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Unfortunetly on Sunday I stayed up later than I should have so missed my early morning writing tutorial appointment on Monday, because I slept later than I planned too. I got a good ten hours of sleep though showing that I am probably not depressed based on sleep disturbances as a depression symptom. But I made it to my psychologist appointment and basically decided to bring my study load down next term to two courses, one in law and one in statistics. This will mean I will graduate earlist by the end of fall 2005. I also made it in to see my math teacher and ask for some help but he hasn't been able to help much beyond pointing out errors in my MATLAB code which don't seem to work even with his corrections. Also he pointed out my derivative errors for my implicit backwards Euler solution. I also attended a scholarship awarding and bumped into an old physical geography professor who is working as a dean now. He recognised me after some 20 years of not seeing me which I think is amazing but then I had won this scholarship two years ago so he could have seen my name recently. Also I have sent him an occassional email recently.
I just completed my paper, adding a few more sentences from yesterday, and also last night I had changed all the ibids and supra's to italics, and will hand it in later today as I am up all night getting some more quiet reading done. I also just checked my student email account and found out that the professor in our drug law course has basically canceled class tomorrow although we must show up for five minutes or so to do a class evaluation. This is good because this will mean I can possibly get home by 12:30 and be asleep by 1 PM for a 26 hour day and also I don't need to do important in class verbal interaction stuff at the end of this day. That is always when I babble at the end of long days and it is never good for in class talking. This is the good news that the day won't last until 4 PM today. This sleep adjustment was made as well as cancelling my attendence at our role playing game this week so that I can make it to my early morning Thursday class because it is the last class and we will have the all important exam review in Thursday's class.
Well since I got my paper completed yesterday I have been not studying. But I did not make all my study goals yesterday. I did not complete any more math questions and had meant to complete one more yesterday. I did contact the professor by email and made an appointment to see him today just before my school psychologist appointment. Then after seeing the school psychologist who is really my only psychologist these days, I am going to an awarding of a scholarship ceremony. E whose is a chair person and a film student is winning the scholarship this year that I won in 2002. I have to brief a case too before Tuesday and in the morning late today I have a late morning appointment with a writting tutor to go over my drug law paper.
My drug law paper was my most important and immediate deadline. It is natural to relax a little after I got that done. I have been up for 23 hours now. I really should sleep now and get up at 9 am. I have all my school work printed out that I need tomorrow. I will also pick up some assigments to be graded.
I am still being affected by the schizophrenia's ambivalence. What I can't decide is " am I a cop or not?" I tell everyone I can't be a cop because I can't drive or may be can't safely operate a weapon. But who knows about the police gun thing. I also can't decide on school courses for next term. It is better when I do decide ahead of time and stick to that decision. I am figuring that a 10 hour schedule of classes on one day is too much so studying statistics next term no longer looks good. The opposite studying three law courses doesn't make sense as I don't really need that many credits in law. I did a SAS program of my own to solve a problem a few hours ago late at night on Sunday. Maybe I only need one law course next term and my honours paper. It might be good to reduce my stress levels and I might find more time to do things I have been letting go of like writing science fiction, radical union administration, volunteering, playing music, getting certified in computer skills. Ya I'll only study two law credits next term. But I will wait until after seeing the psychologist tomorrow and perhaps wait until I get my grades near the end of December.
I guess I don't care about shopping on Sunday because that is what I did today. First I got my term paper written in final draft. I also got some Dreamweaver stuff done. This was the first time I had used dreamweaver. I am going to read about it during the break. I called up a friend after completing some school work at home. I asked him if we could go to chapters to browse. He had to go buy long johns at a certain mall. I had been considering going to that mall too so I agreed. I got us some Via Rail branded roll on luggage and got myself long johns too. But I could not find Aladin Sane the old David Bowie LP.
I had a tutorial lab yesterday in MATLAB and Euler & Runga Kutta methods. I completed it late Thursday night early Friday morning as I again shift my sleep to days over the weekend. I am up now late Friday night until mid-day Saturday. I am fairly good at programming computers and did good MATLAB code for school work. I am doing two linux oerating system installs tonight. I got the Debian 3 r2 installed on an old IBM 486 Thinkpad. I am just about to spend some time installing Fedora core 3 on my IBM PC server.
Yesterday was buy nothing day. The radicals at school had a free store and I got myself a calculator and then gave it to J later in the evening. I also got a palm handwriting computer in Chinese that is totally useless for me just like half the stuff I buy.
I am happy with school right now. Soon I will be able to say another successful school term completed. I have one more math assignment to do and then an exam for my numerical analysis course. I have to polish up my term paper in drug law and then write a take home exam. I have to complete by January a paper comparing US and Canadian law on hackers. I also have to write, again by the time school starts again, a legal brief of a Canadian hacker case from 1980.
My friends came by tonight as usual. It wasn't until midnight that everyone had left. A bus driver had tried to detain my friends. They had a bad day. We began to discuss hording. I practiced active listening and support skills with my friends. My friends came over in two waves tonight. The first group of two wanted food so we ordered Lebanese food. My wife also wanted take out. Then the other two came late because of the bus incident. We read papers, books and magazines. J read my term paper and thought it was good. C was very depressed. I cleaned up the recycling.
I really was getting upset with the school's students with disAbilties Centre but today the counselor helped me proof read my drug law paper and I am doing well now.
Later today I give a lab but my teaching assistant work is winding down now. I have a couple of more assigments to grade but this week was the last week giving labs for one of my assigned courses.
I missed my morning class again this morning because I was up late last night grading assignments. I am not sure but next term I may study only statistics courses basically on only one day of the week. I will have 8 hours of class on Monday's if I choose this plan. Then only 3 hours on Wednesday's. I would need to put my legal studies on hold to do this intense statistics studies but maybe at this point in my studies that is a good idea. Whatever I do next term I won't have early morning classes.
My dad probably knows more about computers than I do given that he works as an experimental physicist. I do help him with computers when I visit. He is switching to Linux and is getting himself a Macintosh powerbook. I am fine for computers right now with my IBM laptop and my eMac desktop. I also have an old PC server running winNT 4 and Fedora Linux.
I haven't heard from my brother lately. This is normal. I typically talk to him only once or twice a month. We sometimes chat on iChat on our Macs. Sometimes we talk on the phone. We only see each other a few times a year. I haven't seen him since June now. He has a family of his own. Last time we chatted I told him about hypo mania. I have been emailing his kids as they use the computer more now. I have been sending them oceanography web sites to read. It is amazing they are growing up in this new on-line world.
I got a lot of my math homework figured out and written up. I did use MATLAB on my windows laptop and printed a nice copy of a graph with a title and properly labeled axis.
I also rewrote my drug law term paper and am getting it much clearer now. I have been scoring low in this course due to muddled writing. My counselor in the disabled students centre has not been much help only saying that everyone has poor writing without editorial or proof reading help. I need to get some proof reading help before next Tuesday.
In my computer crime course I am continuing to read a lot. I am quite proud of my studies and doing them well enough.
Given that both my wife and I have schizophrenia and given that schizophrenia can be like homelessness we need to dress warmly over winter. Last Christmas my dad gave me a new leather jacket with liner and I have been wearing it in spring and fall and last winter on warm days. Also last winter both my wife and I bought new parkas. We now need to get her's dry cleaned before it gets very cold. We have both started to wear our parkas. Last week I bought new underwear and today we are going to buy my wife some underwear. I also bought a nice pair of tall winter boots and then bought knee high socks to wear with them. They are like star trek boots and are also kind of militant looking maybe a punk fashion item. My family helped me pay for them a little. I bought leather protection spray and polish for them too and applied that stuff to the boots.
I am up over night on Saturday night. I spent about 45 minutes surfing ecommerce web sites looking for a PDA cell phone. I then got down to completing my legislative review of computer crime law in Canada. I got one paragraph written. I still need to work on my drug law essay tonight. My topic is forced v. voluntary treatment for drug addictions and the moral aspects of this debate.
I did get my MATLAB code to work for my numerical integration homework. I should be able to get this homework done for Monday.
I will also read about Dreamweaver and other web work topics tonight. I hope to read about SAS and also MySQL. I will also read about emergency psychiatry and learned the Mini mental status exam this past week and tried it out on my wife and R who are both normal scoring above 24 on the exam. I will also read computing literature in terms of the history of computing and ethical aspects of computing. I will also start to organise my notes for the numerical analysis exam.
I had a bad week thinking of giving up on the legal studies but I am back on track now. It was just that I had some poor written work in one law course and scored only C on that work. It is nice to score A but I guess I can't always do this. But in math I scored a perfect 10/10 on some work. I saw an academic counselor and she guessed that perhaps my skills are in math and statistics. If I want to study a lot of statistics next term I need to take a break from legal studies but if I want to get a move on and complete my second BA by the end of next summer I need to keep studying legal studies next term.
We had a quiet evening at a relatives house where we ate dinner and talked. We did get into a discussion of manic depression. I had training in manic depression a few weeks ago. The kids at the party played Hoyles card games on the computer. We got some extra cat food and kitty litter. I felt quite relaxed and not embarrassed.
I am feeling good. My professor had agreed earlier in the term to grant me a stress break or an extension to homework deadlines if I needed one. This week I took him up on that offer. So I have till Monday to hand in my numerical integration assignment. I spent last night trying to answer the questions on this assignment. I stayed up to 4 am this morning.
I also last night rewrote a lot of my term paper for my drug law course. It is looking good now but maybe not on topic enough or clear enough. Clarity and lack of muddled thinking will be very important with this professor.
Since this blog has been off line for about three almost four weeks I should update you the reader on my school work. I am still taking two law courses and one mathematics course at Carleton University.
One of the law courses is a drug law course and I have completed about 30% of the work for this course. I have put in about 30 hours outside of the class room for this course so far on those assignments that are completed. I have also put in another amount of hours on my term paper. I have also put in about 1 hour for every class room hour reading the weekly readings. I have only missed one class in this drug law course because of night shift hours messing up my schedule. This was last week.
In my other law course I have been reading widely but most concentrating on getting one particular book read completely. I have about 13 pages written in a 60 page paper. I am thinking today of withdrawing from this course for next term.
In my math course in numerical analysis which was a real test case course because it has two 8:30 am classes a week I have done so so. I mean at first I made all my classes and scored poorly on assignments. By now I have missed about four classes and my marks have come up considerably back to an honours level. I enjoy the lectures and can interact well with the professor in the classroom. I also seem fairly good at MATLAB programming. I did get a copy of MATLAB for my home use. I have my fifth assignment due tomorrow and will be doing it tonight but have already started fifty percent of the work. I don't put a lot of outside the classroom work into this math course but that could change by the exam and end of term.
Other than keeping the students work private and confidential I have no real restrictions on writing here about my statistics teaching. I worked for three hours in the labs this week plus one hour in the lab today preparing for the lab. I solved a confidence interval question for the binomial distribution and wrote it on the blackboard. I then just dealt with questions as the students asked them. I then collected the assignments and now must grade them.
I can't really comment on my security guard work on-line. There are agreements I have there at that job to keep what I see and hear there confidential.
At my volunteering I have massive amounts of confidentiality required. I can't write here either about some of my friends because they are lonley and hurting and writing about them makes them hurt even more. But not all my friends are like this. R for instance reads what I write here sometimes and has no problems with it. J and C also do not mind although they only read this blog in hard copy from time to time. My wife doesn't read much but I don't think she minds much because I also use a discretion when writing about her or other members of my family.
In my web mastering work I don't really have to keep anything quiet. In my union volunteering I also don't need to keep too much quiet but there are some things that only other members of the union are allowed to know.
I have early morning class again today but you know what? I am up for it. I have steadily improved my math marks this term. I have seen a decline though in my law marks. I just dont have time for all these studies. As much as I like subjects and find them interesting I can't do everything.
Next term I am considering only math and statistics studies. Of course, the subjects I want to study are interesting as are law courses next term. I am seeing an academic counselor this morning to discuss this. I sent email out on Tuesday night asking some school people for help with this. I also have an appointment with a school psychologist to see about the stress levels I am under. My wife and I are seeing our psychiatrist in an appointment together soon.
I have two hours to give labs today at school. I prepared on Monday by attending the same lab while the professors gave it. I took notes and printed them off this morning. I am not working until 10:30. This work has been going well. Our union has a tentative agreement now with the university but we have to vote on it, still.
I have a meeting at city hall today in the afternoon. This is volunteer work. I will then go out a play AD&D in the evening.
Looks like we are back on-line. I will write more later. I have a busy day at school today. Not sure I will have any more time this morning to do more than this entry. I wasn't sure when we would be back on-line.