I'm getting better at not agonizing over whether praise I am given is for legitimately good work or merely for the sake of encouraging me. It still bothers me, but I find the urge to ask the praiser if they really think it was any good less strong than it was before. I would be less mistrusting, but I've been trained on how to train people in the past, and offering praise is pretty much rule number one. It doesn't matter if it was actually the worst job they could have possibly done. If you want to train someone to do something, you have to praise their first efforts to succceed no matter how awful they actually are, or they will give up. Naturally, the better someone is at teaching, the more polished they are at the process, the more I suspect them of this when they commend my efforts. Obviously, this is really corrosive to my progress when I try to learn things, to the point that I have decent success without direct training and mentorship relatively speaking just because that isn't getting in the way. I suspect that part of why I was a strong student in high school was because there were enough other students around to keep the learning process impersonal (and also I hadn't gotten that training yet).

In other general news, I may have one month left before my contract is up and either get hired from my contractor or have to find another job. It's kind of unclear, but then again the whole experience has been. When you are hired because someone is greasing the skids for you, it can be hard to know who to ask what questions about your job. Some people aren't hip to the score, and others know it far too well, and in general you are encouraged to not draw too much attention to yourself. I've done an okay job of representing myself as useful, but so far I have been relegated to reading standards of documentation and making things that conform to them. This is really useful in the department I work with because everyone there is somehow filled with psychotic rage at the very thought of having to do something so dull (read: not concerned with modeling econometric data, which I would like to learn more about but I am quite far from knowing how to contribute usefully to that). Also, I learned how to write and made a patent specification for a piece of softwarein roughly two days time this week. Not a full legal one, but one good enough for the man behind the curtain that can be given to a patent attorney to do the legal heavy lifting later on. Apparently I did so well that they want me to do another one now. If nothing else, this job has taught me that I am very good at being given written guidance on how to produce documents of some type and then producing them. I've also managed to pick up enough HTML that I made my own little test page and used someone else's code to do another one that is actually in use (internally) now. I've looked at a bit of PHP and Javascript and learned some basic SAS code and am just starting to learn some SQL. It would be a pity to have to leave soon, since I'm learning so much in addition to making ridiculous money.