Productivity

[harinezumi]

Had a particularly productive couple of days at work. Yesterday I managed to figure out what was causing the XWin problems on three of my cluster machines for the past couple of months and after several hours of googling on my hunch finally managed to get everything back to normal. And today I plumbed the depths of the atrociously poorly coded Webadmin system to finally figure out how to associate pictures with the dynamically generated faculty profiles on the CNBC web site. (Sometimes I despair at the state of programming nowadays. The guy who wrote the utility graduated from the same program as me only a year and a half later than I did, and yet he has written a horribly hubbed monstrosity with little to no comments, arbitrary indentation, and code that assumed last names to be unique identifiers when he had a perfectly good MySQL database at his command. *facepalm*).

In both cases, I ended up not getting home until about 7:30pm, and not minding the fact in the least. Partly that's from the fact that I can spend half the day reading Wikipedia and playing Nanaca Crash, but on the other hand a lot of my ideas end up coming to me while I'm distracted or otherwise not directly focused on the problem at hand. It feels nice to have a work environment that lets you screw around when things aren't particularly time-sensitive, and a home environment that lets me stick around the office as long as it takes without screwing up anyone's plans. ^^