Help!

Apologies if the next couple of blogs are a little bit work centric but I have a deadline looming and very little chance of completing the assignment to any degree of success. It is the most frustrating thing in the world when something doesn't work and there is simply nothing you can do about it. The support online for the program I am using is severely limited and the things that are available are aimed at people who actually understand the theory behind it. I suppose technically I should as well but I have reached the level in maths now where it would require a significant amount of effort over a long period of time to grasp the higher concepts and to be explained by someone who can word it in a way that makes sense to me. If I had the chance to ask questions and build an understanding of it then perhaps I would stand a chance but I cannot see that happening any time soon. All I can hope for now is that I won't have to use too much of it in the remainder of my university course and even less so in the real world.

Aside from that, there isn't much going on really. I have recently discovered however that my mouse skills have been severely compromised over the past couple of weeks and I can think of no logical explanation for it. At this time of year, the only change that seems to happen is that my typing gets a little quicker because I am typing up my notes - into a legible format - and so the practice significantly improves my somewhat poor skills. The main reason I've noticed it is when I have been playing the brain games on BBC Labs that I mentioned here. When I go to click on something, I often miss by quite a significant amount. Now whether this is because my new laptop has different mouse settings to my old laptop and PC I don't know but I cannot remember even having this problem using different computers before. Most people don't have this problem because when they use the mouse they are finding the destination by moving it in relation to its current position, judging the speed etc in order to land in the right place. I assume that because I use the computer more often than most that rather than bothering will all of those complicated calculations, I have simply memorised the movement necessary in order to perform common tasks. For some reason this memory has then been distorted and I end up over/undershooting the target.

I did have a game based on the Quake III engine that included a target practice mini-game but sadly that is in Birmingham at the moment and I cannot think of a way to test it other than something like that. Perhaps if I started playing games more often it would improve? I might give that a go when exams are done with - which means the weekend after exams and before lectures begin again. I have dealt myself somewhat of a silly card this coming semester. Not only do I have the most time consuming element of my dissertation to complete but I the modules are all 100% coursework as far as I'm aware which leaves me very little spare time. Perhaps I just need to become a bit more organised and spend the time on the work rather than faffing about with this every day?

One to ponder about if the eventuality does occur but I do see this as some sort of release and I dread to think what would replace it if I started bottling all of these thoughts up. It probably doesn't bare thinking about.