Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing

Her research aims to explore what motivates people to engage in an extreme sports such as Channel swimming. She has funding from the Economic and Social Research Council for two and a half years, towards the end of which she hopes to write a book that will reach out beyond the purely academic market to tap into the post-Olympic debate on the motivation to take part in sport.

Throsby wants her research to question orthodox ideas about what counts as a sporting body in contemporary society. And the body she is using to explore those issues is her own. Her training regime has involved swimming around Jersey in 10 and a half hours, as well as ploughing up and down Coventry's Olympic-length swimming pool, just down the road from the university. Not surprisingly, perhaps, her shoulder and neck muscles have "bulked up", as she puts it, "in ways that are counter-normative for women but not for men".

Sounds absolutely wonderful, both as a general area of study and as a chance to swim on company time. Needless to say I'm deeply, deeply jealous.

Being in a swimming costume so much doesn't help — it feels like you're hardly wearing anything. When I was younger, I didn't mind, but sometimes you can get a little self-conscious.

The thing I really dislike about my local pool is the way the walk from the changing rooms to the water snakes around past the viewing area which, given the times when I usually go, always seems to be packed with mums watching their kids take lessons. Perhaps I ought to find the leering flattering, but it's actually deeply mortifying.

At which point we both started laughing...

Miles to Lothlórien: 442

• I managed to ace my six-monthly appraisal by bombarding my confessor with vast quantities of evidence for the work that I've done over the last six months. In the end, I think, both of us were surprised by quite how much I'd done and by what a range it spanned. In the end, my confessor pronounced himself impressed with my focus and drive — not two adjectives I'd apply to myself from my internal perspective where I seem to see nothing by my shortcomings — and praised my guru-like, academic aura of knowledge — yet more proof, if it were needed, that I don't really fit the typical civil servant template.
• I finally fixed a nagging problem in a user exit I'd set up to prevent certain high priority jobs from swapping. It transpired that I'd made the mistake of trying to compare the current hostname against the job hostname using an equality test, instead of using a pattern match, resulting in false negatives in cases where the job hostnames contained a reference to a specific network interface rather than the plain hostname of the system.
• A good meeting/presentation based on a revised version of my security paper, this time concentrating on some of the points that I'd emphasised after they failed to come across clearly in the first presentation. The points were well received — when I presented my updates to my colleagues for criticism yesterday, the only negative comment I got back was that I'd mis-spelt the word "interactive" in the last paragraph — and we had a good, focused discussion of the ideas, both low level technical and high level architectural, afterwards. It was almost fun!
• Despite being late leaving work — the meeting didn't finish until half three! — I still managed to put in a decent performance in the pool. Perhaps not quite as good as yesterday but still far, far better than Wednesday.

And those are only the my highlights. In between, I continued work on a couple of my on-going but lower level projects, prepped for next week's course and caught up on my usual end of week bureaucracy. All of which goes some small way to making me feel that I, just this once, I might have come out ahead against the inevitable forces of entropy...