematical magical formulae.
That was when the proverbial really hit the fan. Not being a creature who does much lurking over at Youtube or watching music or movies online, had no idea just how completely and disgustingly sucky our Vodafail ISP could be.
With snappy zappy speeds of around 10kbps sometimes dipping down to half that and around ten 20 megabyte videos per week, it was going to take a good five hours just to download the infernal things. Had already discovered that trying to make sense of the lecture slides without the running commentary was not a serious option.
But worst of all while the stupid Portkey was proceeding at this pathetic snail pace it was near impossible to visit any other web pages. Everything was taking forever and half the time there’d be those infernal DNS and all sorts of other FAIL messages
It was like being transported back to the dark old days of dinosaur dial up. In some strange way the exhaustion and frustration of the world wide wait is much more tiring than doing real physical work like digging holes or lifting boxes.
Three evenings of this was enough to turn Izzie into a blubbering wreck. But then the little green light flickered and the voice of reason said that learning is supposed to be fun and the difficulties should be in the message not the medium. No point in getting into a murderous rage or risking a stroke for something that is just supposed to be a sort of Sudoku on steroids. And anyway now that it has been confirmed beyond all possible doubt what a useless bit of shit the little black wifi dongle is, then the only logical alternative is to just download the stuff at a snail’s pace, not bother with the assignments and wait for the course to be repeated in some six months from now.
Like with the recent encounters with a certain toxic toad, learning to let go has certain side effects. It switches off the primitive irrational fear motivated brain cells and lets the useful problem solving ones return.
But there is a certain human trait shared by this serpent that the elusiveness and seeming impossibility of a goal is precisely what makes it desirable no matter how useless and pointless it may be in the grand scheme of things.
The solution turned out to be reasonably simple. Simply got a bright shiny new usb storage stick and tried downloading the videos during the weekly visit to Petunia’s place. With a much more civilized speed of 200kbps it took less than two minutes per 20mb lecture.
Still a week behind with the downloads but figures that the time in the Lair is better spend watching the ones we have over and over rather than wasting time trying to add new ones to the stash and being unable to do anything else at all during the process.
Apparently it is useful to have some familiarity with discrete probability for the crypto course. Still not taken a proper peek at the refresher video. Been too busy catching up with all the other stuff. But it was sort of spooky. Such a sense of deja vu. For the last time that Izzie had anything to do with this kind of maths was back in September 2001 in Goblin College.
There was a mid term statistics exam on Saturday 8th September. The organizers stuffed up big time. Not only were they late opening the hall but when the lecturer announced the house keeping matters at the start of the exam (which included an extra ten minutes to compensate for the stuff ups) the microphone went into a serious feedback loop and howled like a rabid werewolf.
Even the geeks and nerds got rattled by that. Had every intention to put in a formal complaint about this series of stuff ups. But the events of a few days later proved rather distracting and put this trivia into its proper perspective.
Everyone else makes a big deal about tenth anniversaries. Izzie goes for elevenses and sixes. There is a cycle of 6,11,6 and 5 years making a total of 28 years where the days and dates repeat. There is a bit of a twist with January and February sometimes due to those pesky leap years. That means that only the intervals of 28 can be guaranteed to be identical.
There is something about an anniversary occurring on the same day as the original event that invokes the first one more powerfully. It feels sort of the same
And there were just so many creepy things to remember from 2001. But the toad has been keeping the Izzie so busy in the present that we have been deprived of the depressing indulgence in remembering most of them. Maybe that is a good thing and maybe that is part of the attraction of the distraction of all those interesting online toys.
In the meantime, there’s lectures to watch and puzzles to solve. Still waiting for the Eureka moment where all the pieces of the jigsaw finally fall into place
It is so so true what a certain Cat has observed. The very fact that some new stuff to be learned is ‘insanely challenging’ is precisely what makes the end reward so great if one can persevere and finally put two and two together.
And it's not like Izzie will ever use this stuff. It is maybe a harmless way of harnessing the hunting and hoarding instinct.
*slinks off to sign up for more hairy scary courses^