Sleep

I woke up forty-five minutes ago. For those of you who are unaware of the time that I am posting this blog, that means that I woke up at twenty to one.  pm.

This really is getting ridiculous. The light was off by eleven last night, and I was asleep by eleven thirty or so. I woke up briefly at eight when the alarm went off, and again at nine when J rushed out of bed and off to work, but barring that, I have had thirteen hours sleep. And for the last two or three weeks it’s been the same. Going to bed at ten, ten thirty, even nine thirty means that I am still struggling to wake up before ten. Sure, I get walking exercise, but not that much, really. I even had a lie down late afternoon, yesterday, after coming home early from lectures because there was no way my brain could cope with Analysis in the state that it was in.

I have so much work, and so little time, and so much less time because I’m losing it all to apparent physical exhaustion. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to get my backside to the Science Site, pronto.

It’s raining.

The Other Side

Here is a graph, which I should have been able to draw at least a month ago – instead of which, I stressed unnecessarily (at myself and others), and published a blog post crying for help, when in fact the answer was sitting literally in front of my nose. This was pointed out by my supervisor yesterday, after I had started stressing again in email format. OK, so he didn’t say that the answer was in front of my nose as such, but I still feel pretty damn stupid about it.

However, because it’s pretty cool anyway, here is that formula plotted for m=6, w_c=5/9, and R=0.9. Resonant low pass filter hells yes?!

I think this is the thing. I’m so stressed about feeling like a constant failure that it’s self-perpetuating. Have broken down in tears/ had a sort of panic attack in front of one of my lecturers earlier on – thankfully after everyone else had left the lecture theatre – I found myself putting into words what my constant internal conflict is about.

I want people to acknowledge that things aren’t right. The drugs aren’t working, but the GP considers it too risky to change things with finals approaching. I’ve been recommended CBT, but I don’t have the necessary amount of time in a single place until the summer, and that’s before you’ve got onto waiting lists. J and I have had (and potentially) still have a pretty wrenching, horrendously difficult decision to make – in a nutshell, he’s seen an advert for his dream job which would take him far away from Durham from the 1st April onwards. It’s a lose-lose situation, and although I think we might have found a way forward, it’s been so stressful having to think and Talk About It. I’m losing a lot of work-time to downers and to excessive sleep. Fourth year is hard. For everyone, Fact.

But at the same time, I’m not a charity case, and I don’t want to be treated as one. Essentially I want my degree to judged on my own merits – fairly, not weighted in either direction because of what’s going on. In a stable mood, I can work. I can’t do everything, naturally, but I can do a perfectly respectable amount of Maths when the situation is conducive, and my degree is important to me.

Fuck, it’s hard. But I’m not quitting now.

Failure

I am an idiot, and deserve to fail my degree. That really is all.

Only In My Imagination

I want to cry. Inkscape’s function plotter does not support imaginary numbers. That is all.

Old Age, and Impending Suicide

My computer is threatening to kill itself.

I have to say, it’s rather inconsiderate of it to do so at precisely this moment. It’s been getting slower and slower for a goodly while now – since September, say? It started out just being Firefox that was taking its time, and I initially wondered whether or not it was the internet connection – but that shouldn’t affect the speed of the brower software iteslf. Then the rest of the computer started complaining. It would cut out my internet sporadically, and the ‘Repair Internet Connection’ thing no longer worked so that I’d essentially have to restart my computer in order to get the internet back.

The restarting pretty quickly became a problem. I’ve lost count of the number of times now that it has stopped responding whilst shutting down, leaving me to resort to the hideous ‘hold-down-the-power-button-for-a-good-ten-seconds-until-it-turns-off-with-that-horribly-squealy-noise’ method. I defragmented a couple of times to no effect – and I was still registering 36% free or something of an 80Gb hard drive.

Was there a virus, one that orignated from Firefox? I went home for Christmas at this point and on my parents’ recommendation took the whole computer along to our local computer repair shop where they did what was essentially a health check on it, installed a bit of anti-malware software, took note of the problems I was having and sent it back. I’ll be honest, it didn’t make a huge amount of difference.

Since then, I have uninstalled, re-installed, and finally uninstalled Firefox again. I have transferred all my music, pictures, and a bit of software onto the external hard drive that I got for Christmas. I have made several backups of project work. And still it gets slower. The internet is hit and miss as to whether it will respond or not, frequently not responding or taking minutes to do so – with the added irritation that I hadn’t realised quite how much I preferred using Firefox over IE until now. A 3-page pdf now takes forever to compile from LaTeX, which is actually quite a big problem, project-wise. Mouse clicks frequently don’t register, and the scroll on my touchpad stopped working ages ago.

To be quite honest, I’m holding my breath as to whether this is going to last as long as I need it to – namely ’til the end of May/ start of June. At least then it’s personal use that’s being impacted, not the final year of my sodding degree :-S

So yeah, any suggestions? Other than “buy a new computer”, preferably, although I may just have to bite the bullet and do that if it gets desperate. This one’s four years old now, which is a long time in computer talk. It’s not that long a time, though, if you think about it, really…

Sell Out

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8467007.stm

:’(

Freeganism

I would like to draw your attention to this article. I would like to warn you that it is technically illegal.

I would also like to tell you just how delicious ten bags of Tesco Finest Cookies are when sat in your cupboard.

:D

Ignorance

A lecturer who started his postgrad career in 1988 is now 43 (assuming that he started his PhD age 22 and doesn’t have a birthday in the first twelve days of January. I also appeared to have assumed that he is male. Oops. Well I do spend my academic life in a Maths department.).

Thus, the vast majority of lecturers over the age of 43 have been studying in their field for more years than I have been alive – in which time I have transformed from a helpless, tiny baby, and through all of the requisite stages of development into a nearly-22-yr-old woman who likes to think that she could make her own way in the world if it were required of her. And when I think about it like that, it seems much less unreasonable to be struggling to know what the hell they are talking about sometimes!

The Game Of Life

Three posts in two days??! Actually, three posts in one day as far as WordPress is concerned, because it thinks it’s an hour later than it is, at least as far as midnight and its whereabouts is concerned.

Anyway, enough pedantry.

My question is this: If you played the lottery and won millions, what would you do?

4H Project

As this is the fourth and final year of my degree (and my Masters year, no less), I am finally getting to do a research-project-type-thing. I add the ‘type-thing’ there because I’m not sure that it really qualifies as research as such – it’s only two modules, after all, in a subject where research necessitates a pretty comprehensive knowledge of everything that has gone before and requires a certain confidence/ genius, delete as appropriate. I have neither of these things, and have anything but a comprehensive knowledge of electrical engineering.

Nonetheless, it is wonderful to finally be doing coursework again! To have a sustained project, with a long term focus and outcome is something that I’ve really missed, and one of the reasons why I enjoyed my Teaching module so much last year.

My topic, for those who are interested, is ‘The Mathematics Inside Digital Synthesisers’. I didn’t choose it myself exactly – well, I did, but I picked it out from a list of about thirty such topics rather than picking something from thin air in the manner that arts people particularly seem to choose their dissertations. Still, this is good fun. It’s basically computational Maths with a very specific application – and is not an area that huge numbers of mathematicians know anything about. If you read around the textbooks or articles on t’net, the vast majority have been written by and for engineers – namely, here is the Maths, use it. I, on the other hand, am trying (with the help of my rather lovely albeit slightly time-warped supervisor) to understand the Maths, and hopefully next term get on to constructing some of my own.

If I ever manage to get on top of the written report (haha, 50 pages in LaTeX), I’d really like to have a play-around with the synthesiser that my supervisor coded himself from scratch and include some sound samples. Nothing too complicated, mind. Getting synthesised sounds to sound realistic is incredibly difficult, much more so than one might imagine, and even those who understand the Maths basically play around with it by ear. But what I’d like to do is the simple stuff, directly related to the calculations I’ve been doing. Here is a sine wave at 440kHz. Here is what it sounds like with a low pass filter. Here is what is sounds like with different envelopes, and the introduction of a resonance paramater. Here is what it sounds like with time-variant resonance (- that’s my new, never before been done angle to the project. Even part way through, my instinctive reaction is “Help I can’t do this The chances of me screwing up are so huge that maybe I shouldn’t even try Why am I doing this” etc. etc. etc.).

Daunting it may be, but it is nonetheless incredibly interesting, or at least I think so :-)

On a not entirely unrelated note, have a graph! Needless to say, it’s not quite the one I intended to draw (but is very cool nonetheless, si?)