Steering clear of politics for a moment, as well as retreating from the exchange of “your mama” jokes on Twitter, I’ll talk about what has been haunting my dreams lately:

Science.

Tomorrow is my day off. Yet I so wish to go in to work. I have been working all week on revising a piece of software I wrote some 6 or 8 years ago. I have been treading water just keeping up with my ever=growing workload, but find myself caught up for the first time in several years. This entire week has been spent taking a hammer to my cobbled-together piece of functional software. Using a far superior algorithm I developed for very low ballistic coefficient debris propagation, I began to completely replace the viscera of the program.

A problem with working on old software is that you often forget what the hell you had been thinking. I found that my code commenting skills 6 or 8 years ago were far better than 10 or 12 years ago. Much confusion was avoided by simple notes to myself clearly explaining what might otherwise appear to be gibberish. That was good. But I wasn’t perfect. In one case, I discovered what seemed to be a pronounced mathematical error in matrix multiplication. It took several hours before I found that I had simply melded several processes together, while trimming away portions that became unnecessary in order to maximize efficiency. I essentially repeated an optimization I did long ago.

Concentrated work on a single such activity swamps the mind. Except for a couple of bouts of rigorous exercise on Tuesday and today, I’ve been headlong in this project.

This afternoon, the worst possible thing happened: I finished.

Well, that is a bit of an overstatement. I finished freehand plugging in hundreds of lines of code that needed to be changed. Then the hard part started. Put in the data, press the button, and then…

Far too early in the debugging process, it was time to go. Tomorrow is my day off, making for a three day weekend.

The worst thing in the world for people like me is an interruption in the process.

I am all but certain I will awaken multiple times over the course of the weekend contemplating potential reasons for the issues I found. I expect to be a basket case until I get this software out for beta testing.