Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing

Without deadlines to focus on, it's doubtful that I'd ever get anything done. My principle method of working involves doing the initial setup on a project, ignoring it in favour of whole load of lower priority work, then returning to the important thing a week before the deadline in a state of frenzied panic. I think this is the secret of my efficiency: I'm either frantically working on a high priority piece of work or studiously avoiding it by churning through a huge pile of slightly less important stuff.

My essay progresses at a shocking pace. The first section is finished, the second section is about half finished and I've set out the scaffolding of my main argument, but unfortunately, I seem to be running out of steam. I think I'm going to go for a wander into town and possible search for inspiration at the bookstore and at the bottom of a Boston Latte. Sounds like a plan.

I think the worst of my essay is now behind me. I've written the first part and set up the logical structure of the second part, so now all I have to do is sit down and convert the logic into prose — shouldn't be too hard. Hopefully, I'll have everything done in time to go to BTP for afternoon coffee.

Well, it looks like I'm pretty much done, excepting a quick polish and proofread tomorrow. I'm not at all convinced by the strength of my own arguments, but at this point, I'm pretty much reconciled to its mediocrity.

Today's big question: will we manage to get our software maintenance finished in time to go to the pub at lunch? Only time will tell...

In an attempt to put off writing my increasingly imminent conference presentation, I decided to tweak one of my bits of C++ to see if I could get it vectorize. Thirty minutes of tweaks - unrolling a couple of loops, replacing whiles with fixed length loops and in-lining a dot product routine - and I'd got the vector ratio up from a big fat 0.00 to 97.8 and chopped 144 seconds off the run time. Hurrah!

The back story to all this is that doctor_squale and I were petitioned by some poor unfortunate, who'd written his latest greatest in C++ only to discover that the performance sucked, who thus wanted some help tuning his code. Unfortunately I've got other things to do, like my conference presentation, and the Good Doctor is off on a week long drinking binge, so he can't help.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got more important things to do. Like finding a paper bag to hyperventilate into when the panic attacks really start to kick in...