Regarding the "test" I mentioned at the end of the last post, it has been hopelessly failed within a couple of days. I think it was sometime yesterday that I realized that something had popped inside, and that, as always, I was going insane from sitting in my room and trying to focus on some dry piece of theory. It's no surprise I get so insane, considering how boring I normally find this week. I don't think things can get as bad as they did last year though; put that down to the subjects getting mildly more interesting as the years go by. Maybe I am also learning how to keep my interest sustained, though I wouldn't bet on it. There were periods today where I could have easily flung my book on design patterns out of the window. Imagine that! There comes a point when the abstract just overwhelms you, and one feels positively suffocated. I was attempting to resolve a very common problem, namely determining the difference between the various creational patterns. After reading class names such as "ConcreteBuilder" for more than a few hours, I tend to get very restless and most agitated. Yet I somehow came across this snippet from an O'Reilly book which helped calm down my boiling blood. Mild humour and Zen are certainly the best way to make me see straight, and more amazingly, I think I finally understand the decorator pattern. It's funny that you can stare at something for months and months, and still have only a vague idea of what it really means. But the image in the aforementioned book with the overlapping condiments suddenly made things click. As such, it's left me feeling positive, as though I have accomplished something today (which isn't true by a long stretch of the imagination).

I sometimes wish that there were more books and resources that did away with the omnipotent voice and instead attempt to actually engage the reader. Both have their place; after all, I probably wouldn't reach for the O'Reilly book for a five-second refresher on Abstract Factory. But after spending a day of wading through dry (though no doubt correct) technical documents, I am a little sick of how unfriendly some of them are. By this I simply mean that I wish that there were more technical books that made one feel some sort of connection with the author, and helped the reader really understand things. As an example, I remember reading the book Design Patterns Explained (wow, lots of technical books huh?*), and the author mentioned at the start of his explanation of the Bridge pattern (to paraphrase): "When I first read the GoF description, my initial reaction was 'I understand all the words in that sentence, but I don't know what it means!'". After that, he proceeded to walk one through the rationale behind bridge in a clear, concrete fashion. It is certainly a more useful learning process than meditating on "separate abstraction from implementation"!

Coming back to getting bored with studying, there's something to be said about the attitude with which one approaches such things, of course. If I may employ a rusty cliche, it's very much the forest and the trees analogy. I can't say that all my boredom these past few days has been because I haven't grasped the bigger picture, but most of the time, in retrospect, I think my boredom stems from a fixation on some small section that I feel I must somehow master. When combined with a lack of sleep and a mild but ever-growing sensation of hunger, things can quickly get out of hand. As with all things, knowledge of this does not by itself hold the key to victory. The problem is that if I do try to pursue ideas to help shape the big-picture, there is a part of me that asks why I am not trying to better prepare myself for assessment. It's rare that these two forces are in unison, although this semester they have gotten along better than normal.

* I've been quite occupied with the technical side of things lately. This is nothing particularly unusual, for it has all the signs of being something that will die down (though not entirely) given sufficient time. On the one hand it is good that I have rekindled my interest in such matters, but at the same time I can't help but wonder why sometimes I positively hate all things technical. For some reason, reading some online forums just..makes me sick. That's on the programming side of things - where I read posts asking how to sort elements in a ListBox or what have you. I can't be sure, but I think it's again because it seems to me to exemplify focussing on the minute details. But what sort of talk is that, you have to get your hands dirty with such things at some point. (Like the comment on this article about design patterns says, "He ends of up calling this thing "the quality without a name" and can only gesture at it with obscure utterances like "A system has this quality when it is at peace with itself, when it has no internal contradictions ... when it is true to its own inner forces". Now, I majored in Philosophy, and so talk like this strikes a chord with me, but by god, this doesn't help much when you're staring down an Emacs buffer!". Indeed!)

I find that even with things remotely technical, and I can't give you any reason why, I read them and then say to myself "Oh God, I can't do this". By which I mean I feel as though I can't spend my time thinking about some of the things people discuss. I used to be fairly interested in the latest hardware, such as the battle between the Pentium and the Athlon. But nowadays, I have a distinct sense of apathy towards such things. Someone recently asked me the details of my network connection, and I professed that I had no idea. I got a strange look, seeming to suggest "For someone who wants to get into the field of computers, you don't seem to know all that much". Sure, I still browse through stories on CNet occasionally, and read with interest the odd story about the developments in Longhorn and what have you, but there are some things where I simply don't care. It seems that any talk of the latest graphics card, the newest beta of Firefox, or the most recent Fedora update (little joke, that one) is met with an indifferent shrug on my part. In that sense, I am a most unusual techie, and I wonder how things have changed in this regard.

(Silly update: I noticed the quote at the bottom of Slashdot was "LILO, you got me on my knees...", and it seemed to exemplify what I couldn't quite express above. There was a time where I might have found something like that funny, but now, I really don't - not that I feel sickened or anything, it doesn't make me angry or irritated or anything, really, but it seems to be the sort of thing where the former me would have smirked or laughed, but now I just blankly stare..more pieces of the puzzle fall into place)