Update on my shunt(s)

Well my attempt at chronicalling my recovery from the op kind of ground to a sudden halt. Once I’d initially got over the op I got dug into finishing off a long overdue website for my cousin’s BMX club which was a race against time to get it finished in time for the launch of the club’s brand new racing track. Got there in the end though, and barring a few minor tweaks and the usual maintenance stuff it’s pretty much okay and my cousin’s highly delighted with the end result. I aims to please!

The stitches in my abdominal wound after the op were slightly problematic, in that when the district nurse tried to take them out, she only got as far as one before deciding my stuffing was liable to come out if she took out any more, and left them in a bit longer. They were in for the full 14 days limit before the body decides they’re most definitely a foreign object and protests, but all was well, and it’s healed very well, infact you pretty much can’t see the scar now already unless you know where to look, and it’s only a couple of months since the op!

As usual after shunt revision surgery involving the distal catheter (the one that goes into the abdomen) I’ve had the usual variety of weird abdominal pains that move around and shift (very amusing game guessing where the next one’s going to pop up!) but they’re settling down, and I only get them occasionally now.  At one point a few weeks ago I was getting some very weird and painful pains in my chest/abdomen/shoulder and was worried that I might have another pulmonary embolism, especially as I’d been off warfarin for a week before the op and then my INR had been way lower than it should have been for weeks afterwards (it’s gone the other way now, and it’s now way too high!), but it turned out to be some weird virus that was doing the rounds which my doc said was causing pleuritic type pain with a lot of people.

I saw my surgeon a couple of weeks ago, and he was very happy with my progress. He’d been slightly concerned about the abdominal wound healing well because he’d had to trim it before stitching, presumably because of all the previous scar tissue, but was very pleased with the result. Unless I have any further problems (fingers crossed!) he doesn’t want to see me for another year – yay! Still waiting for the referral/appointment for a new neurologist, not only to monitor me from an IIH point of view, but to investigate the left side weakness I’ve developed, and he’s going to chase that up for me.

My INR’s still going haywire, as it always does after I’ve been off the warfarin for any reason, and takes ages to settle down again. I’m still needing INR checks every week or so, as it’s either going way too low or way too high, and doesn’t seem to want to stay in range for any length of time. *sigh* Still also waiting for a decision as well from the PCT as to whether they’re going to let my GP prescribe the testing strips for the self-testing machine. *sigh* That’s something I really need to chase up in the new year.

Meanwhile I’ve been having other health related problems (you wouldn’t think there was much else left for me to get, and that I’ve already used up all of the conditions known by TLA (three letter acronyms), but no!) and I’m hoping to get a referral to a specialist in the new year. More on that later though.

On Swatch’sofficial website, right up at the top, next to the breadcrumb navigation, is a little line that reads “@[insert relevant number here] .beats” WTF?! you’re probably thinking. What’s a .beat? Well…

Swatch has reinvented time with INTERNET TIME. Today’s lifestyle which demands simultaneous communication with different parts of the world via phones, Internet, e-mail, video-conferencing, and a host of other tools requires a truly revolutionary way of looking at and managing time. Hence, a completely new global concept of time that eliminates time zones and geographical differences was created.

That’s so true. A while back the inhabitants of one of my forums decided to try and break the record for the number of forum members simultaneously online, and so an arrangement was made that at 9pm on Friday everyone would make sure they were online. Naturally this was met with a chorus of “Hold on…”s from the US contingent, and “Uh?” from the Australian brigade, followed by much scurrying about to try and work out what time that was in their local time. Here’s something that sounds like it could do with being arranged in “internet time”, but what is “internet time”?

INTERNET TIME, an innovative, new unit of time, measured in units called “.beats” was founded on the 23rd of October 1998. On that day, Biel Mean Time (BMT) was inaugurated in a ceremony marked by the presence of N.G. Hayek, President and CEO of the Swatch Group, G.N. Hayek, President of Swatch Ltd. and Nicholas Negroponte, founder and director of the Media Lab at M.I.T.

Hmmmm….still a bit light on details isn’t it? Apart from Biel now appears to be the centre of the universe. So off to Wikipedia we go in search of further information on this strange new thing (except that it’s not that new) called “internet time”. Wikipedia is a little more
forthcoming on the details of what this “internet time” malarkey is all about. Apparently,

• instead of hours and minutes, the day is divided up into 1000 parts called “beats”
• each beat lasts 1 minute and 26.4 seconds
• there are no time zones; instead, the new time scale of Biel Mean Time (BMT) is used, based on the company’s headquarters in Biel, Switzerland (equivalent to Central European Time)
• in it’s notation; for example, “@248″ indicates a time 248 beats after midnight, equivalent to a fractional day of 0.248 CET, or 4:57:07.2 UTC
• Swatch doesn’t specify units smaller than one beat, but others have extended the standard by adding “centibeats” or “sub-beats” as a decimal fraction, for extended precision: @248.00
• like UTC, Internet time is the same throughout the world. For example, when the time is 875 .beats, or @875, in New York, it is also @875 in Tokyo

I have to admit that I like the idea of .beats. There’s something somehow kind of appealing about the idea of using something “underground” that the world outside the geeky confines of the internet doesn’t understand – hell, .beats even sounds kinda cool and geeky, and having one universal time rather than saying, “Well we’ll meet at 6pm…that’s 4pm in your time, and 2am in your time over there…” sound much better. “Meetcha @650 .beats” sounds infinitely more geeky and cool in comparison.

Now a debate on the T175 course forum a while back was on what was the most important ICT invention – ever? My contribution to the discussion? Well I was torn between the humble microchip and the internet. Now of course the basis of the internet and the HTTP protocol was already in place when the web went and got itself invented – wouldn’t have really worked without it, and fabulous though the HTTP protocol is, if you’re of a geeky bent, without the invention of the web to sit on top of it, and the hyperlink and other hypermedia, it would all be a bit dull. I’m guessing that when people said the greatest ICT invention was the internet, they probably meant the web, and of course in everyday usage the two terms tend to be used interchangeably.

The web has undoubtedly changed the way we communicate, turning the world into a global village, and changed how we interact with so many things from banking and shopping online, to finding information, finding friends, and of course boring the whole world to death with our mundane ramblings on many millions of blogs Of course with good, always comes evil, and into that category falls MySpace, link farms, and Bebo (just three random picks from my list of web annoyances). Of course I was arguing the case for the humble microchip on the grounds that without the microchip and reasonably priced and sized computing power, computers would still be the size of small houses and the play things of scientists and academics.

Now apart from MySpace, there are obviously other disadvantages, or things that aren’t so good about the web. There’s online fraud for a start (I too have started getting inundated with emails from banks I don’t even have accounts with warning me my account’s been locked until I click on this special link and hand over all my personal details and passwords to some Lithuanian con artist). Communicating with anyone, anywhere in the world is probably one of the greatest parts of the web, though putting yourself in ‘Skype Me’ mode is just asking for trouble, and you might as well change all your online avatars to a sign reading “Skype Me – I like talking to perverts from Brazil” or some such like!

Now this is just a wild shot in he dark here, but I guessing that with the invention of “internet time”, Swatch’s marketing people imagined all of those people making arrangements to chat with their new Brazilian friend who’s just taken up their invitation to “Skype them” would be falling over themselves to adopt this new “internet time”, and would of course need a watch capable of displaying said “internet time”, rush out and buy this terrific new invention, and in the process make another few squillion francs for those clever little Swiss. The fact is though that “internet time” never really took off in a big way, and have never really been adopted by geeks en masse.

Why? The answer though I suspect is far simpler than no-one being interested in an “internet time”, but as we discovered from the chorus of “Hold on…”s and “Uh?”s when a few of us tried to arrange a global meeting. The fact is that simply whether you call them .beats, .dots, .nets, or anything else with a ‘.’ in front of it, though you can arrange a meet-up with your new Brazilian friend @640 .beat, though it may be @640 .beat for everyone with a clever little Swiss watch, somewhere in the world @640 .beat is still going to be stupid o’clock. That’s the fundamental flaw of web communication.

Now if those clever little Swiss marketeers could come up with a time machine, then I suspect they’d be really onto something.

I should point out that this is not the recommended way to undertake Open University courses. Generally accepted wisdom states that you should at least try to make some attempt to keep up with the course timetable, and not totally forget when you’ve got assignments due in and have to rummage around to check whether you’ve missed anything vital and whether your attendance at a tutorial is required or anything. Nevertheless, after the gigantic struggle I had trying to complete both TMA1 for T175 (the networked living etc. course) and TMA3 for M150 (the computing and data one) I was totally exhausted, having finished the T175 assignment which had been due in two days after the horrendous experience that was M150 TMA3 at some ungodly hour in the morning of the day it was due in, and then getting up four hours later to go to work. This is not a recommended way to complete OU TMAs (tutor marked assignments).

And so, last weekend I found myself three and a half units behind on M150, and a whole block behind on T175. Now right since starting T175 in some ways I wished I’d never started it. It wasn’t that the course didn’t interest me, but the growing realisation that these days in my opiate induced fog, trying to do two courses at once just doesn’t work. Not with all my other commitments anyway. Unfortunately I realised this too late, a few days into the course, by which time it was too late to back out, and I was stuck with paying £380 whether I finished the course or not. For the past couple of weeks I’ve been seriously thinking that still dropping T175 might be wise, but I knew in my heart that stubborn as I am I’d probably battle on with it to the bitter end anyway, and so last weekend I set to trying to catch up.

So last weekend, a block behind off I set. Block 2 of the course is presented entirely online, so on the positive side I didn’t have to move from my customary position on the sofa-bed. About six hours later I finished the block. How? A hell of a lot of skim-reading, and much missing out of practical exercises. It’s lucky that the first part of T175 virtually mirrors the early parts of M150, and having been a webbie for some years now and knowing my way round HTML, there was nothing new in the unit, so it was simply a matter of making sure I was up to speed on the block’s terminology and themes (the OU likes “themes”). That done, I could then embark on the CMA, a multiple choice list of questions, as the CMA’s the first of three assignments due in in the very near future. The CMA didn’t present many problems. The main one was figuring out that the sneaky course team have taken a mix and match approach in the answers provided to pick from for each question as to whether to use 1000 or 1024 for a “kilo”-whatever, and whether equally sneakily we’re referring to k’s, K’s, b’s or B’s – bits and bytes.

Inevitably though towards the end of the week with the completion of the CMA Bliss took over again though, and the past couple of days have been spent largely debating literature online and pulling apart every theme and symbolism, every word and meaning in a piece of literature. I’m classing that as not goofing off and wasting valuable study time though on the grounds it’s developing my analytical and debating skills.

Speaking of which, Thursday I found myself embroiled in an online chat on the course forums for one of the TMA questions discussing to what extent virtual worlds are replacing real ones. It’s all part of us comparing the relative merits and drawbacks of synchronous versus asynchronous communication methods. *yawn* Actually, it was quite interesting, even though there were only three of us in on the chat, though we did go off at a bit of a tangent about virtual worlds and such like. It’d probably make a reasonably interesting blog post, though of course it’ll have to wait until after 24th April and the TMA’s cut-off date for submission, as probably a large portion of it would be similar to what I’ll end up writing as my TMA answer. I also discovered this here little blog of mine has found another reader when I found myself responding to another student in the chat area of the course forums and explaining that web design’s not all beer and skittles, or in this case WYSIWYG editors and pocketing huge bank balances. Said student was impressed by my “jack of all trades and master of none” approach to slinging websites together, and had followed my sig link to here and enjoyed my demented ramblings. It takes all sorts I guess.

The one thing the chat TMA discussion did do though was kick-start me back into learning mode and kind of topped my enthusiasm reservoirs back up. I was beginning to wonder what the whole point of it all was, and why I was bothering, but the learning spirit in me’s been kicked back into life again for now. Yes, I know that getting so far behind and then having to frantically work to get caught back up isn’t the recommended way to do it, but I’ve never been one for playing by the rules, and for me this works. I needed time to chill, to re-charge my batteries a bit, and to socialise a bit, and while the docs have been trying to drum the idea of pacing myself into me for years, I often work best when I’m under pressure.

Anyhow, I digress. A large part of the next TMA for T175 seems to centre around the whole concept of “reflective learning”, and as I’ve mentioned before, we’re supposed to be keeping a journal of our learning experiences. The OU’s very big on “reflective learning”. Small problem with that though – I just ain’t got the hours in the day to analyse my learning experiences to the nth degree! Reflective learning’s a nice idea in principle, but I’d imagine that most students, particularly mature distance learning students with jobs and families and other responsibilities simply don’t have the luxury of the time to engage in an in-depth analysis of quite how they feel about a particular unit, or how they might read it differently next time – you fit it in with your life whenever you can grab a few minutes, and hope for the best. You’re supposed to draw up a study timetable, but in the amount of time it takes you to figure out where you can fit Unit 5 in between mowing the lawn and going to to supermarket, you could have answered half a TMA question already!

I guess it doesn’t help that for the last fifteen years or so I’ve been studying in some form or another and

I’ve been spending a lot of time these last few weeks reading, and just generally chilling out, and I’d forgotten how good that feels, just to do nothing in particular, and not worry that you should be doing something else (of course being me I did worry that I should be doing something else though, though I’ve managed to quash those thoughts mostly and chill). My current web clients are both in the “writing content” stage, so until I get that from them there’s nothing much doing there. Last week, after saying that I was going to finish off M150 as I’m now so close to the end of the course, but that I was just going to skim read the course materials for both courses, and just do enough to get me through the assignments, I decided that I liked this chilled new me, and I was going to drop T175 as I really don’t need the stress of juggling two courses.

I got my marked assignment back for M150 last week though, and I’ve no idea how I managed it, but I got a fairly respectable 51% which is damned near amazing as it was the programming assignment (Javascript) and I didn’t complete half the questions on the grounds that I couldn’t see the benefit in spending hours trying to get damned Javascript programs to work when I hate the language with a vengeance, and rarely use it. Tonight though I got my result back for the first T175 assignment, and I got 93% for that!

So now I’m feeling slightly guilty at the thought of just dropping it, when after May when the final M150 assignment’s gone in it’ll just be T175 to concentrate on. With a mark of 93% for the first assignment I’m thinking maybe it’d be silly to drop it. Hence the dilemma – to drop, or not to drop?

Now having previously done half a teaching degree, and 90% of a psychology degree (which I later combined to make one degree) I am very familiar with the concept of learning journals. Week 1, you fill it in nicely, by the book, dotting all the t’s and crossing all the i’s. Week 2, you fill most of it in but then get distracted by an RSS feed item and never quite get round to finishing it (though admittedly when I started my first degree RSS feeds hadn’t been invented, but that’s poetic licence for you ). Week 3, you realise you never finished off week 2 but think, what the hell, and start on week 3 anyway, but give up half way through when you realise Neighbours starts in 2 minutes. Week 4, you decide you really can’t be arsed with all this palaver every week and decide to give it a miss.

So far my experience of T175 suggests that it’s aimed at those who’ve no idea what a computer is, or the foggiest inkling of what that internet thing might be about. So far we’ve learned that a computer’s a very clever thing that can do all sorts of clever stuff, and has things like keyboards and mice, and screens attached, but computers also come in many other guises like cash machines, and cash registers, and medical equipment and all sorts of other stuff. We’ve learned that computers talk to each other in 0s and 1s, and that information is actually data, and that’s made up of many bytes, or if you’re a real masochist, many, many more bits. We’ve learned how to talk to each other on online message boards, and what smileys are. Rearrange the following words to make a well known saying: eggs teaching to grandmother your suck.

Actually, I don’t have a problem with that. The beauty of OU courses and qualifications is that you don’t need any prior qualifications to start an OU degree, and like universities the country wide, the OU uses it’s level 1 courses (and that’s what T175 is) to make sure everyone’s reading from the same hymn sheet and all have the same basic knowledge. Your traditional bricks and mortar universities do exactly the same with their first year courses, only it’s slightly easier for them because they at least know that everyone’s going to have a similar educational background, as usually their entrance requirements insist on specified ‘A’ levels. For the OU, they can make no such assumptions. Their students may have a PhD in astrophysics, or they may have a bronze swimming certificate. The only qualification you need to get yourself onto an OU course is to be over 18 years of age.

Coach not thy parent’s mother to extract
The embryonic juices of the fowl by suction.
That lady can the deed perform,
Quite independent of thy kind instruction

What I do object to, apart from being told I should keep a learning journal when from experience I know that their value is at best questionable (”what I have learned this week”: what you told me I would in the chapter summary, “lessons for the future”: for christ’s sake, don’t do any more level 1 courses!) is being charged £380 for the privilege of being taught “good netiquette” (and I beg to differ, a good flame row can be highly entertaining Mr Tutor, especially if you started the whole thing off, lit the blue touch-paper, and then stood well back and watched the ensuing chaos! ) especially when the M150: Data, computing and information course covers so much of the same ground, at least in the early blocks. It gets worse though, for the first TMA (Tutor Marked Assignment) in T175, 25% of the marks are for having a discussion on the tutor group forum with the others in your course (of course using the principles of good netiquette). Even worse, 5 marks out of those 25% are awarded for being able to copy and paste a message you’ve posted on the course forum into your answer document!

One of the stated learning outcomes for the M150 course is, “You will learn how data stored all over the world in various archives can be found using a search engine.” Can you? Wow! Where can I find me one of them? Like I said, I know that they can’t assume that students necessarily have any prior computing knowledge. Surely though, given that the courses are both all about computers, that information on the courses can be found on the OU’s website (which you must have known how to find somehow), that a lot of the learning resources are on the site, and again that the courses are all about computers, it might be fair to assume that students have at least a rudimentary grasp of what a computer is and how to use that internet wotsit?

M150 though lurches straight from teaching your grandmother to use a search engine and such like though into the basics of programming. Bit of a large leap there. The course team’s idea of teaching basic programming concepts such as if/else loops, while loops etc. is to teach us “basic” javascript. Having recently finished the third M150 TMA, three quarters of which is writing small javascript “programs” from scratch, I can see why the majority of students who drop out of M150 do so right around the time of TMA03. If I hadn’t the foggiest idea what a search engine was and suddenly I was confronted with a page full of javascript, I’d probably throw in the towel too. Personally, I came to the conclusion that given that none of the TMAs on the course are marked on a pass-fail basis, and you need only an overall average of over 40% across all the TMAs to pass the course, that life was to short to spend hour upon hour battling away with javascript that refuses to work, spectacularly unhelpful error messages, and course tutors whose idea of “helping” us through this section of the course is to repeat ad nauseum, “You need to apply the principles of programming you read about in units 7 and 8, but you won’t find a similar solution anywhere in the course materials. Think about the principles you’ve learned.” Logical I usually am (fairly anyway), but psychic I ain’t!

While I understand the concept of if/else loops, and while’s and for’s and such like, and generally don’t have a problem with them when it comes to PHP, with javascript, I have a mental block. I did a javascript course (which they call “client side development”) as part of the Certificate in Web Applications Development and never really managed to get the hang of it fully then, though I managed enough to pass the course, and as I use javascript so infrequently, and there’s an abundance of it on the web free to copy and paste, and I understand it enough to be able to tweak pre-existing scripts to do what I want them to do, I see no need to kill myself trying to do a TMA question that’s tiny in the scheme of things.

Which leads me on to my next gripe around OU ‘TT’ courses, the technology and computing courses. When I did my first degree, it consisted wholly of 60-point courses. An OU 60-point course is the equivalent of half a year full-time at a traditional university, and with the OU is 8 months long. An OU honours degree requires a total of at least 360 points worth of courses. For the 60-point courses they recommended 14 hours of study a week. Now with the 30-point courses, again 8 months long, I’m currently doing (which certainly aren’t half the price of the 60 point ones) they recommend an average of 8 hours of study a week, admittedly close to half of 14 hours for a full 60-point course, but within those courses, you also have 5 TMAs to do, and at least one CMA (computer marked assignment – a multiple-choice affair), and T175 has more. Then you have an ECA, an end of course assignment, which in my experience takes considerably more than 8 hours and a week’s work to do justice to. Add those together and against a 60-point course with say 7 TMAs and an exam, at 14 hours a week, for two 30-point courses done together, you’ve a minimum of 10 TMAs, at least 2 CMAs, and two ECAs, and there’s no comparison between the workload.

For the 10-point courses that make up the Web Apps certificate the situation is even worse. Each of the six courses that make up the qualification is 10-12 weeks long. During that time you lurch from knowing zero to very little about the subject in hand (though if you’re a total newbie to web design and getting down and dirty with the code, forget it!) to having an ECA to do consisting of putting together a series of pages/a series of pages making up a complete basic application, depending on the course. Along the way you’re learning in depth about whichever language is the subject of the course (or two in the case of the databases course, as you’re learning the principles of relational database design and MySQL, along with Coldfusion Express to be able to interact with the database you’ve just created) and doing three CMAs as well. The ECAs alone take at least two week’s solid work to do in my experience.

Don’t get me wrong; though my friends and family no doubt recall me complaining bitterly about each course at some point in my study of it, I enjoyed doing the Web Apps certificate immensely, possibly with the exception of the javascript one and the ASP one (which I cheated with on the ECA because I couldn’t figure out how to set the required cookie using VB Script, to get you into the rest of the app, so I used javascript instead). I learned a hell of a lot from doing it, and it forced me to learn stuff I might otherwise have put off, or stayed content with using pre-built apps for, and the fact that during the course of all but one of the courses I ended up either in hospital or having some sort of medical disaster meant it was a small miracle I managed to pass all of the courses. The amount of work required for those courses though in no way is reflected in the credit available on the successful completion of them. Somewhere in it’s calculations the team responsible for the OU’s ‘T’ and ‘TT’ courses seem to have seriously lost the plot. I don’t know of another OU qualification that in the OUSA (OU Student’s Association) section of the OU’s conferencing facility has a forum dedicated to it; the “Web Apps Survivors” forum! It’s a badge of honour completing that qualification with your sanity still intact.

So, back to the learning journal. I’m a firm believer in not re-inventing the wheel when there’s nothing wrong with the round shape it is already, so as far as a learning journal’s concerned, if I’ve anything of any importance/interest to say on the subject of my OU studies, I’ll be saying it here. What have I learned already? Well, apart from a few interesting bits of trivia I didn’t already know that may come in useful for pub quizzes, the main thing I’ve learned is that probably doing things arse about tit and doing a qualification that involves level 3 courses, and then embarking on another degree and going back to level 1 courses probably isn’t the best way to go about things. Will I be carrying on and completing the whole degree as I’d intended? Time will tell. There are a number of factors to take into consideration, including not only my health situation, but the financial position with the government’s latest harebrained decision on the funding of equivalent level qualifications. For the moment I’ll be quite happy to get through M150 and T175 without doing serious bodily harm to the course team.

When my pressure’s high I have these weird kind of absences where I’m aware of what’s going on around me, but it doesn’t make much sense to me, and I have trouble responding to things. The first time it happened not long after I was diagnosed with IIH my mum thought I’d had a stroke or something. It’s so frustrating because it’s as though something else takes over my body, something I don’t have any control over.

The OU course I’m doing at the moment, it’s a level 1 course for christ’s sake! I should be able to do it standing on my head, and the first couple of assignments I got marks in the 90’s. Come the third assignment though, the programming one, and everything I ever knew goes out of my head. My brain’s like this tiny little walnut rattling around in my head. Okay, I hate javascript with a vengeance, and I very rarely use it, mainly due to the accessibility problems with it, but having done javascript before I should know this stuff – it’s basic ‘while’ and ‘for’ loops. Throw in a few conditionals and the job’s a good one, but my brain just isn’t making the connections. Too many bad pings.

I’ve never really fully got to grips with javascript, I’m much more at home with PHP, and with javascript even after the previous javascript courses I’ve done, though I knew enough to know what it was doing when I saw it, I’ve always struggled actually writing it myself. This isn’t even complicated stuff though, and it’s so damned frustrating because at times I feel I’m nearly there and it almost comes, but I just can’t get the final pieces of the puzzle together and actually get the program working. I don’t think I’m a natural programmer. I haven’t got the patience for bug hunting, and my code tends to be more of a ramshackle Heath Robinson kind of affair rather than the “elegant code” that real programmers talk about.

I’m giving this assignment one more try tonight though in the hope that something will connect, for tomorrow it’s back to designing, and the day begins with a load of Photoshopping to try and rescue some half decent photos from a load of complete rubbish I’ve been sent for a site.

Like they say; tomorrow’s another day.