It was worth it!

The weeks of catch up to make up my three week schedule deficit; the stresses of getting through the M381 TMA mentioned previously; the bashing my head against the wall to understand what the hell primitive recursion was; the all-nighter on Monday night to finish the M337 TMA*; not to mention the difficulty in fitting this around work (sure everyone does this, but it doesn't make it any easier)... it was worth it!

Distinction, in both cases! Woohoo.

This is a big deal to me. Bigger than in the previous courses, when to be honest, the first TMAs were usually a walk in the park. This time around, that certainly was not the case. I don't have a problem with hard assignments of course, but I like getting easy marks as much as the next guy!

As you may recall, I didn't think I had done so well in M381, but as it turned out, my result pipped the ninety mark. Unsurprisingly, my URM-related answers were awash with comments, but the bits around them on what the functions actually represent were okay. Overall, a great confidence boost for starters on Level 3.

My result in M337 was a bit lower, and only just got past the requisite 85 for distinction, but pass it did. There was no section where I did especially worse than others; my lost marks were spread almost uniformly throughout. It was the final question, on differentiation, partial derivatives and conformal functions which helped keep my mark up. Unexpected, considering I'd not got to conformality yet. I had already resigned myself to a very late night, so I didn't quite search just for the info needed. What I did was 'read' the final half of the unit rather than work through it. A big chunk, fortunately, was just the complex equivalent of the differentiation rules, composition et cetera.

I've been doing daily short translations recently. They are a section of the transcription of these daily press conferences the Chief Cabinet Secretary, Yukio Edano has been holding after the earthquake disaster and the trouble at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant. It's a nice regular job, but it is hard for me because of the 'talky' style.

Anyway, the press conferences have been cancelled this weekend. So for once, I am actually completely free! The good maths mood the TMA results have put me in should hopefully inspire me to get a lot of that done today and tomorrow. I'm still in the procrastination phase, but I'll get started soon. With some luck, I'll complete the catch-up process, as I'm still not quite there on either course. It should be do-able, but even if it's not, I'm nowhere near how far behind I was a month ago. I just need to keep it that way.

* It's been a bad week all in all for getting enough sleep. So I started with an all-nighter for work on Sunday night, getting to bed at 6am. This was followed by the TMA-related one, finishing at 7am. And then on Thursday night, I spent until 5am reading through Kim's dissertation, which I'd promised I would do on Thursday, but put off and put off because of work (which I didn't particularly want to do).