the misadventures of weather boy: March 2005

How many lines?

We started in at about 66, and now it's gotten down to 59.
Break even point: 55.
Guaranteed point increase point: 50.

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Labels: computing, school

Another Lasher Moment...

Today we heard the story of a code tester:

This guy, who was a tester, totaly despised the software engineers (he also happened to be a big guy, so he could probably shout down any of the pesky engineers). Not to mention the fact that he probably got paid a third of what they got paid, but the software engineers thought they were above testing (and of course hated it).

So each Monday, he'd get some donuts and coffee and invite the managers and software engineers to his office. He would then proceed to show off the week's bugs.

Now of course being confronted with bugs in your pristeen code is unbalancing enough, but having the managers see them at the same time is even worse. So this tester compiled what the six most frequent responses for a software engineer to see a bug in his code:

6. The customer doesn't need that.
5. I fixed that a month ago.
4. It's working as designed.
3. I'll explain it in the Readme file.
2. It works fine in my office.
1. SH*T.

Another great recollection from Dana Lasher....

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Labels: computing, school

National Championships anyone?

I was looking at the National Qualifying Times for the 2005 LCM USMS Championships, and noticed the following for the 400IM:
6:52.64L
The rough conversion of that to SCY is approximately 5:56. That, if I could get myself in shape is VERY doable (I used to do about a 6:00 in SCY, so 5:56 is just a little more effort).
If I could do THAT, it would be NEAT. Never mind paying and actually going to Nationals--that's another problem. But never having qualified to go to as much as State JO's, that would be my dream.

More swimming:
Three meets this trimester period:
*NC SCY Championships (late April, Pullen)
*State Games (LCM, mid June, Pullen)
*Dixie Zone LCM Championships (mid July, Charlotte)

The latter one would probably cost me about $150 or so to do ($40 for the train, $50 for hotel, $30 for food, $30-$40 entry fees)

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Labels: swimming

Schedule Irritation

It's annoying enough to schedule courses in two majors, but when one department overlaps things from the same department (that could be reasonably taken at the same time) together, it's a big nuisance.

CSC 312 (Comp Organization & Logic) is offered 3:50-5:05 T/H next fall out on Centennial. CSC 333 (Automata, Grammars, Computability) was going to be offered from 8:30-9:20 out on Centennial M/W/F. I actually had a schedule last week that I was satisfied with (shocking). But today when I examined xtracs, the 8:30 section was cancelled, and the class is offered at 3:50-5:05, T/H. This is annoying to say the least.

To make matters worse, this fall is difficult for me to find 5 classes since the main purpose is to build the prereqs for the remaining 3 semesters--namely CSC 312 and MEA 421. So now, I get to find another class to slide in (no idea since I already moved one CHASS course out of the summer and into the fall to fill the fifth slot that I wasn't going to be able to fill anyway), which delays CSC 333 (consuming another slot in another semester, likely in the senior year). I'm not especially fond of consuming slots like that when I don't know what to do with them.

Meteorology has a variation on this same theme. I wanted to take MEA 320 (Fundamentals of Air Pollution) this semester, but the required lab course MEA 314 was scheduled on top of it. In fact, it is impossible to take MEA 320 (air pollution), MEA 467 (marine meteorology), and CE/MEA 479 (air quality) because they all meet in that same slot (and there are only 2 semesters which they can go in due to MEA 314). In fact, with the sole exception of MEA 455 (not available until after MEA 421), every single meteorology elective is offered in the spring, which greatly annoys me.

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Labels: school