I saw a rabbit and so I chased it far and long without realizing that there had been a perfectly good, easy to catch one right where I’d been standing.
On Friday, I got stuck on the pings and way overthought it thinking that i needed a whole new thread even though everything was already threaded. I spent several hours yesterday making an already disturbing mess from Friday an even bigger mess, so when i reverted everything back today and got it working with one line of code in the original test, i was pretty frustrated to say the least.
I’m behind schedule. For the server & for my apprenticeship. Granted there has been a holiday week and some other stuff that came up, but no excuses. i should be more mindful of time, estimating, and tempting, long-winded bunnies.
These rabbits have actually been a recurring thing for me—especially with strings. I think i really dislike parsing strings. I didn’t necessarily like it in clojure either, but at least in clojure, there are rather simple functions that can be used to destruct and re-construct stings. In java parsing a String is a painful task that requires annoying and abundant new String & String[] objects, and with HTTP, pretty much every single thing is either a String or a byte[] that has to be completely destructed only to put it back together again without much changing. It’s yucky.
Whoops, i chased that bunny with a String tied to its cotton ball down a tangent, what i meant to say was that chasing bunnies is a recurring thing. I’ve gotten stuck several times on this journey only to break from it for the night and return to it fresh in the morning when i finally see the easy bunny. I think I’ve even written it here before that when i get stuck on something for more than an hour or so, I should really take 5, think about something else, and then return to it instead of plowing through only to feel more & more stressed as the minutes flash by and as the mess becomes impossibly complicated to straighten out.
As I thought about it more, i recalled that I have mentors in the past coach me on not limiting myself to one path to solve a problem, and to do just as I said—break from it, or even get some feedback on it, to break free of the forever lost, one-track mind. I’ve tried setting alarms for myself too—work on this for 20 more minutes, and then break or ask for help. You can guess what happens here. By the time the alarm goes off, I’m right on the tail of the bunny (or so relatively it seems I am), so I snooze the alarm for another 15 minutes—that should be enough time, right?—at the end of which I’m even closer to the bunny, so snooze again, until I’m so far in that I have no choice but to eat the weird mushroom causing me to shrink and be further away from the bunny and that much slower.
I’m making light of a problem, and I don’t mean to be really. This is a problem that I recognize as it’s happened a number of times now, and so I need to be mindfully focused on getting better at managing this. Even if you’re the best coder in the world, not meeting deadlines and commitments will ruin you and your customers won’t trust you—that’s true for anything. No one is going to call the best firefighter ever if they cannot trust that he will actually get to the fire while it’s still burning. Amazon would not be who they are today if they were lax on meeting their 2-day delivery commitment—and in fact I’ve been annoyed with them that they have been slipping this year even if it is due to COVID. Thus, the customer is what matters and meeting their needs by meeting the commitments promised to them is critical.
Rex:
I went out to show Rex Jupiter & Saturn tonight. He excitedly pointed the other way and exclaimed, “Mommy! It’s the moon!! There it is!! The moon is not sleeping!”. Then he pointed leftward, and said, “Mommy, look! It’s Venus!” It was Mars, but hey, a kid who can point out a bright dot in the sky and call it by the name of a planet instead of just calling it a star, is alright by me. He also knows how far away the sun is. “Nmnmnmn-three meel-yun miles away!”
Leo:
I gave Leo a small donut tonight after dinner. Suddenly from around the corner, i hear him screaming and yelling and desperately needing immediate help. I rush to see what’s wrong—Tails was trying to take his donut and he did NOT want Tails to eat his donut! She has stolen food from him before, and it is no doubt it feels like the world has ended.
Leo now says “Up”, “down”, and “ball”, and “dah-uhng”.
Brusly: Brusly has sadly, not improved at all. she seems lost and pretty miserable, so we’ve decided to let her go peacefully. She will make her last prints on wednesday. We are very sad–fortunately, the boys don’t really understand, but we are still very sad. It was just last week that I was saying, i think she’ll make it to the new year. I really didn’t want to leave her behind in 2020, but at this point, it woul be selfish to for her to continue through to the next year. We will miss her. She is a good dog!