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I played Spellbinding[1] for 3 days. I have to stop now and I'm never going to do it again. It took up 1 or 2 hours per day, which could have been my writing or art time. That's why you didn't hear from me.
My brain was is overdrive generating (possible) words for hours a day. Here's a list of the more interesting words it should have accepted, some of them freely made up:
Heraldry: red.
Without ego. They did allow "eggless", which I think is more dubious. For when your eggs got stolen?
Gluttonous. The sin of gluttony is called gula. Or, tasty. I also later learned about the word "sapid", cognate twin to "sipid" as in "insipid", which also means savory or tasy.
What we considered calling the gemlog.
A sort of Voudou sigil. Attested in my world only in Mona Lisa Overdrive, where the neuroprosthetic filigree implanted in Angie's brain becomes conductor - metaphorically a vèvè - to the Loas.
It was an art movement.
Apparently you're not allowed to swear even that far on there.
A bread soup, apparently. I am also suprised to learn that there is no english word for the dough or breadcrumb that goes around breaded fried things and the act of breading them, I might call this panade and panading.
Being a dad.
Surprising but obvious in retrospect: A one-book dictionary is not the full dictionary. The full dictionary of old is that bigger, multi-volume thing. The big single volume is a subset, in particular the subset someone thought was appropriate for schoolchildren.
[1] SPELLBINDING. Easy to play in Lagrange browser. Cognitohazard; don't go there.
Similarly, I can't let a problem go at work, even though I have plently of other, more important, stuff to get to. I've been trying to re-build this old software (no documentation, no manual) with MPI and some other libraries for months.
First it was fake-parallel working - running the whole job N times - because I got a cmake flag wrong, and I crossed the project off until people complained.
Now it's really going with MPI - and it went slower with MPI. Parallel efficiency: none.
I spent a few days checking things are really divided up. I considered IO bottlenecks, busy waiting, and excessive interupting. I thought I found the main message passing bits, and found them taking minimal time.
Then I started to doubt everything about anything. Maybe all "processes" are in fact taking turns on just the first core? Maybe I don't actually know what any of these words mean at all. That's when this side project into an bigger problem - if I don't even know how MPI works, that's a career emergency.
After more debugging (carefully reading the output logs), actually everything seemed to be going fine, except the core computations are running mysteriously slower on smaller problem pieces and nothing makes sense.
I am helpdesk
They teach you how to program, not how to set it running or what's wrong with other people's code.
Today we had some breakthroughs - the data they gave me is not the data. MPI does go slower than serial on a tiny problem, that's normal. d'oh, obvious. Did not really need days of frantic investigation to figure that out.
And the libraries I spent months building will not be used.
It goes faster. It goes so much faster I had another few hours of work convincing people that it really ran.
We learned some things. Which is a nice way to say there was a lot of pointless work and investigation into every possible thing about this.
Now at least write down how and why I installed it and how to run the damn thing! Every morning I thought that today will be Writing Day; take a break, just document the current state and think about the problem. But monkey brain like to push buttons and make things happen, no break until problem is solved.
It happened - my IP address changed. The dynamic DNS client did its job - or did it? I also had to power cycle the raspberry pi for unknown reasons yesterday.
I'm sure there are many interesting people around here - one just has to find them by targetted wandering.
Right now I subscribe to anyone with a pulse (entries in the last year), without reading too much.