You know I'm really on the point of giving up this giving up blogging business. At least Kaarina doesn't know that this blog exists (yet! - keep it to yourself will you). But the facts remain:
I have not handed in my final essay (on Chomsky's model of language acquisition in kids).
I have not started revising for my exams in less than four weeks time.
Being closer now, to drawing my pension than to claiming my student grant (remember them!) it amazes me how little I've changed in the last quarter century. I still put off doing my homework. I still find the bit where you have to actually start writing your essay the hardest wall to break through. And worst of all, I still use computers as a means of procrastination.
I remember sitting up all night with (I-kid-u-not) a HP computer with no hard drive and a 3x4" screen creating bouncing-ball simulator programmes using an early verion of Basic. Then there were arcade games: Space Panic was my particular vice -- and not only did this waste time but also money. Even when I got good at it. Later in life I became addicted to pacman, tetris and (of this I am deeply ashamed) minesweeper, the soporific of choice for bored office workers with not enough to do.
And now, how did it get to be nearly noon? I've spent the morning reading blogs, commenting on blogs, writing this blog...and I haven't even showered yet. I need help.
So here's a question for the blogosphere. Is blog-writing a form of obsessive compulsive disorder like nail-biting or cleaning and recleaning your flat? Is it more like a drug, numbing the parts of the brain that would otherwise have to face up to whatever we can’t cope with in ourselves or our world. Or, should we try to convince our bosses, tutors, partners and loved ones that such as I have just written is the creative outpourings of a tortured genius.
Somehow, I don’t think it would wash.
6 comments:
You still interested in recursion?
As part of a graduate planning course I'm supposed to compose a tender in response to an imaginary research brief. This brief is to produce an evaluation of a government programme (on forests) that's coming up to the end of its funding. So, we (a group of students) are supposed to pretend we are a consultancy and to compete to do this evaluation.
I researched government guidance on how to evaluate programmes and projects, The Green Book: appraisal and evaluation in Central Government.
I then searched other relevant sites on evaluation but I have now found myself - TOTALLY LOST. Evaluations get evaluated by evaluated criteria of evaluation at every possible turn and many impossible ones too. "An evaluation report is the documentary evidence of the result of an assessment process whereby one or more competing providers' offerings (proposals or tenders) proceed through ot the next stage of the procurement. The final evaluation report ...
Which is weirder, the multiple, variously fictional identities made possible in cyberspace (that word still in use?) or the variously fictional texts written in the name of government?
Yours,
Alf
Something tells me that you need to get out more, meet some people perhaps...
Alf
I am still interested in recursion and not least, the recursive aspect of managerialism inspired by this government's obsession with targets and performance indicators.
I understand the Finns have an expression: 'we can't all just wash each other's shirts' to question the basis of a "service" economy where nothing tangible is actually produced.
In Blair's Britain, we've gone a step further in the public sector, to create organizations whose main purpose is to produce (preferably favourable) data demonstrating how "productive" the organisation is. In reality the only thing that's getting produced is a kind of shadow product, an image which only remotely reflects reality.
Since levels of funding and so ultimately people's jobs depend entirely on the (brand?) value of their organisations image, what they might think are actually supposed to be DOING (i.e. lending out books, solving crimes, saving lives etc.) is at best an irrelevance, at worst an encumberance to the real job of succeeding in evaluations.
NCI has a point. Thanks. The best thing about this course (planning) has been meeting so many other people who are as pissed off as I am about the various forms of idiocy that pass for professional expertise. We joke about it, do what we can to pass the assingmnents, but we still wonder where we might find jobs that aren't totally cynical or just plain pointless. One guy (from Spain) said he now knew why the UK had such a shortage of planners: it required reading thousands of pages of almost identical, empty drivel that would drive anyone around the bend. If they weren't already.
Cheers, Alf
You think blogging's bad? Wait until you try Facebook!
Hi AntarcticHousehusband
Nice of you to drop by
I've heard all about this and am staying clear so far -- I know at least one face-book all-nighter and when he talks about it, he oscillates between a hopeless junkie and a born-again evangelical ("you must try it - it's great for networking" Yeah Right!.)
Actually, the truth is I did try to set up an account and crashed into the incompetence barrier before I got anywhere. So it goes.
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