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Ambien cliff approaches
Thursday, May 12 2016
Gretchen had to get up early this morning so she could drive to Albany and teach kids about animal ethics, so it was my job to walk the dogs in the forest. I hadn't been in the forest in awhile, and there is nothing so hopeful and promising as a forest in early May.
Later I cracked down on some of that same exuberance by mowing the most-used part of the lawn, a task that took less than an hour. The grass was already so tall that I had to take it slow in places so as not to bog down the blade.
I had some tomato seedlings in need of repotting (they'd grown from seed right next to each other, but were now three or four inches tall). But instead of repotting them, I optimistically planted them in the northmost tomato patch, which I only partially-weeded first. The chance of any more frost this season is very low.
Today I worked a long shift in my remote workplace, starting at noon and ending after 9:00pm. I have to be willing to work like that if I'm going to be taking off three eighths of a day every week to play with clay. I spent much of the early part of the day building a function called nestArrayToHierarchy. Its job was to take a recordset (similar in structure to an excel spreadsheet), scan it for certain known pieces of information common across the records, and then build a hierarchical data structure (an array of arrays) with those common elements pulled out and put in those higher levels in the hierarchy. All of this was necessary in the "framework" of code (I use the term loosely) I was working in, where the ultimate display of web pages is handled by parsing under the rules of a very limited proprietary pseudo-language (it's probably not Turing-complete) and replacing tokens with data from a data structure. Because I needed to display a hierarchical menu, the data for that menu had to itself be hierarchical. And that meant it needed to be programmatically manipulated, since data from a single database query is never hierarchical. My function nicely automated the process when adding a single layer of hierarchy, but making it recursive was a challenge that would have to wait for an insight I would have later in the middle of the night (when I would wake up and not be able to get back to sleep). Armed with this insight, I would manage to make the function fully-recursive while waiting for 10 milligrams of Ambien to kick in; I love getting shit done as the Ambien cliff approaches. By the way, I feel like I've written a function very similar to nestArrayToHierarchy before, but I wouldn't know where to look to find it.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?160512 feedback
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