Days of Summer >> 8/25/16

1. 8/25/16
1. Wake early on my lovely new mattress, inherited from M. Break the fast, a quick shower, and it is off to Alpha.
2. We have a promising lead with the Freescale reps. So I abandon my quixotic process to automate the build with a drag-and-drop mouse driver, and start working on the user interface with Ross.
3. He’s figured out some stuff, like how to use asynchronous tasks while keeping the UI responsive, and reading real-time output into a box for monitoring.
4. But his code is utter spaghetti. Methods spanning 50+ lines, random flags floating around, conditioning on the text! Of UI labels.
5. I spend some of the time actually editing the code, and more time arguing with Ross about how it should be done. He’s receptive to my ideas but doesn’t seem to understand the basis for my objections.
6. Bike to lunch with Mike, Ross, Adam. The ride is exhausting but fun, the sandwich at Avenue Bread is awesome.
7. Get back to coding drenched in sweat. Make an enumeration to represent all the possible states of the UI, get rid of all the flags, etc.; but when I have Ross on board with that idea, I realize I have no idea what the macro-purpose of the whole UI is. Is it a walkthrough so that the user can input default config details? Is it set up so that the user can do custom builds? Discuss this with Ross for a while, arrive at a basic strategy.
8. Am about to leave when I see an email from the Freescale guy. He says he’s solved my problem! Incredulous, I recreate his solution. It works! I’m astonished and embarrassed I hadn’t tried the exact thing--maybe I had but had messed up a detail. Maybe Ross and I can finish after all.
9. Reply and bike home in a cheery mood.
10. Shower and ship out to golf with Dad and “I”. Good fun! Talk with Joseph about UW application essays.
11. Return, make delicious melt for dinner. Good conversation with Dad, then dig into the Feynman lectures. Dance to some K-pop videos with M, more Feynman (super interesting, I love Feynman’s explanations so much, #psychedForQuantum now that I know what an operator is :)
12. Watch last episode of Firefly :( with Mom and Dad. So good! Then we start watching this show called Bloodline with the great actor from Friday Night Lights. It’s kinda depressing so I sit outside and write this log to classic Uncle Bonsai songs. Night all!