Yes, I DID steal the camera.

I admit total responsibility for that. I didn't really get any decent photos (so far, anyway) - Rocky hasn't really flooded, and all I managed to get was a photo of an overflowing weir that I drive past, that's usually empty, and a double rainbow that I haven't uploaded. Unfortunately, it's nowhere near as GOOD as the GIS for 'double rainbow', so I'm not so sure I should be boasting about it.

Jade's been a right bitch for Tharyn. This will be the last time I go away for a month or so, so I'll be home for a bit. Hopefully that'll help. I've got to start contacting the remains of the CardXpress customers around Australia and getting them upgraded to a new PC. That'll have me away from home for about a month (seriously), so I'll probably do that over a couple of trips. Everything seems to go pear shaped when I go away... Not that it's terribly wonderful NOW. Jade's really trying to push her boundaries, and discover where the lines are drawn, and it's not much fun for Tharyn. Me being away so much doesn't help either.

I spent an enjoyable evening talking geek with one of the top geeks from Radiant, aka Breeze. These guys wrote the POS (that's POINT OF SALE, not the other usual meaning of POS 8) software that most Mobil servo's use. We talked much, and drank much beer. I am a bit inebriated at the moment, but please try not to hold that against me 8)

I'm going to have a quick rant, if I may. It's geek, so feel free to ignore it. Greg's doing an IT class at school. They're teaching him Access. Microsoft Access. OK. Yes. I understand that knowing Databases is a good thing, but wouldn't it be better teaching him IMPORTANT stuff? Like 'Filesystems' and 'Locking' and 'CPU Utilization' and, gosh, performance tuning?

The teacher is asking them do to basic Access stuff, but not (it seems to me) explaining WHY they're doing it, or HOW. Yes, I understand that understanding WHY SQL works the way it does is complex, and you need to have a basic idea of SQL to start breaking down the queries into sections, but wouldn't it be better to build from the ground up, rather than from the top down?

How did 'set this field to be an index' become better than 'this is the "most common" field in the table. You're going to want to query this the most. So this needs to be an index. It's called an index because that's what it is. If you're looking for the word "heffalump" in a book, isn't it easier to go to the index and find that "heffalump" is mentioned on pages 38, 299 and 10,293, rather than reading every page in the book to find it'? It's annoying. If you're learning IT stuff, which is basically all maths (and maths is one of the few things that is 'provably true') there shouldn't be any 'I don't know why we do this'.

Another thing that annoyed me is that Greg didn't understand square roots. He's in Year 10. He should by know understand what a square root is. I'm mildly annoyed that his old school let him get this far without knowing what a square root is. I sat down with him and said that it's 'basically the opposite of a "squared"' and drew some diagrams and I hope he grasped it. His homework was doing stuff like (3⁹ x 4³)⁶. That results in an insanely large number. So large that his calculator went into scientific notation, which he didn't understand either (3.996019499 x 10⁴⁸ - I did it quickly here 8).. so I had to explain how that works too. That I DON'T think he understood. Sigh.

When I come back I'm going to spend some time doing some basic maths with him to get him up to speed. There's nothing actually hard here. We're not doing trigonometry or calculus (yet 8) so it's all pretty basic stuff. He's probably not going to enjoy it, but once he gets the basics, all the stuff that he thinks is hard now will become easy.

I'm going to finish this beer and go to bed. G'night.

--Rog