It's been 6 months or so since I've spent a good 8-hour stint in the lab. It's special. I've bitched and ranted about it countless times before (Technically, less than 550, which is my total number of entries. But you know, countless.) And, you know, those were usually because I'd been doing it 5 times a week for the past month. That can grate on you. But last night was easy. I coded, I thought, classmates drew huge diagrams of dots on the whiteboard and we casually debated how to approach the problem, and what the hell the algorithm we were supposed to implement actually was. Jacobi Multigrid. In parallel. The Devil.
So I coded and I debugged. I swore at my terminal when it didn't give me what I wanted. I spent 15 minutes hunting down a spurious semicolon that had eaten the logic the program was supposed to follow. I actually named a function "int unleashfury(int a, int b...)". And I created.Every couple hours or so I'd go outside, and that was another thing I'd missed. Warm arizona nights, Palm trees swaying gently in the wind. Behind me, inside the building, past a hallway and inside a room, I could hear the soft, yet thunderous din of 500 fingers upon 50 keyboards. Creativity being coded. Fury being unleashed.I sat there in the warm breeze and the dark sky, watching cigarette smoke curl up against the walls and the lamppost, and I felt like I had groove for the first time in weeks. Up till now it had all been planning and twisting, whoring myself to company reps in exchange for empty promises and free t-shirts, pumping out assignments on the very edge of deadlines. Sleeping where I could, living where I could, eating in between. It's easier now that I have someone to fall into bed next too at the end of the longer days (hell, at the end of all of'm). I think it would be exponentially harder without her. Not just because she brings home free coffee, but, you know, 'cause it's her. Still, one more deadline is looming before break. Midnight tomorrow. Precisely 30 hours from now, the project is due, and we've got a ways to go. Goin'. Goin'. Gone. -Alex
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