Here I have to pen a belated valentine to my beloved X.

I met him for lunch in Campustown today, and we were talking about my classes. I was telling him about battling a serious case of (beginning) programmer's block, and how I figured out how to fight it on Sunday evening by getting out my notebook and just writing pseudo--

"Code," he finished. "I was just going to suggest that." He also suggested something else I hadn't thought of: when he doesn't know where to start, he starts by writing descriptive comments: i.e. "This program will do _____," or "The user now inputs _____ variable."

From the moment that I, while contemplating the end of my full-time job, came up with the idea of going back to school, he has been, without any hesitation whatsoever, my biggest cheerleader. Actually, the general response from my boss, co-workers, and assorted friends and family members has been overwhelmingly positive...not really surprising, considering that most of the people I work with or hang around with are geeks who think computer science is good for everybody, but it's still a revelation compared to the general reaction I got from family, friends, and acquaintances when I started graduate school fifteen years ago, which was mostly veiled hostility, outright suspicion, and, in one puzzling case, malicious glee. Only X was unconditionally supportive.

But this time he's not just supportive, but excited. I suppose there's some inherent risk to having a spouse who long ago mastered everything you're studying now, that he might push or be impatient with you, but X has been none of those things. While I struggle with code late at night he sometimes camps out in a recliner in the library and dozes, in case I need his help with something. I think his training as a professor probably contributes toward his unflappability in the face of my ignorance and occasional stubborn inability to learn. He's also deeply aware of all my old math and computing hangups. More than anything, I think he wants me to fly...and he doesn't want to do anything that might damage my fragile wings.

Now he smiled at me, in the noontime sunlight. "It makes me so happy that you're doing this," he said, again, for maybe the hundredth time. He knows I won't fail. For him, this whole decision is a no-brainer. He doesn't know what the future will bring for me, but he knows that this will only help me, that the unpaid leave from work, the tuition (inexpensive, but still around $1500 a semester for a full courseload) is an investment, that it will make me more valuable in the future, when things are better. And for once, I don't find negative thoughts interfering with my ability to concentrate; I don't find myself questioning the purpose of what I'm doing, how I'm spending my time. I want to make this whole effort entirely worthwhile, and I want to make him proud of me, and there's really no need to keep these two goals apart.

I SO NEED THIS BOOK, PART I

Morrow, James. Shambling Towards Hiroshima.

X, who knows my love for all things Godzilla, will know what I'm talking about.

And Morrow is the guy who once said, "'There are no atheists in foxholes' isn't an argument against atheists, it's an argument against foxholes." If he's got a sense of humor, maybe he'll read a little like Mark Twain (who dabbled in science fiction a bit himself, after all). Here's hoping. I'm very picky about science fiction in general.

Via Scalzi.

catching up...

So. Three weeks have gone by, and this marks the fourth. How are things so far?

I'm still adjusting, I think. And there's a lot to adjust to. I haven't been a student since the spring of 2000, and a lot has changed since then.

I don't really worry too much about being a returning adult student. For one thing, I don't want to be That Woman, the one your mother's age who sits in the front of the class ostentatiously taking notes and nodding violent comprehension and shouting out the answers to all the questions and and monopolizing the professor and trying otherwise to show what an exemplary student she is, the one she should have been thirty years ago except that flunking out/marriage/pregnancy/miscellaneous adolescent rebellion got in the way.

No, I was the perfect student twenty years ago (minus the more obnoxious habits, I hope) and it didn't really get me very far. These days, I sit in class, I listen carefully, I take down anything I haven't heard, I don't speak up unless no one else has the answer, I ask questions not for the sake of asking questions but because I really need to know something or am intensely curious about it, and I don't obsess over my grades. But what I'm thinking about when I sit down at my machine and log on to the Windows XP VM two nights a week in class, or get into the online course website other evenings, is what I can get out of this session, how it will affect what I want to do later.

I do things differently, though. When asked for freehand drawings of both the exterior and internal workings of my home PC, I supplied diagrams created using PowerPoint. "I'm a technical writer," I said to my instructor. "This is how I do stuff." Freehand just wasn't going to cut it. I was a little startled that no one else in the class had thought to do this--it seems that if you have tools at your disposal, you should do things properly, and it really didn't take me that long.

One thing I'm still getting used to is the treadmill of studying, homework, studying, homework--and taking two of my classes online kind of complicates things. I have to be careful to check the schedule diligently for unexpected assignments, as there is no physical classroom where the teacher reminds everyone.

I'm also getting used to just how cut-and-dried these courses are: either you get something right, or you don't. Either it's true or false. Either the walkthrough or program works, or it doesn't. I suppose you could have points subtracted for poorly-written code, but still, it's a much less subjective system of evaluation than I was ever used to, and I find the decrease in the number of potential areas rather gratifying, not to mention the immediate feedback from those exercises which are graded automatically. I realize that there are other intangible ways in which I might be evaluated, but at least I'm not second-guessing myself so much about whether I've mastered the material.

Mastering the material, however, is one thing. Mastering Linux or VBasic programming is a horse of an entirely different color. X has warned me about not just blindly following recipes but becoming aware of similarities, parallels, differences in operating systems and languages, fundamentals that are universal (or nearly so). If something goes wrong, I don't want merely to figure out how to fix it and move on (though sometimes that's expedient and necessary): I want to understand what's gone wrong, to gain more insight into the system, so that I can handle similar or related problems later on. So as I do my homework, I try to make myself understand as much as possible, because I want to be able to call on every bit of it when necessary.

And then there's the time management issue. In the humanities, graduate seminars take place once a week. For undergraduate classes, you can often do all your preparation in one sitting--read through Paradise Lost or the "Cyclops" section of Ulysses or whatever in a single evening, scribbling marginalia as you go. But this is different. I tried doing all my programming homework in a couple of days, on the weekend, and discovered the following weekend that life had interfered to such an extent that most of what I'd learned had slipped through my fingers and I had to go back and review it all over again. So I'll do what my Linux instructor strongly urges and try spreading out the whole thing over the course of a week, working for half an hour to an hour on each subject every single night. As I've said before, practice makes perfect.

signs of the times

Things are bad all over. This week we heard that Caterpillar and some other global companies are laying off workers by the tens of thousands. The jobless rate has reached levels not seen since the early eighties, and it's expected to get worse in 2009 before things pick up and turn around.

That's not, of course, how most of us measure economic decline--our index is more anecdotal in nature. Yesterday I tried to buy lunch, only to be told that my bank card was invalid. No, not because I've run out of money, thank goodness. Apparently someone tried to make some purchases using my card number, one of them rather substantial. Fortunately, they were declined, and the bank put a block on my card number. I'm not sure whether it was an honest mistake or someone just trying out my card number with different PINS until they got the correct one, but it made me think immediately of stories like this one, in which an LA consumer columnist had his money and plastic stolen out of his gym locker by someone who immediately went on a spending spree and bought himself a nice new Macbook, among other things. As people get more desperate--either to meet basic needs or to feed a mass consumption addiction acquired in the last couple of decades--you can bet that there will be more ID fraud than ever. And most of it won't even involve physical theft.

Another sign of the times: more insider threats. From Wired:

A logic bomb allegedly planted by a former engineer at mortgage finance company Fannie Mae last fall would have decimated all 4,000 servers at the company, causing millions of dollars in damage and shutting down Fannie Mae for a least a week, prosecutors say.

Unix engineer Rajendrasinh Babubha Makwana, 35, was indicted (.pdf) Tuesday in federal court in Maryland on a single count of computer sabotage for allegedly writing and planting the malicious code on Oct. 24, the day he was fired from his job. The malware had been set to detonate at 9:00 a.m. on Jan. 31, but was instead discovered by another engineer five days after it was planted, according to court records.

Let's set aside the utterly moronic, self-sabotaging nature of this kind of attack. You're pissed off because you think your company screwed you by firing you? You think you're going to show them a thing or two? Well, Mr. Makwana, you just guaranteed that you'll never work in IT ever again, ANYWHERE. Duh.

But R. B. Makwana is a statistic, or will be soon. Insider threats are on the rise, and as the recession deepens, organizations will be at risk not only from disgruntled employees like Mr. Makwana, but also from employees who are dealing with increasing personal debt and are desperate for cash. Obama's administration just put out their cyber security agenda, a major aspect of which will be battling cyber-espionage. If it were a big deal back in August, when this agenda was actually formulated by Obama's campaign, it's an even bigger deal now.

Happy days are here again

Yeah, we had a little management turnover this morning.

How does it feel? Weird. I have a president who won by a landslide even though he's a liberal Democrat, an egghead former college professor, and--oh, yeah, is black and has the middle name Hussein. President Barack Hussein Obama. Also, I used to live in his neighborhood, which is a little like Berkeley, except colder.

What's it mean to me? More than anything, this is a guy who believes in science.

For everywhere we look, there is work to be done. The state of the economy calls for action, bold and swift, and we will act—not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth. We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together. We will restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology's wonders to raise health care's quality and lower its cost. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age. All this we can do. And all this we will do.

I don't consider this promise to be pie-in-the-sky demogoguery, or a sop to the reality-based community or to environmentalists. Obama's not your run-of-the-mill politician--he was, after all, a law professor at the University of Chicago and is surprisingly intimate with the scientific community. Which is partly why he picked this guy to head the Department of Energy. In fact, there are now three or four physicists in major posts in his administration. Pinch me, I must be dreaming!

Tonight I submitted the first exercise for my Intro to Linux course. The instructor expects us to practice, so that's what I'm doing. I used an editor I'd never heard of before, called joe, but I'm thinking about doing the next entry in emacs instead. joe seems very user-friendly, a lot like pico, actually...but I have the feeling that using an intuitive editor like joe or pico marks me as something of a n00b.

I've been thinking a lot about practicing lately. X, my husband, bought me a digital piano for an anniversary present, which is an extraordinary gift and out of which i hope to get as much as I can. When I was in high school, I was a competent pianist, but not a really good one, and it strikes me now that perhaps part of the problem is that I didn't really know how to practice. Practice, for me, used to consist of simply going over and over a piece from start to finish and hoping that the difficult passages would sort themselves out. I don't think that's really very productive. So I went looking for some tips for effective practice and came up with these methods from a music professor at Missouri Western State College. He suggests a lot of different techniques, many of which involve mixing things up (practicing at different volumes, tempos, playing everything staccato or legato, stopping abruptly after each measure, etc.) but the thing that really sticks in my head is that if you play something seven times perfectly, you've committed it to physical memory: neurologically speaking, seven is apparently a magic number. (Which means you have to get it right from the first--erasing that stimulus and replacing it with something else takes five times as many correct attempts.)

And so I tried it with some passages from Debussy's Clair de lune that involved some complicated fingering. Practiced these passages up and down, over and over, refusing to go on until I'd mastered them, and although I haven't quite got them perfect, I can already feel my fingers automatically depressing the right keys, and doing so in a manner more agile and flowing than I can ever remember.

So. Practice is key. Once isn't enough. Even if you think you've grasped something from reading it through the first time, it doesn't mean you've mastered it. And mastery is what I'm going for here. I want to make these commands automatic. I used to watch my husband or my co-workers working in UNIX/Linux and marveled at their ease and fluency with commands that I had to piece together from online help pages. Now, I can start to imagine being like them.

I'm starting to understand what that means now.

There's been a change in the program.

Seriously. It was bitterly cold last week, busy at work, classes started...somehow, that doesn't seem enough of an excuse not to post here, but I'm back now.

On Friday, January 9, I went in and took my placement exam in the Administration wing. For about fifteen minutes before the test, I was the oldest person there...until a woman in her sixties huffed up, arms filled with math review books, and announced that she was there for her "re-assessment."

We had to put all our belongings in lockers--everything. I'd brought along a pad of paper to do scratch figuring on, and several pencils, but I wasn't allowed to bring them in--everything would be supplied, including a graphing calculator, which I actually used once or twice.

This exam was, in fact, multiple choice. But that didn't matter so much, as I did a lot of figuring and came up with the right numbers. There were a few problems for which I simply eyeballed things and didn't bother working them out, but somehow I don't feel bad about that at all, not since I discovered that there's a lot of eyeballing that goes on in mathematics. The exam began with geometry and moved through algebra and pre-calculus into trigonometry. By the time I got to trigonometry I was kicking myself for not having reviewed the stuff I'd learned in tenth-grade physics, because if I'd remembered most of it I would have done better on that section. I seemed to recall that trigonometry was actually pretty easy.

I wasn't nervous or anxious at all. At some point--about an hour and a half in--I started to get bored, hoping the exam wouldn't last much longer. And the woman I'd seen coming in earlier was a terrible distraction. She had a hacking cough and kept leaving the room for various reasons, and from the corner of my eye I could see that she was stuck on the same geometry problem long after I'd moved on to algebra.

What made me proudest was being able to figure out simple functions. I'd never seen functions before--or if I did, I didn't remember them--and it probably took me three times as long to solve those problems as it did the students who'd just graduated from high school a year ago--but I figured out that all they were, really, were nested equations.

After a poor showing in trigonometry, where I just simply started guessing at random, the test ended (probably because I was doing so badly) and I went up to get my score. The woman behind the desk took the paper from the printer, highlighted something, and handed it to me. "That's the class you can start with," she said. I looked at it. I'd tested out of College Algebra. The class I would begin with would be trigonometry. Hot damn!

So that has changed my plans for the next semester. Now that I've got documented proof that I've tested out of algebra, I could take beginning programming and the introductory Linux course in addition to the basic hardware/OS course that meets at Parkland on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I will be taking trigonometry in the near future, but I need to get these courses out of the way fast. And I'm rejoicing, because it brings me that much closer to where I want to be.

After trigonometry, which I've no doubt I'll pass with flying colors? The big, bad C-word, of course. Oh, yes. Bring it on.