Following Edge

I have recovered my sense of humor and perspective since Wednesday and enjoyed a relaxing day of programming. It's thanks to feeling more healthy by increasing my daily dose of synthetic thyroid by about 9 micrograms (5%). For most people, the body's thyroid and insulin levels are so automatic that they don't appreciate how perfectly they are regulated. Having to regulate these things manually is a crap-shoot where it's hard know how much to increase or decrease my doses, so I'm happy to be feeling a bit better in the last couple of days. Oh, and Kinsey's picture of me and Lauren helped bring a little levity as well.

And, what do I do when I'm feeling better? Programming. The big project I'm working on with Keith is at least a few weeks behind my optimistic goals because of my recent limited energy and the ever-present big project problem: unexpected problems. Hence, while I had important new features to work on, I instead spent time solving an unexpected performance problem. You see, our small test program was taking about 12 seconds to start up which meant the final program might take two minutes (which only an extremely distracted user would fail to worry about).

I spent the day tracking how many milliseconds various parts of the program took to run. Kind of reminds me about worrying about teeny micrograms of thyroid. Anyhow, once I found the slow and lazy parts of the program that were taking more than 50 milliseconds, I beat them like sweat-shop laborers until they got their noses to the grindstone. (Well, not exactly, but that's a good way to understand it.) And what makes it all feel even better is that I had good results: the test program now takes only 2 seconds to load... a significant improvement.

Now, perhaps I can get back to expected problems and get this project closer to completion. It'll be a lot easier now that I'm feeling a little bit better.