The Dreamwidth Account

First up, have a read of this entry and the comments thereupon.

Next up, we pause for a note on context and perspective - that of a chronic perfectionist with an anxiety disorder to show for it, plus chronic depression which feeds into the anxiety and vice versa.

Those two things considered, might I offer an alternative path toward the great goal of Getting Things Done.

( TL,DR - Years of strategy below the fold )

And the kitchen table. And the receipt for the new printer and the expansion drive which didn't work. And a whole heap of paperwork from the past three years.

The thing which triggered all of this was installing a new printer (well, all-in-one device really - it scans and it prints and it photocopies and although it doesn't fax things, it's connected to a computer with an internet connection, so it can perform the equivalent of faxing too) and discovering that the only place I had where the printer would actually fit on my desk was (at that point) covered with an ever-increasing stack of paperwork. So, I got the printer installed (and working very nicely, thank you) and then realised I really had to do something about the piles and piles and piles of stuff which had been occupying the space on my desk where the printer had been. Mostly because it was now occupying the space on the kitchen table where the eating spaces had been, and I really did want to sit down and enjoy a proper dinner at some point in the next couple of days.

So, I decided to get started by clearing a bit of space to put down my little hand-crank shredder (handles 2 pages at a time, and is also capable of chewing through credit cards and CDs) and started shredding all the obvious crap as it all came to hand. End result (before I got bored) was two plastic bags of hamster bedding. Then I pulled out the ring binder/portfolio I'd been using to store all my corro and stuff from a couple of years ago - it was a system which had worked for me right up to the point where I stopped being dilligent about it, at which point the backlog took over and it disappeared under the mess. So, pull out everything for the past couple of years from that, and grab three envelope-style folders from the storage cupboard - one for 2009, one for 2010, and one for 2011. The 2009 and 2010 stuff just got dumped into the folders, and the folders go into the filing cabinet for further action later. The 2011 stuff got put into the appropriate categories in the portfolio binder (and I wrote up a new index for this binder, so I can find what I'm looking for).

Meanwhile, I looked at a couple of file trays I had on top of the filing cabinet, and decided they could be re-used in a more constructive manner. One now has a pile of stuff in it which needs to be shredded - and a label saying "to shred". The other is currently empty, but there's a (smaller) pile of stuff to sort on top of the filing cabinet, and I figure I may as well use the capabilities of my nice new scanner to scan those things which I want to keep, but which I can't figure out a decent "away" for. So it has a label saying "to scan". My eventual aim is to get to and scan all the hundreds of recipe leaflets I've collected over the years, so I'll have a permanent record of them, and then I don't have to bloody well keep the silly things! Yay! More storage space!

I'm in my second-last week of the contract down in Bunbury, and I'm starting to really get fed up with travelling to and fro for five days out of every seven. I'm also tired as, and I've been missing my meds because it just slips my mind. Aside from all of that, I'm fine.

I'm trying to think of something witty (or at least interesting) to say here, but my brain isn't working at this hour of the morning, so all I can say is that I'm fine, and our little corner of the world hasn't experienced anything catastrophic lately. Gods willing, I'll be able to keep saying that for a while longer.

It be my birthday. I am now 39 years old. Yay.

So, what do I have planned for my birthday? Well, to start with I have to drive up to uni and drop in a couple of assignments - the maths one is due today, and the computing one is due tomorrow (but I spent yesterday getting them both finished because I don't feel like having to make two trips there during a study break week). Then I'm heading home, and we're expecting a friend to visit this afternoon. Tonight, Himself is going to be taking me out to dinner (Hog's Breath Cafe in Rockingham - one of those places that does food, rather than cuisine).

The computing assignment was a right whatsit, and took most of about three days to do. I'm not sure I'm going to get high marks for it, since I know there's at least one bit of the main function code which could have been a lot more efficiently done if I just knew how arrays functioned (my position is that we haven't been taught arrays yet, so I'm not even going to try and use them; I was always confused by them in Pascal, and I don't fancy trying to teach myself how to use them in C. Instead, I'll wait until we're taught them in class in Java).

Tomorrow, I'm planning to head up to my favourite clothing store and get myself some new clothes (because I've been asking people for money for clothes as a birthday present). Mostly I'm planning on getting some more t-shirts and maybe another pair of jeans since my t-shirt collection is starting to look a trifle threadbare, and I've at least one pair of jeans which are starting to look just a tad over-worn. I'm also planning on dropping in to see my parents while I'm in their district (my favourite clothing shop is just a couple of suburbs over from where they are).

Thursday and Friday I'm planning on using to collapse in a heap and recuperate. I'll probably empty out my bag I use for uni and do all the filing of notes and things. Oh, and write up a formulae sheet for the maths test we have coming up on the Friday of next week. But I suspect I'll probably devote most of my time to re-reading manga and working my way through my latest effort at completing Persona 3.

So today I read something on Charles Stross' blog (pointed there from Making Light) for the first time in months. Then I started reading back through the prior list of posts on the front page, until I got to Designing Society for Posterity, an ideas post about the nature of society which would need to be created in order to handle Generation Ships (extremely long distance - interstellar - colonisation). Which sucked me in massively (not just the post itself, but at least the first eighty of the three-hundred something comments which followed). So, after pulling myself away from that for long enough to get the next batch of truffle mix into the fridge and chilling (prior to rolling things into balls and chilling again, then choc-dipping), I switched over to Shakesville - and promptly got pulled into another enthralling comments thread.

This has not been a good day for the housework. It's losing out in a major way to the distractions of teh intarwebs.

So today my readers get to have a mini-linkspam, along with reflections of my own.

First up - social engineering won't really be possible until we really have the tools to do the equivalent of performing maintenance on a social system while it's still running in such a way that the participants don't find such maintenance obtrusive or intrusive. At the moment, the only tools we have are fairly blunt ones, such as advertising, war, legislation and suchlike. They all have an effect, but often all they do is pass the problem on down the line for future generations to handle (to get an idea of how effective this isn't, consider that we're still dealing with fallout from a war which happened in Palestine in 69AD, and another which hit Afghanistan in roughly 325BC). So first we need to be able to fix potential problems fairly early on, before they expand outward with chaotic effects.

Second up - The issue of "who is a good guy" is one which highlights some of the current problems in our society - particularly our love of simplification and easy binaries. Humans are always going to be more complex than a mere binary axis can pinpoint, and so are human problems. This is why I always tend toward the notions of multiple solutions to a single identified problem, simply because there are always going to be underlying factors in every problem which aren't considered in an easy fix. For example, imprisoning people is the "easy" fix to the problem of crime - but it brings with it a range of different issues (such as the cost to the state as a whole of maintaining prisons and a justice system, dealing with the simple logistical issues of keeping them functional, and also coping with a society where prison culture is starting to shape a significant fraction of your population over time).

Third up - Every single time I see anything about the US political systems I wind up having at least one massive "WTF?" moment. The issue spoken about in the link is one which would be far more difficult to achieve here in Australia - mainly because the average Aussie tends to trust political parties about as far as they could heave the collected membership thereof, and therefore hasn't left anything significant in their hands. Voter data here belongs to the Commonwealth and State Governments (or in other words, to the Commonwealth and State public service) and there are some very strict rules about what can be collected, what can't be collected, what can be done with the data, who has access to it, who they can give the data to, how it can and can't be stored, and what's allowed to be done with it in the meantime.

Fourth up - Currency, cash flow and crime and the relations between all of these. One of the most basic things about money is that it devalues - this is a universal. It doesn't matter how solid the currency is, it will wind up devaluing in one way or another. To put it another way, all money is ultimately inflationary, whether legitimately acquired or illegitimately acquired. The process of resetting the value of $CURRENCY is generally nasty, since it gets started at the top of the tree, and winds up hurting everyone all the way down - those at the bottom of the heap get the worst of it. One other small reflection: I started to think the US economy had effectively gone down the tubes when Australian dollars were very near parity point with the US dollar - given the Australian economy is approximately 1/15th the size of the US economy, it's probably a pretty good indicator.

Finally - Girl Genius is still my favourite web comic. Endless fun, drama, suspense, thrills, action and, of course, Mad Science!!!

My day so far has been... um.

I started off the day by having nightmares. Gods alone know why (although I suspect it has something to do with the raw skin on my right hand smallest finger, where a hangnail got too persistent) but I was dreaming I was the TARDIS in human form, and I know I woke up once all in a rush having thought someone was drilling into the back of my head. No, really. I could hear the drill. Scared the bzuh! out of me. Fortunately I got back to sleep again, although the nightmares didn't stop. I really should take a couple of Nurofen when I have something owie before trying to go to sleep.

The next thing to wake me up was a phone call from a real estate agent regarding a rental property I'd seen advertised online. As some of you may know, our house is currently being repossessed by the bank, which means we have to be out by 5 December, and handing over the keys for vacant posession by then. So we're looking at rentals. Given we're both on the dole, this isn't easy - I'm setting an approximate value of $200 per week (which is roughly half a fortnightly dole payment each) on the rent we can afford, and the result of the searches is... interesting. Let's just say if we wanted to live in rural splendour, we'd be spoiled for choice - there's places galore in spots like Kalgoorlie, Bunbury, Manjimup, Northcliffe, Geraldton, Norseman, and Kambalda West. Unfortunately, none of those are precisely convenient for jobs in Perth (plus, of course, if we moved to any of them, we'd be moving to an Area of Lower Employment, so our dole payments would be either cut down or cut off for about three to six months. Hoo-flippin'-ray).

Anyway, I have an appointment to have a look over this little 2 bedroom cottage in Bassendean that I put in an enquiry about. Now, given Bassendean is about 10km out of the Perth city centre, there has to be something wrong with this place for the rent to be this low (the next lowest rent is something like $260 per week, and the more likely one is $350 per week) - so I'm going to be looking carefully at the location, the neighbours, and the house itself to try and find out what the issue is, and why the rent is this low. Hopefully the issue is something liveable, such as noise, or a bad area (noise I can live with, a bad area I have lived with) rather than things like missing doors and windows, or a hot water system which doesn't function. From the maps I'm looking at (the map online, and the street directory I have handy) it looks like the problem's more likely to be noise from the railway crossing and passing traffic - in which case, I can live with it for the rent we'd be paying. Himself will just have to start sleeping with earplugs, or move in with his parents - his choice.

Aside from that, I've also been moving on to the next stage with my job search: cold canvassing. I've written up the letter, I've drawn up my list of candidates (I went through the yellow pages last week and drew up a list of all the mining companies listed) and now I'm chasing up contact information, checking details against websites, and getting email addresses where possible. So far I've sent out 10 emails today, I have another 10 planned for tomorrow, and I'm going to keep on at 10 per day until I've emailed all the ones I have email addresses for. Then I start on the mailouts - 10 per day every day until done. Once I've done all of those, I'm going to make a list of the oil and gas companies, and then pick my economy sector from there. If I haven't got a bite for tech work by the time we have to move out, I'll start looking for general admin stuff (but I'm hoping I'll get at least a nibble for the tech work).

NaNoWriMo update: I'm not doing it. Writing cheery, upbeat, positive letters to 10 companies per day soliciting work is quite enough fictional output to keep me busy. Even if it is mostly copy & paste.

It's been about a week since I wrote the "I need help" post, and about a week since the breakdown which prompted it. Since then, I've had a few things happen. I've contacted the Silver Chain people about getting some assistance with ensuring I take my medication regularly. From what I've read on their website, they're probably the best people to provide the kind of help I need, which is someone dropping in on maybe an "every second day" basis, in order to ensure I'm taking my meds regularly and getting out of bed at a reasonable hour. They've returned my contact, and advised me to get a referral from a GP, which I did on Thursday last week. Now I have to wait for them to get back to me again, and let me know whether it's possible for this to happen or not.

I'm back to taking my medication, and I'm going to try and keep consistent with it, even though I know I have problems with this (see the above paragraph). So far I'm on day two, and I'm suffering the understandable side-effects of restarting psych medication after about two weeks without it. Or in other words, I'm dizzy, dopey, and a bit distracted at present. This too will pass, but at the moment I'm trying not to move too much too quickly.

( More under the fold )

Well, for some reason getting out the two longish pieces I've been working away at on and off over the past year or so and doing some more of the epicyclical rewrites I'm prone to (I call it editing, because that sounds ever so much more purposeful) appeared to have worked to dispel the cranky mood. By the time midnight came around, I was able to kick off the download without wanting to bite the update program, and when I eventually went to bed at close on 3am this morning, I was just fine.

What was even better, I'd added some new content to both of the pieces I'd opened, which really helps. One of them's up to 24,000 words plus, while the other's only at 5,000 or so, but they're both going to be walloping great bastards when (if) they're eventually completed.

I'm still fine this morning, having created my first character on City of Heroes and completed the initial missions. It's an interesting little game, that one. I think I shall see about creating a second character, and see whether I can get any further. One of the only complaints I have is that if you're playing a trial account (as I am) there's a persistent little box in the dead centre of the screen telling you you're playing the trial, and asking whether you want to buy the full version. Mind you, I can live with that for a week or so, while I decide whether or not I want to keep playing. So far the answer is "yes", but that may alter.