This week was fairly stressful. I had to take a sick-day as a close friend took ill, and having no one family in the city, required some help. As a compromise I spent portions of the week working on a laptop in between fetching bowls of soup. I'm sure Renee wouldn't have minded if I took some time off but I do not like letting personal stuff interfere with work and I wasn't incapacitated so things worked out alright. Anyways, all is well as the sicko has recovered for the most part, and I ate all their left over popsicles which were very delicious. So a win win if I ever saw one. So I guess that would be the distinguishing feature of the past week. I'll do my best to let you know what I did but I'll warn it is a lot like last week. Sitting in front of a computer, softly cursing, running lines of seeming oddly punctuated sentences through the sieve of a mental compiler/debugger, wondering what it would be like to have an English degree. Shock! Such blasphemous words! I'll continue now before I offend your comp sci sensibilities. Anyways, I apologize for my brevity this week but as mentioned it has been a hooey!
So that family guy quote could pretty much sum up my week. That is honestly what it feels like. You're just sitting there and entering in every single combination until you hit bulls-eye. I remember once Martha and I were working on our 329 labs together and we experienced the most bizarre error. The objective was to create a timer in assembly that with certain keypress interrupts would stop, start, restart and quit. It was a simple task, being one of the easier early labs and I had finished but Martha was experiencing the most bizarre error. All her keypresses except one worked. When she pushed p it wouldn't pause. I thought this odd seeing as she'd basically copied the majority of her assembly code and just modified it to have a different character check for the keypress and then a new action. I looked over it and couldn't find anything wrong. We took out the new action and replaced it with one we already knew worked. Still, pushing p did nothing.
Here is the turning point in the stories kiddies, listen carefully, if we changed it from p to any other character it worked. Everything she had done was perfect but for some reason it would not accept p a a valid keypress. We switched keyboards, it still wouldn't work. Several computers later and we ruled out a hardware error. It just wouldn't accept a P. We emailed the prof and even he was baffled. I still have no clue to this day what was wrong. But how do you debug for seemingly insane things like a computer refusing to recognize the character p?
That is what this week felt like. Like I was just changing every line of code just to see what it would do because logic had forsaken me. Okay so perhaps it wasn't so bad but there were minutes where I believed the gods of logic had forsaken me. I laboured and talked to Renee and changed plans again for how to implement her bottom up model. This time we were going for a more general approach, one that didn't require so many special case productions. Work work work.... It's hard when you're stuck in that frustration, where you think you can't do anything and you'll never see the light again and you should drop out and go after that english or music degree you'd been originally coveting.
But... then something works. You tweak something and your output is no longer a big error.. its a whole bunch of Nulls. BUT it's a NEW error. And you get this burst and you continue. You keep going until you have something. You can show people. You can do cartwheels past the other labs and when they check it out and realize you're ecstatic over something silly like getting a stop watch to work they laugh, pat your head, and return to their research. But you have those moments. And when you're entirely done it's fantastic and you never feel done because you WANT to go back and make things better and faster and silly comments and just baby your code. Or maybe I'm crazy. Either way this is what won me over from math. That ability to create something for yourself. It's like getting that proof that had been so elusive, except you have something concrete, some NEW progress to offer to the world no matter how small. But. That's enough of me blathering on and on. I hope you all feel the same way about whatever you do!
One neat thing that happened this week is that my lab mate David had a visitor from the far away land of Saskatchewan. David had the pleasure of giving a tour of our department to an old friend of his from his undergraduate degree in comp sci in Saskatchewan. His friend was considering doing his masters at the UofA and decided to come for a tour. It's always fun to listen to the grad students talk about their tours as prospective students. Tales of far off Universities, or even their first time being here and going for lunch with the scariest prof in the department. I look forward to perhaps on day getting to go on such a tour in some far off land. I don't know if I'll be able to tear myself away from home. I love this University so much. But I hear they have grass and trees and buildings over on the east coast too so I shouldn't be so panicked. Either way, it's something to work towards, another reason to keep up my marks and try and do as much as I can before I graduate. Exciting! Alright. With that I'm signing off. Take care dearies. Cheers!