Diary of a final day’s psychosis…
((Some context : I had been suffering coders and writers block for about two weeks. At this point I have one final day to finish an assignment… This is the ramblings I produced while doing the work…)
My Saturday ended at Sunday 7am… Sunday started at midday when my mum decided I hadn’t got up early enough… and she was kinda correct, normally on a Sunday I need to get up at 10am to stand a chance of sleeping before my 7:30am start Monday… hmmm, 24h to swap my sleep cycle around, this isn’t at all doomed, heh
In the end I crawled out of my bed around 1pm, weirded out my parents and sister for a bit and then hid in my room. They are going to this family thing and I didn’t want to watch the annoying attempts to guilt me for not going and leaving it so late before saying I wouldn’t be going… my mum already tried this when I said I wasn’t going, although this is a classic example of my ‘I prefer not to agree to anything more than 2 days in advance’ method of dealing with things…for someone who doesn’t do much my life is very… fluid.
Anyways, around 2pm ‘bye’ was yelled in my general direction and I heard them leave the house. About 10mins later it occurs to me that (a) I hadn’t heard the car start and that (b) I could still hear voices down stairs.
Now, if I’m honest the latter isn’t much of a problem, I’m somewhat used to hearing voices, however it’s rare that they sound like my family.
By rare I mean ‘never’.
So, intrigued by this turn of events and hungry, I drag my body from my chair and wander downstairs to the kitchen where upon I’m greeted by my mum and sister still being here. A moment passes while I stand in silence observing them, a slightly puzzled look on my face, before remarking ‘now, maybe it’s just me, but traditionally when you say ‘bye’ you leave….’. Turns out a bird or birds had crapped over the back of the car and my dad decided to clean it.
A mental note was made to stop throwing crumbs out of my window.
Once they did indeed depart I settled down to make a cheese and pickle (chunky, not sandwich) sandwich. As I stood there, knife in hand and trying to free cut uniform thickness of cheese from a block, it occurred to me that I’ve been eating a lot of cheese and pickle sandwiches of late. I considered this for a moment and came to the only logical conclusion there could be; I’m a mouse in a human suit.
A mental note was made to look for the zipper at some point to confirm this.
However, it then occurred to me that this doesn’t explain the pickle fascination, mice not being known for eating it (I figure their tiny paws means they can’t get a good grip on the jar to open it). I dismissed this however, being a mouse myself and eating pickle means that mice must like it. Indeed, this goes some way to explaining this human suit, it is the only way get a good enough grip on the jar to open it and extract the tangy goodness.
The alternative is that I’m human and the pickle eating mice have power tools… this doesn’t even bear thinking about…
Also, you’d notice wouldn’t you?
Consider a traditional mouse hole in the wall, these things just appear, apparently chewed out by the mouse or mice in question and would they chew if they had say, a jigsaw?
However, a jig saw… even a mouse sized one (well, smaller than a mouse of course or they couldn’t work it, I mean you wouldn’t give a 6ft bloke a 6ft tall hammer.. unless you were really bored… or drunk).. would make enough noise that one day you’re gonna be sitting there and you’ll hear this sound and upon investigation behind the sofa you find this mouse construction crew… think of it like a slightly furrier edition of the Village People.. but less gay.
So, yeah, you’re gonna notice a mouse construction crew in your house, it’s not like it’s gonna be subtle, the scaffolding alone is sure to cause comment and as for the diggers and bulldozers.
So, yes, the only logical conclusion this that mice like pickle, can’t use power tools and instead build human suits so they can get at the tangy goodness… anything else would just be silly.
I should do some work now…
- 14:50
- 17:55
OK, so that was fun indeed… I’ve been productive for a about an hour and a half, which should make you wonder what happened during the rest of the time?
Well, as soon as I said it was time to do some work I went off to select some music to listen to, I can’t work unless my brain is subtly vibrating… having music playing helps me focus as all the parts of my brain which are normally going to distract me start analysing and learning the flow of the music, the timings, key and changes, components of the music and the lyrics… all of which leaves the rest of me able to focus.
But yes, I selected some music by a group called ‘Videodrone’, who I had never heard of… so off to Google I went which took me to wikipedia and that’s where I spent the next hour and a half or so going from them to various other bands and band members who had some connection with them… it was an interesting hour and a half I admit, but not overly productive 
However in the hour and a half since then I’ve got the results output working and the program performs some ‘goodness’ tests on the data produced. I did also squish 2 horrible logic bugs;
One a result of sloppy copy-and-pasting, I forgot to change something in a loop which kinda mucked things up.
The other was just me not paying attention when I was typing which lead to some silliness with the results output, which is when I spotted it.
I’m still not done;
- I need to run the test a few times (note to self; in future think more about an automated testing system … it’ll save you time)
- Work out the complexity of these damned functions (*yawn*)
- make some kinda semi-coherent waffle about best fit and blah blah blah
- Oh and explain why two threads aren’t always better than one… that bit will be easy however 
I’ve got about 8h to do all that in, at which point it’ll be 2am and I’d like to get some sleep tonight before the hand in tomorrow and the lecture I have to attend. Granted, after that I’ll be back in bed which is all good, heh
Oh, and I’d like to fit a bath in there somewhere, which shouldn’t be a problem as with no one else in the house I won’t have to fight for the bathroom.. huzzah!
Right… time to turn on the oven for a pizza and then it’s back to working on stuff…
- 18:05
- 18:10
It just occurred to me as I wandered downstairs to put on the oven that the only real source of light in the whole house right now is from my two monitors… indeed, the only sign of any life at all is coming from my small 8ft by 9ft box of existence… granted, based on how often I clean this place it’s probably a lot of life *chuckles* but the rest of the house is very much in the dark..
All I need is for someone to phone and ask me what my favourite scary movie is and I’ll feel even more like I’m in a bad horror film… as it is I’m just in a bad ‘hacker’ type film as I’m doing my cliché thing again…
- 18:12
- 21:15
Ah, baths… so relaxing… so clean… so much better when you know one of your family aren’t going to bug you as they want to go to the toilet… I’m either going to have to arrange for them to go out on a Sunday evening without me more often or invest in chloroform… the latter does have more amusing long term usage however…
“Excuse me miss, does this rage smell of chloroform?”
“wha-”
*thud*
“Bwahahahahaha…”
Yes… much more amusing long term usage indeed…
I was just sitting here going over my various web logs and for some reason I chuckled to myself before remarking, in a very silly voice, “I know what your doooooooooooiiiiiiing”… at times I even make myself stop and pause… jury is out on if this is a good thing or not…
I’m down to 4h 40mins until my target finishing time of 2am and I’m doing pretty well, sure I’ve only knocked one thing off my to-do list (pizza, scrubs and a bath taking up the rest of my time) however working out algorithm complexity is something I’m not overly good at… mostly because I normally don’t care, I write things for myself and they are generally ‘fast enough’ and until they become a bottle neck I’m not too bothered about finding a faster solution.
This is another principle of mine when it comes to programming; be lazy.
Make the compiler do as much work for you as you can, make use of libraries of pre-existing code, don’t put more work into things than needs be.
The reason for this is very simple; programmers are crap at guessing where problems in code are.
Between being humans (or small gods, depending on apparent ego level) and the complexity of processors these days (some times I long for the mid-90s when things were soooo much simpler) guessing what’s going to cause you problems is just not sane. The advice these days; keep it simple stupid and then profile it later.
So, yes, the programmer who goes all out to try and ‘fix’ a section of code to make it ‘fast’ is often wasting both time and effort… granted, I’m not the most productive coder ever (although total time for this assignment, as I effectively restarted at midnight, is only around 8h right now so I can be when I want to be) but I’m also very lazy and can’t be bothered most of the time…
I also distract myself by writing blog entries for longer than I meant to… so, with 4h 30mins left on the clock I r away to do some more stuffs…
- 21:30
- 23:24
Hmmm… those two hours whizzed passed… Tests have now been run 9 times each, so with 4 versions that 36 program runs and copy and pasting… thrilling stufzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz…..
*whacks head on desk*
Huh… wha-.. right right… yeah… so, that’s been done, the results have been made to look pretty and stuff and the document weights in at 34pages. Keep in mind that I’ve only been doing this now for around 10h or so and I probably won’t score higher than a pass… (in fact, lack of references means I should end up with a referred, however I’m not sure how I can pull a reference out of thin air on this one… hmmm.. an idea forms…).
It probably doesn’t help that each program comes it at around 5 pages each… still, my table of content looks cool, heh
All that’s left to do now is waffle about the results and then call it a night and given it’s only just got to 23:30 I think I should be able to get that done before 2am 
Right, conclusion time!
- 23:30
- 23:55
It’s still technically the day before the work has to be handed in and I’m done.
34 pages of pure ‘meh’-ness.
Well, that’s a slight lie, frankly the code rocks once I got my brain in gear, I mean it looks good and it works well which is always a bonus… as to if my lecturer sees my lack of classes and bear structures in the same way I do is another matter, heh, however when I looked at the problem I didn’t see the need for them.
To be honest, I’m glad it’s over…. well, for now at least, I expect I’ll be back here again in a month or two reworking it for a pass, but right now it’s done and dusted and all that needs to be done is for me to get some sleep, wake up, print it and get rid of it
And this is where the journey ends for now, I’ll leave you with my acknowledgements from the work (the rest has to be serious, this bit you can play around to some degree) and… well, you’ll see… *chuckles*
Thanks for staying with this… oh, and I couldn’t find a zipper…
laters…
- 00:00 beep.. beep.. beep…
Acknowledgements
—————-
While this assignment might well have gone horribly wrong, I’d like to thank two people for getting me to the point where I had at least something to hand in;
Firstly Claire for offering me some good advice as well as indirectly convincing me that drinking really was the answer to my problems and also for providing entertainment and good conversation Friday night.
Secondly Paula who happened to be having her birthday on Friday and for giving me much amusement as she wandered and crawled around drunkenly
Finally, a general thanks to all of those people I know who read the rubbish I write on myspace and gamedev.net, the fact I’ve got somewhere to vent when stuff gets to me and people bother to read it is always appreciated
