Jay’s Not Here

I didn’t make it into work earlier this week because my front left tire decided to relieve some pressure.

Enough that I had to swap in my trusty spare. It’s the second time I’ve had to use it this year. Second time, ever actually.

Doesn’t it look lonely in such a large wheel well?

I took my car into the shop to get the flat fixed. After they took put it on the lift, they told me the front left wasn’t damaged. It just spontaneously became unsealed.

Spontaneously!

Oh, and my rear right tire had a nail in it. But that didn’t lose pressure.

Somehow. Luckily, it didn’t. I only have one donut. And I was already worn out from installing it. You know, power tools are really good at tightening wheel nuts. Too bad I don’t have any. I had a hell of a time undoing them so I could get my unsealed rim off my ride.

Seeing my RMT tomorrow. Mmmm…

In one of my recent assignments, I had to write a program that identified and corrected spelling errors in a set of 1200 sentences. It was about a hundred lines of Python that took 6 minutes to run.

The algorithm was parameterized such that the number of false positives and false negatives could be loosely controlled. Problem was, decreasing one meant increasing the other. The goal of the assignment was to minimize both.

To plot the false positive/negative trend, I needed a table of values. More data points, the better. However, each data point took 6 minutes to compute, and I didn’t know which range of values to focus on.

Four terminal windows and about half an hour later, I was able to generate 20 data points. It was 2 hours worth of data crunching compressed into a quarter of the time, thanks to the quad core rig sitting under my desk.