Up...and down

Work this week was an interesting case in patience.

Tuesday was our department's holiday party, we went over to Kobe's Steak House in Largo. God it's been years since I have gone to a tepanyaki style restaurant, and boy are they worth it. By the way, if you're ever in Albuquerque, NM, check out The Japanese Kitchen, it is one of the places you should make a stop on vacation. Anyway, so the food was great, they put on a good show, it was a great time. I couldn't quite catch the piece of shrimp in my mouth, but it was fun.

However, then I get back to work and around 3 PM there's a crisis again with one of my surveys. This time one of the questions that I had fixed way back in August didn't seem to be working again. After doing some testing and then looking at the input data, it turned out that the data had not carried over to the current quarter because it had been collected way back when the setup program was referencing the wrong variable, and since the next two interview attempts were coded as non-interviews, the data was not collected again. So it wasn't the instrument this time, thank goodness. Still, it was rather frustrating to go through this cycle of thinking that something else was broken.

Wednesday I was off, in that time, one of my co-workers found a potential "solution" to fix the problem of the instrument throwing the red X of death, but we still wanted to know what broke it in the first place. Thursday morning I sat and made one change at a time between the December and January instrument and tested to see if it broke. I was finally able to break it, so now we know what broke it, but we still can't explain why. The current theory is that we crossed some previously unknown memory threshold. But at least we have finally isolated the problem and can fix it. The final test will be to put this thing on a laptop and hammer away at it to make sure it always works.

Friday it's just been more testing, at least I should be ready to move forward, plus start focusing on other projects as well. I have a production release coming up soon for my conversion project, and I can't wait.