Oog. What a day. This whole week has been a quagmire of debugging where nothing quite works right. The Frankenstein’s monster configuration I’m working on has given no end of trouble–configuration kills overtly in the beginning, but with more subtlety in the end.
I can’t even remember all the things that were broken that I had to fix. It’s either that I don’t have the mind for it, or that my brain is offended by the triviality of the bugs that plague it and disbars them from memory.
Insights for this week: If you have a broken thing, and a similar working thing, and you want to fix the broken thing using the working thing as a resource, you have two approaches. One: start with the working thing, and tweak it towards the broken thing until it breaks. Use this point of breaking to find the bug. This way, you know roughly where you went wrong, but the direction from which you approach the working thing will be essentially random. Two: start broken, make work. This allows you to use your intuition to home in on the part which is most likely broken, but you can’t tell whether you’re actually making the situation worse. Interesting tradeoff.
I had more insights but apparently I’m too tired to remember them. Well, I also played basketball today, and biked around a little bit. It was absolutely stunning out. I had an enormous burger at Cafe on the Ave, which was delicious, but absurdly stuffing. I should have either forgone the extra patty or swapped out the fries for salad.
Gratitude journal:
- My mentor continues to be nice as I present him with stalled-out progress reports.
- Deferred the Google thing to winter! That will be so much nicer.
- Got a couple of potential physics tutees lined up for next quarter.
- My crazy sam ba Winnie seems to be settling in really well at Amherst and has made lots of professor friends already.
- Free lunch!
- This comfy chair I’m sitting in.