No, I can't tell you how my day went.
One of my co-workers asked me how my day was going, and what I was working on, and I had a flash of insight into why I'm not very communicative with questions like that.
I have been programming a data massager * in Python for a new equipment mangement system during the past couple of hours, and couldn't get my list of string permutations that identify the models to populate. Print statements and debugging littered a tiny, tiny function that should have been over and done with in about 20 minutes. I'm poring over websites and looking at my reference books and swearing at my code, the books, the sites, God and the bat that I had to wrangle at 2:17 am this morning. Then, the caffeine kicked in, or the borken cylinder in my brain started firing and I realized that instead of doing a "!=" (not equal) comparison, I had mistyped "==" and so was never actually adding anything to the list.
Right now, I've probably lost a good portion of my readers who aren't programmers, and here is the beginnings of my incommunicado.
I don't want to blow a whole bunch of code-y nonsense at people who aren't interested, so I don't want to fully explain the problem as I just did above. So I could say:
"I mistyped something and spent the next 2 hours dealing with my mistake."
Hmm, that doesn't sound like I'm a useful member of society, does it?
"I was having programming difficulties but I figured it out."
Seems like an awful lot of words for something which is essentially:
"Bad, but now good"
Which reduces to:
"Good."
And so that's what I go with.
* Programming-wise, that is exactly as dirty as it sounds, and I have to wash afterwards.
I have been programming a data massager * in Python for a new equipment mangement system during the past couple of hours, and couldn't get my list of string permutations that identify the models to populate. Print statements and debugging littered a tiny, tiny function that should have been over and done with in about 20 minutes. I'm poring over websites and looking at my reference books and swearing at my code, the books, the sites, God and the bat that I had to wrangle at 2:17 am this morning. Then, the caffeine kicked in, or the borken cylinder in my brain started firing and I realized that instead of doing a "!=" (not equal) comparison, I had mistyped "==" and so was never actually adding anything to the list.
Right now, I've probably lost a good portion of my readers who aren't programmers, and here is the beginnings of my incommunicado.
I don't want to blow a whole bunch of code-y nonsense at people who aren't interested, so I don't want to fully explain the problem as I just did above. So I could say:
"I mistyped something and spent the next 2 hours dealing with my mistake."
Hmm, that doesn't sound like I'm a useful member of society, does it?
"I was having programming difficulties but I figured it out."
Seems like an awful lot of words for something which is essentially:
"Bad, but now good"
Which reduces to:
"Good."
And so that's what I go with.
* Programming-wise, that is exactly as dirty as it sounds, and I have to wash afterwards.