PIMOM

 Well, a new acronym... PIMOM.

OCD has made me a Prisoner In My Own Mind (PIMOM) and it is very difficult to break out.

Never mind, tomorrow is another day.

 OK. so I'm diving deep into C++. It turns out I need to learn Linear Algebra and possibly other aspects of maths to get the most out of "Discovering Modern C++ (2e)". That is quite a challenge!

OK, so I've read broadly, now to dive deep into C++

So I.T. book reviews are being submitted, checked, and forwarded for publication. These past two weeks have been... challenging. Nevertheless, I have a couple of C++ books to delve into. It appears I am a bit of an optimist when it comes to thinking about estimating things. But I seem to get there in the end. Also, I am running the occasional Traveller game and that provides a break from everything else.

This my morning I managed to get nearly an hour of weeding done, suitably protected with sun cream and an Ubuntu beanie hat. Followed by doing some background reading about the Trojan Reach (a sector of space in the Traveller Charted Space setting), interspersed with chapters from "The Kobold Guide to Worldbuilding Volume 2". Then rounded off by watching Matrix - Revolutions (the 3rd film). All in all, a good day.

Python 3

I've been reading Python stuff quite a bit, getting to grips with a Python 3 and Design Patterns book. I'm not so certain about the book, though. Time will tell. However, over the weekend I designed and wrote a Python program to create a quick reference table for the Mongoose Traveller 2nd edition Traveller game. It all boiled down to one key function:

def distance_km_and_thrust_to_seconds(distance_km,thrust):
    distance_meters = distance_km * 1000;
    result = 2 * math.sqrt(distance_meters/(thrust*10))
    return result

Covid-19

Well, on Friday 22nd, I felt like a train had hit me. So I didn't see people in case I pass on a nasty bug to them.

On Monday 25th, I tested positive for Covid-19, using a Lateral Flow Test. So I can't go out. Fortunately the Chapples have been dropping off groceries which is really nice of them. The symptoms are that of a bad cold but I don't even want to pass that on to other people. Paul Chapple recommended that I stay at home until I test negative for Covid-19. In the meantime I have been reading "Learning MySQL" and wondering about running Traveller games. I tested positive again this evening (27th April).

A bit of a surprise...

 ... apparently, the writer Philip K. Dick had schizophrenia, too!

family life (DVD, 1972)

Janice Baildon is a young woman living with her conventional, authoritarian parents. Her sister Barbara has already fled the roost. Janice becomes pregnant, is coerced into having an abortion and has a psychotic episode – resulting in being admitted into a Psychiatric Hospital. In there, she is treated. Initially by an experimental Psychiatrist who does not believe in over-medicating patients and has a very liberal approach. However, that Psychiatrist is told to move on by the Hospital Committee and Janice faces 1970’s medicine, crowded wards and ECT (Electroconvulsive Therapy). ECT is now typically used for depression. Once discharged, she continues living with her parents and seeing her problematical boyfriend.  However, the stresses of life result in more psychotic breaks, triggering Janice’s descent from everyday girl to mute, troubled woman. I don’t know how accurately this film, directed by Ken Loach, documents its subject but it is definitely a case of “same schizophrenia, different century”.

2021. A retrospective.

This year was spent virus dodging. I met with friends, occasionally, going for walks with Margaret and sometimes Neil and Les. I socially bubbled with Richard, watching DVDs and the very occasional film. I keep in touch with some Contact friends either in person or on Facebook but, for privacy’s sake, won’t go into details.

It was the year of Zoom. The Tyneside Linux User Group met once a month on Zoom. Church services were run on Zoom. Even a Traveller session was run on Zoom.

I am the volunteer reviews editor for the ACCU’s CVu magazine which is published once every two months. Every time CVu is published, I send PDFs of it to my publishing contacts, who in turn contact me when they have titles they would like reviewed. I then arrange for ACCU members to receive review copies who in turn send me their reviews and I, in turn format the reviews correctly and send them to Cvu’s editor. Over the year, I have dabbled with Python, C, bash shell scripting, C++ and Makefiles. In particular, I was interested in how to learn programming languages and how to remain competent in them. I bought some blank revision cards from WH Smiths and created some revision cards for bash shell scripting. Late in the year I committed to reviewing “Learning PHP, MySQL and JavaScript”, something that I will be resuming after the Christmas break.

I continued to run the Computer Wombling Project, even though supply of unwanted computers was next to nothing. I’ve been helping Richard with his wombled PC that runs Ubuntu Linux and LibreOffice.

To counterbalance my I.T. efforts, I read at night. For quite some time I read about how to run roleplaying games. Then I read background material for running Traveller games. Then I started brushing up on particulars of the Traveller TTRPG (Table Top Role Playing Game). I have created a small library of fiction in my spare room, with the hope of returning to fiction one day.

October saw the publication of my technical article, “Stufftar Revisited”, in Overload magazine - available here - and I went on to experiment with the "tar" command. Throughout the year I reviewed these books:-

• “Thriving in a Crowded and Changing World: C++ 2006–2020.
• Software Engineering at Google : Lessons Learned from Programming Over Time
• Effective C By Robert C. Seacord
• Zero to One : Notes on Startups or How to Build the Future”
• How Linux Works: What every Superuser Should Know
• The Kollected Kode Vicious
• Odyssey: The Complete Game Master’s Guide to Campaign Management

The reviews are online and the main page on reviews can be found here. I also dabbled with coding. In December I wrote a brief (438 line, 14 function) program in the C programming language for handling some statistics in Traveller.

I hope you have a prosperous 2022!

Video - 15 Things NOT to say to Someone with Schizphrenia...

 It is just under 15 minutes wrong but oh so relevant...  click here.

The pain of being multilingual.

 I last experimented with the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) about 2015. So, when I received a review copy of the book "Learning PHP, MySQL and JavaScript" (6th Edition)- and its sister title "Learning MySQL" (2nd Edition) I knew that I would have months of study ahead of me.

Being multilingual in computer languages and retaining that knowledge is difficult. One way to retain this knowledge is to have small pet projects in these languages.

That is OK. But what if you are learning a language from scratch? I am currently becoming acquainted with PHP 8.0 and the process of learning another way to handle variables and loops is difficult to retain that knowledge as you sometimes end up wanting to write stuff in the new language in the style of a more familiar language. It isn't an easy problem to crack but this year I bought some revision flash cards from WH Smiths. I started writing questions on the bash scripting language on some of them. When these books arrived, I was reluctant to make the effort to capture questions and answers on PHP - it is a tedious process, to say the least - things that will clarify "How do I do variable interpolation in a string literal in this language?".

I think this approach is going to pay off, with the Questions and Answers acting as an aide-memoire.

Spoons and Willpower

 Some people find life more of a challenge than others. Just simple tasks like getting out of bed, household chores, preparing food, socialising, holding conversations, working all drain willpower.

The idea of "spoons" is that the amount of willpower someone has is measured in spoons, at the beginning of the day. Some spoons are specialised - for instance there might be a limited amount of spoons available in the day for conversations. For more details, click here.

And, if you want tips on conserving spoons, click here.

 Well, I've had two doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine and I can recommend getting vaccinated.

The risks of taking medication

 For a long time, now, people with mental health problems have been faced with a dilemma: take medication that could have really drastic consequences or to forgo that and become extremely unwell.

Now, the whole population has a similar dilemma: take a Covid vaccine or not?

YouTube channel about schizophrenia and schizo-affective disorder

 There is a really good YouTube Channel called "Living Well with Schizophrenia".

Take a look at it here... Living Well with Schizophrenia.

Being mentally unwell.

 Being mentally unwell isn't a hobby or, usually at least, is not like the end of an episode of EastEnders. It is being chased by your demons. Feeling worthless or worse. You sit, lost in inescapable thoughts, time whirring on. Minutes feel like seconds. Crying dry tears. Or sitting, with eyes leaking. Hopefully, you will have retained enough of your sanity to employ coping strategies. Being patient. Eventually things clear. The intrusive thoughts evaporate. The voices go silent. Now you can face the world.

Effects of lockdown

 Well, it is now August. Contact is still closed and my only means of tackling isolation is the Internet.

I am having to use all the coping strategies I had to learn when I left Hospital. It isn't easy and even the smallest of problems seems a huge deal - resulting in anxiety, paranoia and hearing voices. So far I've been able to keep it together.... just. Here's hoping that you, the reader, is coping with this, too.

Well, the whole country is in lockdown, nearly everywhere is shut and Contact is closed as well (for the moment).

Been taking the time to do technical stuff. Finished a couple of C++ book reviews. Upgraded an old computer's memory (that took a lot of effort). The voices came back for a while - sometimes helpful, giving me technical advice, sometimes paranoid.

And my right heel has started to play up, making walking a bit painful.

Leaving the EU

Well, Brexit is continuing. I wonder what will happen in the future.

An update

Despite all the political and economic turmoil, I feel OK. Yes, there are things to worry about or plan for but, within myself, I am OK.

I spend a lot of time doing technical studying and, thanks to some generous book presents from family, will be refurbishing my low-level skills.

Here is a list of the old and the new that I hope to replace it with...

680x0, 80x86 assembly language -> x86_64 assembly language
QMON -> GNU gdb and ddd
GST macro assembler -> GNU assembler or NASM
C68 -> GNU C
Sinclair QL running Qdos -> Standard hardware running Ubuntu Linux
Qjump Pointer Environment -> GTK+

I will be studying the manuals for various tools (such as GNU Make and GNU gdb), will be using other technical books but it looks like Igor Zhirkov's book "Low-Level Programming" will be key in integrating the different tools to do something useful. For C programming there are the usual suspects plus Klemen's 21st Century C and Krause's GTK+ Development.