31 May 2000

Well, yesterday was a little crazy at work. I was running into a problem that was apparently in Random Mike's code, and while he was helping me track it down, CK came in and told him he had approximately one hour to do something for this other project.

That left me twiddling my thumbs and unable to do anything for about an hour. But about the time he came back, I realized I should've just had him give me his code so I could walk through it and pin-point the place in his code where it was breaking, even if I couldn't figure out why. (Mike's code is all low-level card and cryptography stuff that he and CK put together, and I only understand about a tenth of it, and even then it only makes sense in the most general of terms.)

Apparently, Mike hadn't ever actually used Visual Studio's debugger and was unaware of some of its features. He made impressed noises while I made the computer step through his code one line at a time until we tracked down a couple of problems. (Mind you, he's the one who actually figured out what the problems were and fixed them - all I did was open up the guts of the code so he could see it breaking in detail. It's all about teamwork.)

So after he fixed that, and I plugged in Scary Mike's newest code, I nervously ran the whole program.

And it worked.

First time through. No mistakes. Data was written to the card, and then read back off the card. Everything was good. This does not happen. It was frightening.

But I got to spend the rest of the afternoon working on my project, and today should be fairly relaxed as well.

Life is good.

That'll teach me to get smug about things. Just now I looked down to scratch an itch on my sternum and realized it was caused by the tag of my shirt. Yep. Put my shirt on backwards this morning. Doin' good. Need to go back to bed.

Word of the Day: doyen - the senior member of a group; a person considered to be uniquely skilled as a result of long experience

Is it just me, or does the Word of the Day list seem to have a bias towards French-derived words lately? Or maybe it's because I'm prejudiced against French. (Not the people. Just the language. Actually, French people speaking French doesn't bother me in the slightest, either. I think it's just that French words on an English-speaking tongue are like fingernails on a chalkboard.)

Okay, you caught me. I'm feeling ever-so-slightly melancholy this morning. No, that's not really the right word. I'm not sad. I'm just feeling... quiet. All of a sudden. I don't know why, I just sat down at this computer and fired up the various programs I like to have running and glanced at my mail and got this editor open and ... couldn't think of anything to say.

I mean, there are some things on my mind that aren't really fit for a public journal, either because they're too private or too petty or something like that. But even they aren't getting a lot of processor time this morning. I just want to sit and stare out the window; merge my mind with the trees and the wind.