Random Rants OA - I Have 71 Problems, But This Thread Ain't One

[Gori the Grey]

As an aside, if I could find anyone willing to bet against this I'd have been rich long ago.

Only if they'd been willing to bet a lot of money against it. And nobody with any acquaintance with the site would be!

But for all that, I went silent for a whole year just as an April Fools joke. That took some self-discipline, some curbing of my unruly member. If someone had made that bet with you on March 31, 2015, you might have felt like you had to pay up after some months of my not going on!

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

I got a refill of my medication and the manufacturer changed the shape of them (previously round, now oblong) and they're just the size where this makes swallowing them more difficult.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Three scam phone calls in one afternoon. This has exacerbated an already no good, very bad day, in which I seem to have acquired a shadow following me around on one of my forums.

 

[Hygro]

I got a refill of my medication and the manufacturer changed the shape of them (previously round, now oblong) and they're just the size where this makes swallowing them more difficult.

Been there. Sucks

 

[Zelig]

More broadly, a pretty significant proportion of all computer-based science, not to mention anything involving complicated statistical analysis, contains serious errors. The peer review process is kind of a joke - nobody looks over your code. That should really change. It probably won't, though, because it would add a lot of work for everyone and thereby reduce people's output in a publish-or-perish world. Never mind that the output would be more reliable - that's not where the incentives lie.

Hell, a pretty significant amount of work doesn't even have the code available.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

The Last Tudor

It's about Jane Grey and her sisters.

The book arrived yesterday.

I hope this author runs out of Tudor people to write about fairly soon; I'm running out of shelf space for them.

 

[Arakhor]

Well, you should be encouraged by the title of your latest acquisition, then.

 

[Takhisis]

 

[Lemon Merchant]

Computers suck.

My network attached storage unit bit the dust a couple of weeks ago, so I thought I would mount a hard disk in an external controller and backup that way...

1. I backed up my main data drive, but got errors accessing some of the files on the drive...
2. So I ran CHKDSK on the drive to make sure it was OK. It's a 1 TB drive and it took forever...
3. It finished and the computer would no longer boot. After two hours of fiddling and pulling my hair, it finally booted up to Windows 10. (I dual boot with Windows 7 and use 7 all the time)...
4. The data drive is no longer accessible. It has been corrupted by CHKDSK...
5. The backup drive that I had just recorded the backup to then failed...
6. In the process, my Win 7 installation was heavily damaged, requiring reinstall...
7. Reinstalled Win 7 (after some crying and hair pulling)... Microsoft will not allow me to reactivate. They say it has been re-armed too many times - I am now stuck with Windows 10...
8. Bought new hard drives...
9. Reinstalled Windows 10 to a larger drive and attempted recovery of the CHKDSK drive. I got back 4% of my data.
10. After reinstalling, I installed some of my favorite utilities - one of which gave me a virus. The PC would no longer boot. I had to wipe the system and reinstall everything again.

The long and the short of it is that I have lost 500 GB of data. All of my modding files (I spent months working on new versions of the BAT Mod and Better BAT AI - almost ready for release), my music, pictures, all of my documents and important things - gone.

I really, really hate this computer right now.

 

[Takhisis]

Instead of sounding like the usual Linux shill I'll suggest that you keep a special boot disk (pendrive/DVD) so that you don't have to yield to viruses and can access your drive as if it were an external one. It can be a life-saver.

But, for now: .

 

[Hygro]

Denver airport is moldy

 

[Synobun]

Landlord vetoed my two preferences for new roommate.

 

[Bootstoots]

Do correct it, because of your care for science. You are wrong. It wouldn't be better, including for you, if you hadn't caught or didn't correct it. As you move on to some other field, some job interviewer will ask you to characterize yourself and you can cite this development as a testament to your character, all sorts of good things about your character: honesty, willingness to own up to mistakes, eagerness to correct mistakes, care for things other than your own reputation or convenience, pains-taking. I bet I could go on.

Don't worry, I've already told my advisor and am creating the corrected plots now. I'm not going to let this slide. I do - whether it's in my interest or not - want to reduce the amount of BS in the world in general and in my little corner of science in particular. And it would make for a decent tale for a job interview, in which I pretend like I'm a conscientious, selfless worker. But I'm going to correct it, whether it's in my interest or not.

I'm not convinced it would actually be a great idea to call myself on my own BS, if all I cared about was my own self-interest. There's maybe a 15% chance that someone would actually want to use my work, in which case I'd incur a slight cost by being like "OMG, I discovered a mistake" and act as though I hadn't noticed it ahead of time. Most of the time, it would just slip by unnoticed, providing a publication while nobody ends up caring enough about the actual work to use it. It might be cited by people wanting to justify using the general method (machine learning to predict variables that global models can't resolve), but there's a low probability that anyone would care about the specific result.

And I'll give you a more cynical POV: you'd better retract or correct it, because if you let it stand and it's later debunked you'll look either like an arse or like an idiot. Or both.

I'm leaving the field. If someone discovered something a year from now, my professional reputation would be neither here nor there. It's pretty hard to catch people like that, who just finished their MS and scattered, unless you somehow plastered it on the internet.

If I weren't, though, it's possible I'd look like an idiot. I'd prefer that to being an arse. But I'd guesstimate the chance of anyone noticing at all is low. Certainly nobody even thought about it in peer review.

But as I said above, I'll do what it takes to correct it anyway.

95% of all code I've worked on (written by somebody else) has not been documented nearly well enough to make it easy for me to just jump right in and start making modifications. Even if it were, there are often so many variables at play, editing or even understanding somebody else's code can be a challenge. So I'm not surprised!

Hell, a pretty significant amount of work doesn't even have the code available.

Mine doesn't have the code available either. We'd have to make it available if asked, but it would take someone actually asking - most likely, nobody would. I'm finding it difficult enough get my code legible enough that another student in my group can understand it. Or even legible enough that I can understand it - I can barely figure out what I did. That's the nature of the beast I suppose.

 

[Takhisis]

I'm leaving the field. If someone discovered something a year from now, my professional reputation would be neither here nor there. It's pretty hard to catch people like that, who just finished their MS and scattered, unless you somehow plastered it on the internet.

If I weren't, though, it's possible I'd look like an idiot. I'd prefer that to being an arse. But I'd guesstimate the chance of anyone noticing at all is low. Certainly nobody even thought about it in peer review.

But as I said above, I'll do what it takes to correct it anyway.

I might leave my current field too, sure, so I sympathise, but that kind of thing can follow you around in these days of virtually instant communications. I've seen so many things come up from weird databases…

 

[Synobun]

Takhisis, you promised not to tell anyone about that!

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Well, you should be encouraged by the title of your latest acquisition, then.

I would be, but she wrote the series out of historical order! She's already written the books about Mary Tudor, Elizabeth I, and Mary, Queen of Scots... all of whom reigned several years to decades after Lady Jane's death.

Landlord vetoed my two preferences for new roommate.

Not Japanese enough?

 

[Takhisis]

Takhisis, you promised not to tell anyone about that!

Oh, c'mon, baby, I know you have a soft spot for Heroes of Newerth even if you pretend to hate it.

 

[Synobun]

Not Japanese enough?

Haha. They actually stopped with the Japanese preference. The last one bailed midway through his Visa and apparently gave them issues during the leaving process. They're switching it up now with a mandatory one month trial before signing a lease (this is illegal, but whatever) so they can get rid of anyone they don't like, and they obviously can't do that with a Japanese person fresh off the boat.

Or, well, I guess they can, but that probably exceeds their moral limits.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Haha. They actually stopped with the Japanese preference. The last one bailed midway through his Visa and apparently gave them issues during the leaving process. They're switching it up now with a mandatory one month trial before signing a lease (this is illegal, but whatever) so they can get rid of anyone they don't like, and they obviously can't do that with a Japanese person fresh off the boat.

Or, well, I guess they can, but that probably exceeds their moral limits.

Yikes!

I lucked out this time. The new manager seems nice, doesn't mind slipping notices under my door instead of expecting me to wander out to the outside of the building every day just to check if maintenance is going on in the building (we have days when the water is shut off for several hours; those are the days when I go to the library and work on my NaNoWriMo prep), and if any parcels come that are too big for my mailbox/parcel locker and I'm not home, he'll make sure I get it later.

My rent did not go up this year (thanks to a recommendation from the outgoing manager to the leasing agent), and basic cable and internet are included in the rent. The only utility I need to worry about is electricity, and since I try to use as much natural light as possible, it stays at a manageable amount.

The neighbors across the hall have several screaming brats, but it could have been worse. At least the adults are quiet.

I was expecting a hassle with the telecom company because of how spectacularly they screwed up last year over the TV/internet arrangement, but my current bill doesn't have any weird charges that aren't supposed to be there... so it looks good for the next year.

 

[Arakhor]

The long and the short of it is that I have lost 500 GB of data. All of my modding files (I spent months working on new versions of the BAT Mod and Better BAT AI - almost ready for release), my music, pictures, all of my documents and important things - gone.

This (a) closing the stable door etc. and (b) employing the services of a soulless megacorp, but I like saving certain important files to my Google Drive so that I can maintain a cloud backup of the files most important to me at any one time.