Doodles

Something that is a little bizarre is that I have always somehow become friends with the sort of people who like to doodle in notebooks. The kind of person who, whenever there's a spare moment, will suddenly become very artistic and with the aid of a pencil or pen start to deposit the contents of their brain onto the next blank page.

This happened quite a bit whilst I was at college, but it came to a head in university and I remember sitting in lectures whilst a piece of paper was passed up and down our particular row. The shared doodle that no one of us could take individual responsibility for would grow in complexity and surreal insanity over the course of the lecture. In fact I still have most of those doodles tucked away in a file somewhere.

I am also one to doodle when I have a spare moment, however my doodling is rather a different cup of tea. I am not a particularly artistic person when it comes to drawing animals, people, or anything organic. I do, however design things and do drawings of them for a living, so I can draw things quite well. I will occasionally draw spaceships, aircraft, machines, etc. One time recently, during a particularly... interesting... course I was sent on by human resources I drew a train with bigfoot-truck type tyres crushing a national express coach.

More often though my doodles are mathematical and are linked to my attempts at programming in DarkBASIC. I have always enjoyed problem solving and anything that involves establishing systems and methods, as long as I get to see the results. This is why my doodles are usually A4 in size, involve line diagrams with position, force and velocity vectors, have a good serving of differential equations, and live in their own folder. It's a very unusual way to relax by most people's standards, but I find it really works for me.

Whether I will ever progress any of my DarkBASIC programming attempts to a useful result is yet to be seen though. I guess I do it more for fun, and oddly yes it is fun!