Despite the number of large, system-wide errors we hear horror stories about all the time, I wouldn't bet against the distribution of the actual length of all bug fixes following a power law or something...

September 4: Sample Dat

This morning's breakfast was tororo and gobo-kinpira with rice and miso soup, which was delicious, but rather small.  I was running a little behind, so I suppose it was good to have a breakfast that was easy to eat quickly, but I did not enjoy the hour between 11am and 12pm as a result. >_<  In face, thanks to my tiny breakfast, I somehow made it to the bus EARLIER than I usually do...  Yikes.

At work I was actually able to solve my "mystery" bug very early in the day.  It was due to me not initializing an array properly (when is it ever anything else...?), and I actually, for a brief moment, understood why some people hate C and C++ (I still wasn't able to agree with them, though).  One of the reasons I was having trouble tracking down the bug yesterday was because I would get any of three different error messages at three different locations on a given running of the code, and the error would disappear and reappear if I changed the range of data to work on, all just because I put m_K instead of m_U at one place in the code.  I am actually blaming Ruby for the trouble I had, because the three different error messages were its fault, and if it had just been "Segmentation Fault" every single time I wouldn't have been nearly so confused.  Oh well, it's gone, and without being too much of a headache, to boot!

For the rest of the day I ran tests on my finished model to make sure it was, to the best of my knowledge, working, before setting it loose on the hugegantic full data set (I expect it will take at least 5 hours to complete), before starting on the next model I'm supposed to code, which will serve as a baseline for the performance evaluation I'm going to do.

At lunch I ate murugi curry, which was good enough, but somehow food doesn't taste as good when you choose it out of necessity rather than actual preference. >_<  Today's menu options were reaaaaally sad... D:  I wasn't hungry in the afternoon until almost 6 though, so I guess the gossamer chicken in the curry did something after all.  After eating was handiball, which was decent, although there were gigantic teams again, so I didn't get to play too much.

I went home almost right at 6 today, because I had readied the next model (it turned out to be rather trivial to turn the one I already had into the next one) and started it on the 5-hour test as well, leaving me with nothing to do aside from start ANOTHER model, which would likely take a half-day.  The walk home was pleasant as usual with the vestigal typ(h)oon breezes cooling things off.  I wonder if the nights are honestly cooling off now, or if it's just the typ(h)oons at work, because it's actually 28 degrees in my room.  This makes me happy, and I am wondering if it is here to stay.  One of my coworkers said that the weather wouldn't get cold until October, but maybe this year's fall will come early...  I'm crossing my fingers...

Dinner was chow mein and a preserved fish (looked and tasted quite a lot like a kipper).  The preserved fish was kind of impossible to eat, as a lot of the outer flesh had turned into a sort of carapace, making it rather hard to negotiate with chopsticks. >_<  The chow mein was really good, though it bore little resemblance to real chow mein, or even my understanding of the Japanese interpretation of chow mein for that matter. O_O  I wonder if it was even supposed to be chow mein at all.  Maybe it was secretly a pork bun or something...

I got to enjoy the first of many frozen grapefruits after supper. :D  I am very happy for the insight the frozen oranges from Jiuna's and my Izu trip provided!  I didn't think this would happen, but the freezing really tones down the tartness.  I kind of have the process of eating a frozen grapefruit down to an art now; before dinner I take one out and put it in a bucket of cold water, and then by the time I come back from eating, it's still frozen, but the mesocarp (frighteningly, I didn't actually even need look that one up...) is thawed and easy to peel off, and the segments softened enough to split.  Yum...

I am going to go to bed now, in the hopes that I will actually enjoy waking up in the morning (HA!).  Night!