Below are the 6 most recent journal entries recorded in rosewonna's LiveJournal:

Monday, September 3rd, 2007
6:38 pm	Personality Tests Thanks to raksaksa, I've been doing some tests he found. Have a go and post me your results. The Nerd Test is quite quick, but the Everything Test takes about 20 mins. Take the Nerd Test My Results:- 40.476190476190474% of me is a huge nerd! 40-49%: What's this, a well balanced nerd? Impressive. I prefer the term geek to nerd, but I'm quite happy with 40%; that makes me quite geeky, which is cool and accurate. Take The EverythingTest My Results:- Personality: You are more emotional than logical, more concerned about others than concerned about self, more religious than atheist, more dependent than loner, more lazy than workaholic, more rebel than traditional, more engineering mind than artistic mind, more cynical than idealistic, more leader than follower, and more introverted than extroverted. You are outgoing (100%), intellectual (78%). Stereotypes: Punk Rock (73%), White Trash (73%), Hippie (42%) Experience: Sex (44%), Substances (62%), Travel (24%) Politics: Your political views would best be described as Socialist, whom you agree with around 100% of the time. Socioeconomics: Your attitude toward life best associates you with Upper Class. You make more than 55% of those who have taken this test, and 58% less than the U.S. average. Life: If your life was a movie, it would be rated PG-13. Btw, your hottness rank is 50%, hotter than 16% of other test takers. I'm not happy with the lazy and white trash references, and I would have liked to have scored higher for Hippie, and had a more exciting life movie, but I'm very happy with the 100% socialist, and the rest seems fairly accurate. It's sad that I've become cynical and introverted, but at least I'm still outgoing! It seems odd that on Jobseekers with a son, I apparently earn more than 55% of the people who took the test -- I guess they must be on Jobseekers or Income Support without a dependant. I'm also assuming that hott is different to hot (I guess a bit like the "Sind Sie Heiss?" that you shouldn't ask.) Current Mood: thoughtful (Comment on this)
Monday, August 20th, 2007
9:37 pm	Yo BiCon! I just got back from BiCon2007.  It was absolutely brilliant, warm-feeling, exciting, comfortable, thought-provoking, mind-blowingly friendly and chilled -- unlike the one I went to 20 years ago, which has now been identified (thanks Kate) as BiCon 7 (at Hammersmith?).  My eyes were watering with emotion during bits of the final plenary this morning (but then, afternoon telly does that to me too sometimes). Thanks to my wonderful friends who talked me into trying it again, to all those really great new people I met, and to the old friends who I thought I would never meet again and who it was amazing to catch up with.  The con was totally awesome, and I intend to be a regular from now on (as I'm sure I said to everyone there loads of times). OK, OK, I'll stop gushing about it now, and catch up on some much needed sleep. Current Mood: tired but exhilarated Current Music: --catching up on TV (Comment on this)
9:29 pm	Disclaimer First things first, before I get into posting again.  I apologise for my extreme words about my ex-husband.  I don't usually slag people off, or use such vehement language, but it felt good at the time, and was a necessary part of my healing process (imo). Current Mood: uncomfortable (Comment on this)
Friday, December 30th, 2005
2:09 am	Stuffed at Christmas, stewed for the New Year Quick Christmas triv question: How many objects did my true love give to me in total over the 12 days. Answer below I'm not very good at this diary thing. I need to write more often -- it's cheaper than a counsellor and helps serve the same purpose. I had a very good Christmas. My mum and stepdad descended almost a week early because they had to pick my daughter up and decided to stay instead of coming back for Christmas, but it all went very well (even with my mum since we made up -- it did involve a lot of jumping when she called but was worth it for the relatively stress-free, totally non-argumentative atmosphere). Five people crammed into a small flat for over a week could have gone a lot worse. This may be the last Christmas I get to spend with my kids so we made the most of it -- although my mum did complain that it's the first Christmas we spent together that we didn't get ratassed. It all seemed to go far too quickly and we only did a fraction of all the things that we had wanted to do together. Everyone has now gone and I've been alone for two days, but a different friend has dropped by and stayed most of the day on each day so far so I've had a very good time. I still have an enormous amount of food that needs eating, and even more chocolate that I haven't yet been tempted into (I have a savoury rather than a sweet tooth, or should I say after watching the Christmas Lectures, an umami tooth -- and does this explain my occasional flutters with Chicken and Mushroom Pot Noodle!?). I have been slowly working my way through the alcohol and have discovered that sherry is even nicer in coffee than whisky. I am currently working on the gluwein which is doing its job nicely in this cold weather, although the forecast snow hasn't yet arrived. I have just got home after the pub quiz (which I arrived too late to take part in -- the opposite of last week when I was the only one to turn up) and rung a friend I haven't been in touch with for over two years. That was really nice and part of my intention this year is to keep in touch with people -- I wonder if that intention is a consequence of encroaching age, or a sign that my confidence is growing. I spent yesterday ploughing through the maths of a standard backprop neural network (among other interesting subjects) with a maths graduate friend and greatly enjoying it, and I'm one step closer to my dissertation so I'm feeling pretty good at the moment. The answer to the 12 days of Christmas question is: 2 x (12x1 + 11x2 + 10x3 + 9x4 + 8x5 + 7x6) which is 364, so ironically 'my' true love gave enough objects for one a day for every day except one (Christmas day maybe), in a normal year. I was just fascinated that a seemingly random collection of 30s and 31s (-1) also adds up to the sum of this series, which is also the distribution of tossing 12 coins. Oh and apparently (according to a documentary on the three wise men) Jesus was an Aries, like me! But 17th April 4AD was year of the rat, not dragon like me. Current Mood: cheerful Current Music: Miss Marple credit tune (not necessarly recommended) (Comment on this)
Saturday, December 17th, 2005
5:53 am	Very quick update, and trying to get into the spirit of this diary thing. Had a very good day. A friend who I bumped into, who did the same Masters as me, came round and we spent the day discussing consciousness and learning algorithms for neural networks (NNs) so that was good. It's nice to chat to someone who knows the same stuff so we can discuss at speed (big words and all that) and totally unexpected because we're miles away from Sussex Uni. I've got to teach myself Java coz we have a small project in mind knocking up a neural network training program to train NNs and record learning performance (we thought a meta NN on the top might do the trick) -- there might also be a paper in there somewhere. The idea is to create or identify the most general purpose learner out of the NNs, and I could then use that one for my robot sim for my dissertation, so there is an increasing chance that I might get my act in gear and actually produce my dissertation! My son and I were up until almost 4am (irresponsible parenting, I know -- especially when my daughter's coming for Christmas at midday tomorrow/today) playing a game of Primordial Soup (or Die Suppe, or something like that in the orginal German). It's a board game where you have amoeba-like things that eat coloured cubes of everyone else's colour and excrete your own colour and you can buy genetic advancements that increase your game play options like movement, eating requirements, and attacking. It's a very good game but every time we play it some genes stand out as being grossly unbalanced. Since we haven't played it much, we're still not sure if it's the same genes each time or different ones, so much more research (i.e. playing) is required before we start tinkering with game balance. He won by the way but it was a close call. Thanks to raksaksa for his 'mention in dispatches' as an 'internet stalker' (yes they were my words) which quite chuffed me today, and to suzylou for her email a while ago which was an unexpected contact but nice, and my apologies to mhw for not being in touch (but I do read your entries and I've booked for next summer's fest/con). I also added 'falsifying statistics' to my interests as suggested by exeter_uni, but it didn't even appear in a search of most popular interests, so more people have to get onto this to make it work. Well, it's now even more silly-o'clock (7am-ish) after composing this stuff and getting distracted reading other journals, so I really must crash or I'll sleep through my first day in ages spent with my daughter, so bye. Current Mood: but tired Current Music: -Morning traffic rolling by (Comment on this)
Friday, October 7th, 2005
12:42 pm	A Summary of the Last 15 Years We moved from Edinburgh to Brighton to have babysitters on hand (two kids being a bit of a handful) and I had my tumour in that time as well -- initially diagnosed as malignant but eventually benign. Thanks to everyone who sent cards and turned up to see me off to my op. I really appreciated it, but subsequent events took over and I've never thanked everyone properly and individually. Although the tumour was completely removed, the doctors also removed my smell glands and accidentally deflated my optic nerve, leaving me blind in one eye. I remind me of my favourite teddy who was in a similar condition after years of attention from me. Deon and I knew it was all over before my daughter was born, and we split amicably while continuing to live in the same house together (3 bedroom house but we were penalised for having a bedroom in excess of our needs before we split, and the council wouldn't pay the full rent -- not much of an incentive to get a bargain; after we split the DSS wouldn't split our claim because we were still living in the same house, although as flatmates in separate rooms -- not much of an incentive to tell the truth about being a couple in the future). We hung around with a group of live RPGers, and I ended up going out with one (incidentally, Deon went out with his sister first) who seemed nice at first but when I tried to end it and told him to leave, he said no. I wasn't going to leave, taking the kids with me and leaving everything behind, so we always made up and carried on, although it would have ended in the first six months if I'd had my way (but then me and Deon would have ended earlier if it hadn't been for my 'accidental' pregnancy; still the kids are wonderful, so no regrets -- his genes scrubbed up lovely for someone who looks like a cross between Bill Bailey and Homer Simpson). Doing my degree was an accident. I'd always felt a bit inadequate because all my good friends had degrees and I'd bombed out of mine -- too much overnight D&D [If you're out there, Aston and Whitefields 7 people, I'd love to hear from you.] -- but it was always mañana/drekkly). For fun I did an HNC in Software Engineering and to get the fees paid we said we'd continue on to a degree, and chatted to the Uni entrance guy to back it up. After the HNC, I decided to do the degree after all (getting an unconditional offer helped -- grudging acknowledgement that my parents were right about the value of doing my A levels -- and Deon doing a degree was an incentive because we were supposed to be sharing looking after the kids so if he could find time to do it so could I. The degree was a BA in Artificial Intelligence (minoring in Psychology, and Japanese Language and Society) and was absolutely brilliant. I discovered I had a natural flare for philosophy -- thanks to all those years discussing things like determinism before I knew the big words for it all. Sussex is also the largest institute of AI and ALife where people talk cross-discipline (Computing, AI, Alife, Psychology, Philosophy, Linguistics and Biols) and is the only Uni computing department that I know of which grew out of the philosophy deparment. Unfortunately that has probably all changed now because the dept just merged with Engineering (uughhh -- how ordinary!). Anyway that's enough of an advert for a place I thoroughly recommend. I also stayed on and did an MA in Evolutionary and Adaptive Systems, but I left after completing the coursework but before starting the dissertation, so that's become a PG Diploma and apparently I can turn in my dissertation at anytime to upgrade to a Masters.** I've lived in Cornwall twice in that time, before and after my degree (before was to get out of Brighton so that we were eligible to rent a campus flat, after was because my mum offered us a house to live in and ended up taking £15,000 from me and trying to evict us).** We're now talking again and she's starting to make up for it. I also lectured for a couple years at Truro College (programming and software engineering which I really enjoyed originally, but which I came to hate (I need to explore why sometime).** I miss Cornwall because I'd started to repair myself -- I was writing the first Late Cornish text book, was on the advisory panel for BBC Radio Cornwall (my all time fave channel, like having a lively group of people crash your living room), and was consequently starting to make new friends. Anyway, back to the miserable bastard (Mark) who wouldn't leave. After 12 years which included a short separation where I did actually miss him, a bad marriage (well at least I've done it now so I don't ever have to get married again -- and it was a very nice small do, not the top hat and tails in the cathedral that my mum always threatened when I was younger), persecution and mental abuse by him, a complete collapse of my personality and pending insanity, I was moved to a refuge in Exeter with my son (when I saw no way out, I had offered the kids the option to live with Deon because I was afraid of the effect Mark was having on them, and slightly afraid that he might lose it and physically hurt them.** My daughter took me up on the offer, but I miss her terribly). I'm now out, in a wonderful council flat with my son, ex-free and happy, and trying to piece myself back together and work out what I want out of life. That's quite enough for one day. I feel drained and melancholic now, and that was just a quick overview. **Points I noted for expansion: the fallout with my mum what went wrong with the lecturing the whole Mark thing the problems with the refuge my daughter not living with me my dissertation If you have any preferences or other suggestions, let me know. Current Mood: shouldn't that be melancholIC? (2 Comments |Comment on this)