Woke up blearily, exhorted myself not to think any negative thoughts on account of forcing myself out of bed. It worked well–I had a nice breakfast of the delicious granola I’d gotten yesterday and read some physics.
I made it early to CompBio. I did some debugging there and found that my optimization hadn’t even been used. Fortunately, once I fixed a really stupid error–uninitialized boolean flag field getting set to a default value–my optimization came into play and solved quite large problems–up to 52 variables. Without the optimization, that would be north of a quadrillion solutions to check!
I resolved to make a log file where I kept track of important run events–such as one of my new optimizers actually being created! I’d avoided this for a while because it just seemed silly–surely there must be a better, IDE assisted way to track runtime behavior without actually stepping through it! However, I never found it. But the technique had been recommended in 331 so I finally accepted it. Will do that tomorrow!
Skipped physics to work on homework. Then went to my music class, where I sat through some student presentations. The quality of work that is tolerated in the class, compared to say my Cows class, is so much lower… ah well, I guess I’m not complaining. It is kinda demotivating though.
I ran to Sizzle and Crunch, picked up a sizzling lunch, went to SPS, and started pounding away on my 226 homework, which was also frustrating. Half of it was looking up values on Wikipedia, and the other half was some none-too-enlightening calculations. Fortunately Winnie brought me a Honest Tea and a hug :D And it was easier than last week, and I finished easily in time to get to my last Glee rehearsal.
Rehearsal was fun! Afterwards I got dinner with Winnie at this little hole-in-the-wall sushi place way up north on 52nd! The walk was beautiful and the place was really cool. It looked totally dark and dank from the outside. When we got in, we realized why–the big black curtain over the window blocked sunbeams coming almost directly in. The decor was lovely and looked like it had been acquired organically–so different from aggressively “cultured” and decorated restaurants. The prices were good and we had lots of fresh, delicious sushi. We talked about Winnie’s lab work. I was surprised to hear that, although she spends so much time making experimental setups, doing glassblowing, and so on, she really enjoys the data analysis and trying to figure out what’s going on more. I suppose this is natural, since for all the challenges of the experiment setup, the procedures are relatively mechanical.
I walked my W back to physics then went over to Katie’s apt to work on CompBio. We rewrote our experiment-running code so I could understand it and wouldn’t break some statistic-gathering code by making changes.
Went over to D and chilled with Brandon. Played a live chess game, but realized I was spreading myself too thin–I had to play regularly to capitalize on opportunities. It’s too difficult just to play one game every couple of weeks–you accumulate too much rust. Watched a little dorky anime with those guys (Hunter x Hunter with no context). Then went back to M and ended up going on a run with Trevor and Casey. Then I wrote this log and hit the hay.