No Direction

In case there's anyone reading this blog, you might have noticed that I've rather lost my sense of direction. I don't know exactly how this happened, so I'm writing this post to lay out what I think's gone on.

Essentially, my biggest hurdle is boredom. I simply don't find things interesting that I used to, at least not the useful things. In particular, I find software, and the development of it, uninteresting. This is rather fatal for someone whose career has been almost entirely in software development. I don't hear about software that I think "Oh, I must try that out", ever. It just doesn't happen.


I wasn't always this way. I used to like computer games, and I was very much interested in the development of AI systems. Most of my major developments since University have been complex algorithmic systems. But somehow the business came to seem very, very trivial to me, endlessly repetitive. There just don't seem to be any new ideas. I've just spent too long looking at these things, so there's no marvel in any of it, no admiration for the engineering behind various software efforts. They're just the product of hours spent plodding away at the same cycle of analysis, design, implementation, test, rinse, repeat.

Talking about software development seems mind-numbing, I can't bear to talk shop with anyone. The intricacies of the latest and greatest development methodologies, which are the same as they always were, but have new names. The wonderful tools for making people faster coders, hiding the fact that development is incredibly slow and people grind for years and years on the same projects. Everyone's tedious and always totally arbitrary opinion on the very best practices. The hackneyed jokes and observations about the psychology of programmers. The sad tribalism around roles and technological choices, as if somehow coding on Linux OSes is an entire philosophy.

Mind you, I feel the same way about some other things I liked, too. Movies and books. Somehow, I can't find any interest in fictional stories any more. I was a fan of fantasy and sci fi, but over the last few years, every new one of these I've read seems worse than the last, more formulaic, longer, less consequential. I've tried reading other kinds of fiction, the less pulpy variety, but somehow I find them actually worse, even more formulaic, the more they try not to be. Whatever it is in there that's supposed to make such aesthetic choices more serious, the more detailed characterizations, or more work on the dialog, just makes me sad, to think that someone has a point they wish to hide behind such rhetoric. At least speculative fiction doesn't usually bother to pretend its got a deep point.

As for movies, well, admittedly I haven't really widened my scope much. They're bloody expensive and they hog the TV, which I figure might as well be being enjoyed by my wife and kids. But the offerings of Hollywood these days are just a study in how bad things can get. I really struggle to stay awake during movies.

Philosophizing? I majored in that, after all. Unfortunately, I've come to think it's a silly pursuit, on the whole. While it is fun to speculate about the boundaries of various kinds of knowledge, that's about all it's good for. Perhaps that's why I liked speculative fiction, because it resembles Western Philosophy so much. Logic itself is almost a parody of a study. Touted as being at the core of knowledge, a basic building block of thought, advanced study of logic does not even address knowledge. Beyond first year at University, logic stops being applied to any problems except mathematical ones, and even then only its own kind.

Music? Well, I still mostly like what I used to like, but I do feel I should listen to new things more. Unfortunately I don't like anything new, in the sense of hearing something and thinking "wow, I want to follow that group/artist". Indeed, I struggle to hear the lyrics at all, and the sound of the music itself seems to have strangely widened and narrowed at the same time. As for immersing myself into the study of old music, that's one of the few things that actually makes me angry when people do it, as if it's a clever thing to do. There's something so anally retentive about it, I have to just switch off, or I'll nut off.

Is this symptomatic of depression? Am I finding the shit side of things because I'm depressed? I don't know. It seems quite possible to me that things really are just dull, and that's depressed me. Chicken/egg thing. I don't even know if it's a useful question. I know I'm a bit bummed, so what use is a formal diagnosis? Indeed, my brief time spent with a counselor made me lose a lot of respect for psychiatry generally. It seems to very much be a matter of them listening to you working it out for yourself. Expensively.

How do you make yourself interested in things? I know the answer to some extent - you just immerse and forget your other concerns, and there you go. I can easily do that with practically anything, indeed, I can do it far too easily, and lose days, weeks, years. That's part of why I won't do it any more, without being sure that a) I'm genuinely interested in it and b) It's in some way practical for me, in proportion to the time spent on it.

So I return to the problem - what should I get interested in? What direction should I take?

At the moment, my only real insight is that things that are factual are more likely to be useful. Preferably the more general skills. I'm hoping that in immersing myself into such study, an interesting field might open up before me. Or perhaps I'll discover a new talent.

A thought experiment I've conducted a few times has been "what would I do if money was no object?". The answer has ironically been "immerse myself in study". Which makes me think I'm interested in it, at least at some level. But what to study? This question is a work in progress.

Orcon, get your act together

Wow, Orcon just charged me $154.90 after I connected with them on a plan I thought was free until January, since that's what the salesman at the door told me. Suddenly I'm wondering if I got conned, or if I dreamed the whole thing up, until I found this still sitting on my desk:

Having just sat through 40 mins of waiting for customer service on hold, and hearing the message that I can use their website for all of this over 100 times, and then being simply disconnected mid-call after getting someone who could not even comprehend my query, I'm loathe to pick up the phone again.

I never actually received any kind of confirmation message from them after connection, telling me about my website login (which is why I had to endure the phone call). Indeed my first contact from them, post install, was a strange automated message telling me I had zero usage, which had been escalated into a technical problem. This happened because I had not connected to their router yet, still using my Telecom connection until I was certain the whole connection through to Orcon had been successful, and my phone number had been put through. I then got another one a bit later saying the problem was now resolved (presumably when I plugged in and started using the service).

So, nice offer, Orcon, and the broadband is nice and fast. But charging me for it now is a complete violation of our agreement, and your phone support leaves a lot to be desired. Hoping I don't end up regretting ever having had anything to do with you....

End of Semester

Final lectures were Friday. I'm now on study break.

I'm taking a moment here to summarize the amazing discoveries of the semester. These observations are glib, of course. If anyone wants to query/dispute them, feel free.

1. Students have become swots, but they're not brighter for it
2. A number of subjects have emerged between the old subjects, and struggle for recognition
3. Mathematics seems to have got easier since the early 90s, but it is also taught better
4. Large scale student political engagement seems to be finished
5. The practicality of subjects studied is unknown to both students and staff
6. Mature students are assumed to not exist at undergraduate level
7. The facilities have improved dramatically
8. Costs have increased for everything from courses to books to food
9. The Internet and mobile phones have changed the face of interaction as much for students as everyone else
10. It's hard to find people who can make decisions
11. It's hard to find people who have plans for the future beyond a few years ahead
12. Staff appear to treat students more like children than I recall in the past
13. There seems to be no central congregation point for the student body
14. Students as a group seem to be disjointed, fragmented, compartmentalized
15. There's a higher level of respect for authority than I remember

The value of education

I can't decide which article in the Herald today shat me off more. Was it Our degrees don't repay their cost or Wanted: inquiring minds or Our degrees are not paying? My mental jury is out, but I think cranking Bob Jones' blathering opinion as if it's a story does take the cake.



The annoying part is that I generally agree with all three stories, in technical detail. It's pretty clear that tertiary education has a long term financial payoff that has devalued as tertiary education has become so pervasive. Coupled with the high cost of actually putting oneself through it, of course the pay-off is not as huge as it once was. What is annoying is that the articles have so little contextualization. It's not noted, for instance, that the problem with NZ degrees might not be the degrees, but the weak NZ economy. No other value of the tertiary training is considered than the purely financial aspects.

Even then, the conclusion is that actually the degrees do pay off, that they do, across the average lifetime, make more money than the degrees cost. "Little net effect" might be insignificant to a statistician, but an extra $30,000 across one's life, coupled with the opportunity to participate in higher education, is still a highly rational choice. Certainly no mention is made of that idea that people might have actually enjoyed getting their qualifications as goods in themselves, or that having a very large number of people with extensive training might have been good for the nation in non-economic ways.

Bob Jones is annoying mostly because he just has no skin in the game. It's easy to tell people not to get a technical degree, but to go study history instead, when you're worth hundreds of millions of dollars, rather than facing the dole queue with a big student loan, during the longest recession in 80 years. Just because he personally might hire one out of every ten thousand history graduates (to do what? He never says) doesn't really make a compelling case. He really doesn't have any useful ideas. I remember him trotting that shit out in the mid 90s, about how he'd rather hire a philosophy graduate, right at the time I couldn't find any work whatsoever with that exact qualification. Computer science, on the other hand, has kept me in decent money for 20 years. So much for the anecdata.

The level of sophistication in Herald columns on education is appalling. They get better writing in their outraged commentary. There's something I can't put my finger on - a smugness perhaps? It seems to be a rag catering to insecure middle-aged-to-old people, stroking their anxieties to sell fat copy.

Tutorials are officially shitting me off now

I'm going to downgrade my evaluation of maths tutorials so far from educationally useless to having negative educational utility (for me, in both cases). I had to go in just for a tutorial, both yesterday and today. In an hour, I got through about as much as I would in 20 minutes if I were studying on my own. Yesterday, I drove in and parked there, so the travel time was 30 minutes and the cost was $4 for the parking and about $5 for the petrol. So I got 20 minutes worth of study done in 90 minutes and  it cost me $9. Today, I parked and bussed, so the petrol cost is a little less, covered by the extra bus cost, but there was no parking cost. However, the travel time was doubled. So I got 20 minutes of study done in 120 minutes, and it cost me around $5. I justified the extra 30 minutes by thinking I'd work on an assignment in the labs after the tutorial. But unfortunately MatLab would not work in the labs, so I had to come home to use it.

If these were outlying data points I'd ignore them, but unfortunately, I have not yet had one single tutorial out of the 20-odd I've now attended, that were worth the opportunity (and real) cost. So far as I can tell, they exist to extract free tutoring out of the motivated students, to give it to the other ones.

First half semester as mature student

Mature student. Such a euphemism for "old bugger". Everything about it feels surreal, since being an old bugger has never been how I see myself.

Studying Again

I recently resumed study at the University of Auckland. Having found that my PGDipSci that I began in the 90s was now too long ago and would have to be restarted, I questioned whether more computer science was actually something I wanted to do. If I want to work as a computer programmer, it might make sense, although, to be honest, just doing that would make even more sense. More to the point, I'm not much interested in the stuff they teach at Master's level in that subject any more, and very much more interested in a lot of other things.

What to study?

So I decided to start a science degree. Starting in the middle of the year is nearly impossible for most of the science subjects, as the first half subjects work as prerequisites, with the exception of mathematics, which is so core to science that every first year paper is offered every semester. Since that is the subject I feel needed the most brushing up, I enrolled in "Advancing Mathematics", a Pure Maths paper for people who want to take maths further, and also "Modelling and Computation", which is Applied Maths. The course adviser actually told me I could go straight to Stage 2 if I wanted, but frankly I didn't feel confident enough in the Pure Maths to do that. I felt it likely that Applied Maths could be a little too easy, given my computing background, but couldn't be sure, and figured that it wouldn't hurt to have a thorough grounding.

First setback

I also enrolled in Physics subject "Sustainable Energy", but when my kids got sick in the second week of the semester, requiring me to miss all lectures, then I got sick the next week, and missed another week, I felt that a 75% of full time course load might be too ambitious. So I dropped the Physics, which was only for interest and non-advancing, and anyway, the textbook was online and I read the whole thing on the bus to lectures. It's interesting, but actually, nah, I'll have my $700 back, cheers.

The courses

My guesses both turned out to be right about maths. I have found the Advancing Mathematics course refreshingly challenging, having not studied any calculus for 20 years. And I've found the Applied Mathematics extremely easy. I decided instead of taking it for granted, I'd "overlearn" it, paying very close attention to every detail. I might as well get one A+ in my academic history. The mathematics side of it is at least interesting, I've never studied difference equations before, and I am one of those people who clicks to mathematical ideas from practical examples, which is what the subject is all about. I think it could end up being a lot more interesting in the long run, and very useful for other science.

Advancing Mathematics is hard! The lectures are at a blistering pace, the examples worked through are extremely tricky, and the amount of subject matter is huge, for the time given. Presumably well prepared school students aren't finding it quite as tricky as me, not having to relearn calculus. Then again, ironically, I seem to find some of the ideas easier than most people, perhaps because I'd forgotten calculus (at least in the detail - I do know what it's for and what can be done with it). So the excruciating attention to detail on limits and inequalities and the minor theorems that contribute to why calculus works were really interesting to me. I remember 20 years ago being very frustrated by them, being in a great rush to find use for maths, and finding the very idea of proving the underlying formulae boring and pointless. This time around, I can see the point, I can see that pure maths is the business of laying out the bleeding obvious in such detail that the things that aren't bleeding obvious can be found.

The teachers

The lecturer, Wendy Stratton, is fantastic. It's a pretty hard thing to make a subject like this come alive, especially at the speed that is required. She has a rare gift in being able to explain the mathematics without losing any precision, and to make students feel involved in the process, without leading them by the nose all the time. Perhaps it's just a streaming thing, that the students are the self-selected higher achievers, but I don't think so. It's almost a cliche that maths lecturers are meant to be boring or incomprehensible, at all times. Not Wendy.

I won't judge the other teacher. When you find a subject really easy, it's hard to keep perspective. She seems to teach at a snail's pace, doing endless examples. I'm probably doing a subject I shouldn't be - the other students seem to find it challenging. Word is that the second half steps up in difficulty, when it comes to modelling lots and lots of problems. I'm thinking I'll end up liking that, so an easy intro is probably a good thing.

Student life

Mostly, I'm missing out on campus life. I just don't have time - childcare and housework is at least 7 hours of every day, and there's an hour of traveling. I park and ride, either on bus or bike, leaving the van in the closest place I can find an all day free park. This is usually Kingsland. For such a short ride, I don't need to change clothes. On some days, when I have only one lecture, I'll just park on a 90 min zone outside the lecture theater and go home afterward. At home I have all the resources from University I need, internet, printer, MatLab, and the hideously large textbook for maths.

So most days I get about 3 hours that aren't lectures, and I spend them basically studying, or doing assignments, which are the best way of studying anyway. Only recently did I discover the SciSpace, which is set up specifically as a study area for science students, with minor kitchen facilities, and have actually found familiar faces to work through the harder problems with. 

Tutorials

Gotta say it, maths tutorials aren't really very interesting. The range of things considered is not wide, and you're either right or lost. They're a far cry from, say, a philosophy tutorial. They actually have a rule in the pure maths tutorials that you get marked down if the tutor doesn't hear a hubbub of voices from your group. This is necessary because otherwise people tend to study silently on their own. It's the kind of subject where that works. It actually requires a lot of effort to discuss the problems, since usually you're just putting on display how you're lost or stuck, and those who aren't lost or stuck are thus being delayed by you.

Why do they insist on it, then? This has changed since I studied years ago. It seems that pure mathematicians have finally realized that there is value in social interaction, even in their subject, that a group does actually find things faster, and learn better. I'm not sure, but I have a humorous impression that this might be an amazing theorem that one of them stumbled upon recently, and that they are struggling out of their autistic shells under the power of the logic that drove them in there in the first place. 

Applied Maths tutorials are all lab computer work. Generally I've cranked out the solutions in 20 mins, and I spend the rest of it helping other people. It's been a good way to meet the other students, actually. Interaction doesn't need to be forced. I finally met another mature student! Not feeling quite so weird any more.

Better get back to my swot.

University of Fuzzo takes a turn

Since my last post, my life has turned upside down. Staring down the barrel of selling the house to survive, my wife opted to seek work, and was employed within about 2 weeks by her former employer before we had our second child. I took on all of her housewife duties, which involved all meals, most housework, and childcare.

This threw out all of my planning so far, as there was no way at all I could continue working on my Android app whilst being engaged full time in childcare, indeed to develop any kind of skills that weren't related to house-husbandry was next to impossible. My exercise program went out the window too. I'd say I'm amazed at how much time childcare takes, and how exhausting it is, if I'd ever not accepted that it's substantial. But what I am amazed at is how tiring I found it. It's easy to think that work which is mostly easy is not tiring, if you don't account for the unrelenting nature of it.

I am not complaining, though. It made financial sense, and I think it was a very good thing for her to do, to take control of her life to a greater extent than housewivery without income allows. Also, for me, it was a welcome chance to actually do some things I've long been meaning to and have not found a good excuse to spend the time on. In particular, my cooking repertoire has finally moved beyond the frying pan and BBQ, my attention to household management has moved beyond knowing what food I like to eat myself, and I've spent a great deal more time with my children. My youngest, who was not yet in kindergarden, got my undivided attention for a good four months, and together we knocked a shockingly out of shape garden into some good order, and had numerous outings to libraries, malls, swimming pools, beaches, parks, gardening centers. When the elder son got home from school, we all played together. This has been very good for my soul.

I can't, however, fully embrace this role, for two reasons. Firstly, the novelty is wearing off, and the youngest, turning 3 years old and becoming eligible for 20 free ECE hours, could now be put into kindergarden without crippling our finances. This gave me more time to consider my future. Secondly, despite our income being average for the nation, it does not cover the bills. We do not live an extravagant lifestyle by any stretch of the imagination, so cutting back costs hasn't been able to put us into well-balanced books. This can't continue indefinitely. I decided, for better or worse, to engage a bit of formal re-education, and enrolled in a BSc at the University of Auckland.

I am not entirely committed to gaining a BSc, actually. The degree itself is hardly of more value than the Graduate Diploma in Computer Science (and a number of post-graduate CompSci papers) that I already have, and could easily take me 5 years to complete part-time. But you need to write something down when you justify why you want to do undergraduate papers, and the subjects that I'm most interested in are generally taught in the sciences. In particularly, my maths, which was a major strength at school, is something that I felt really needed to be lifted. At the moment, it's all I'm studying.

Why? I don't have a good answer. General education? A feeling of something missing, of a lost opportunity? To expand my horizons? To freshen up my thinking?


Why pay for education? Again, no particularly sound answer, other than that solitary training is something that I've been unable to really do for the last few years. Perhaps I just need people around me, and a change of physical working environment? I was certainly royally sick of my home-office.

I'm writing now in the mid-semester break, the first time I've been able to even think about doing any serious writing. The boys are at school and kindy, the slow-cooker has dinner on the way, the breadmaker is working on a fresh loaf for after-school and dinner sides. The washing is hung out, the house tidied, the dishes done, the lawns mowed, the network fixed, bills paid. Phew! Ooops washing machine beeping, better pop those on the line, then I'll come back to reflect on what the first half-semester has been like.