Do you know what's astoundingly fun?
Spending several hours of one's time customizing colormaps in Matlab and adjusting the figure format in various ways (swapping axes and so on) at the request of a coauthor. (And I needed to rerun all of my numerics because in this case, it wasn't space-efficient to save the matrices but was easier just commenting out appropriate parts of the .m file and running things again.) Grrrrrr.....
Update: And you know what's even more fun? I'll have to do it all over again. (Sigh...) I'll deal with this in a while after I have dealt with various teaching duties. I could write a much longer rant, but it's not worth it. I don't think there's much to be gained by having a conniption (that's one of the words of the day), and I already spazzed out a little while ago (that's another of today's words/expressions) in an IM to Lemming. (But, believe me, my frustration really is justified here.)
12 hours ago
5 comments:
Why don't you just write better MATLAB code so ancillary changes (such as these) are transparent? Oh, right, mathematicians don't believe in software structure because it's not abstract enough...
(...Greg says in the midst of an all-nighter, largely spent taking his MATLAB code for a 1-D friction model into 2-D)
You mean the changes I find out about after I've already produced all the graphs? So if it were in the code, I would still have to do trial and error to figure out what changes to put in the code and then rerun it? I don't think much time would be saved in this case, because it's all about somebody else not liking the aesthetics and wanting them changed (partly for consistency, but that was one of the annoying parts because I produced my plots and put them in the manuscript draft first so if consistency is an issue, that person's plots should be consistent with mine, not the other way around).
But your general point is right---other code/plotting changes are much worse. The changes themselves were min-numbing, but it's the circumstances involved that were so frustrating.
Heh heh.
I just like seeing you get all riled up.
One of my biggest frustrations in industry was changing requirements - especially when they change in a managers' meeting, but those changes aren't revealed until you're presenting your work and the program manager is asking for features that weren't even remotely on the radar, but that your team leader had agreed to. Bah.
Good news: about an hour ago, I got my 2-D friction model working - woohoo! Maybe I won't fail this class (from last semester)!
G: Fair enough. And if you like seeing me riled up, then you've come to the right place. :)
I'm glad to hear that your friction model is working. Still getting E's, eh?
HEY!
I NEVER GOT AN E AT TECH! In that ill-fated Ma1 class where half of my class got E's, the line for E going into the final was 60 (course grade). My 105/300 score on the final gave me a 56; but the line was dropped to 54 to save the majority of the class! (My good friend Dale ended with a 53 and took the Ma1b-dependent E).
This is actually the first end-of-term incomplete I've ever had -- though I won't deny that it's overdue....
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