You’re so great

Correction: I’m so great.

You will not believe this. For hours and hours and hours, I was repeatedly complaining on Twitter about this program called Greenstone. It’s a shit program. We pretty much only learned about it in class on Monday, and our assignment is due the following Monday – in about a day from now. I was so infuriated about this, and I even left negative feedback on the student feedback survey (without being rude). In our group I was assigned to do the coding and the layout (who else? ;)). It drove me mad. Because it wasn’t just regular HTML and CSS. It was mixed with macros and other scripting. It drove me absolutely insane. And to be honest, I thought, if I couldn’t do this, then how could anyone else? A lot of the people in my class are not code-literate. :P

We basically have to make a database with an appropriate interface design for a client. We have to collect all the objects and write appropriate metadata/properties for them. We managed to do that early, so this week we were just putting everything into the database and I would fix up the layout. For a short time I felt like I could get all the coding done and done quickly too, as well as nicely. But it was definitely a lot more difficult than I thought. There was one error that drove me mad, and ten minutes ago, was still driving me mad.

The title was coming up twice. And it wasn’t coming up twice on every page – it was coming up twice on just one page. Because of the way the shit is coded and structured, I had to look through nearly a hundred macro files to find out where things were going. The documentation was of no help, and neither were the tutorial sheets that were given to us. I pitied – well, actually, to be more accurate, I felt incredibly sorry for – whoever wrote those tutorial sheets. (If it was my tutor, no matter how much I dislike her… still.) They weren’t explained properly and there were even some incorrect instructions. I felt sorry for whoever wrote it, for they would think that they would be helping people when they weren’t. They would probably get a few complaints, too.

A few hours into this afternoon, I was sure I’d fix the error, but I didn’t. One minute I heard the birds outside, the next, it was pitch black and I’d forgotten to take the clothes down. I was so angry I had to eat lemon cheesecake because I couldn’t stand sitting, staring at my screen, trying to figure out this stupid problem.

After eight horrible and very shitty, tiring hours trying to find out why this title was coming up twice on just one page – after hours and hours of hacking at code, dealing with trial and error because of the endless variables, it hit me. I was just having a browse through the demos and through the original interface and I realised that the title had to be replaced by an image with a function inside the editing interface. FUCK.

I think I just exploded when I refreshed the page and everything was how I had wanted it to be. I don’t know whether to laugh, cry or throw buckets of meatballs at a pinata. I… don’t know what to say. Endless complaining. I can’t say complaining worked, I can probably say I’m an idiot as I could have figured it out a bit earlier. I am just relieved, but angry that I wasted so much time – pretty much all day – on this stupid error. I want those eight hours of my life back. /angry

I find it unbelievable that I didn’t actually give up. That might be a bad thing though. I’m never spending that long on part of an assignment again. It is now nearly 1:00 in the morning; I slept at 3:00 yesterday morning… far out. But I still want to have a quiet celebration.

10th June. I can hardly wait. I just need a break. Dfdlkgjdlgdjgdlgjfd. /bash /bash

Comments on this post

Congratulations! Perseverance is the key to success. I could really relate with your problem when I had those C++ assignments waayyy back!

Oh man, debugging! The problem seems so ominous at first, and then you realized that the problem was stupid. This happens too often in all kinds of coding. *sigh*

You’re almost done! Good luck!

Hello Georgina! Long time, no speak, it feels like I’ve been away for so long and I missed reading your blogs!

I hate that situation- when you spend hours and hours trying to fix something, whether it being online or offline and then you realise the mistake, and it’s only a small one that you missed from the beginning. So annoying!

I suppose now though, that you’ve realised your mistake if you ever face an assignment similar you’ll know what to do right away. Still, it’s a shame about the lost time!

Woo, it’s not long until your break now at all! I’ve had a week off school but it has not been enough. I finish for 10 weeks on the 30th and I am counting down the days!

Omg that seems horrible. I never heard of that program before, but after reading this I do not want too. How can a teacher give that to someone and you are amazing at coding? Like if you can’t do it, you are right i do not know how anyone else could. I hate coding my layouts because I am always in a dark room with just the light on. I always forget that I spent like 4 horus making it perfect, people just do not get it. That sucks that you kinda of wasted a day on something you do not find useful =/ Well lemon cheesecake isn’t THT bad :) lol I hope you at least get a good/decent grade on it. It will all work out :) Do not worry :) I am glad you finished, dedication is key:)

I really want to not be friends with him. he caused me so much agony in the last 2 years. Although our friendship (when its good) is awsome and I trust him. But it’s like he does these things to me which makes me think our friendship is meaningless. I am actually not “done” I kinda talked to him today. ugg. I tried so hard, had so much hope. and yet he does the same things that I hate that he does. UGG i don’t like guys. I like the phrase we have to bite the bullet. Thank you *hug*

All you had to do was refresh the page and it was fixed, or at least it was simple enough to b e like that? Oo at least you didnt do it all, then have it be deleted by accident right after. I have had that happen; or save over it without thinking what you were saving over – -. I hope you get a nice break , you deserve it.

Maggie

Ugh, wasted time… it sucks that it can not be retrieved again. /wah

But then again, the most important thing is… you’ve resolved the error and everything went on smoothly after. YAY! /love Congratulations on that achievement. You’re one hell of an awesome person, yay you! <3 It was a lengthy time, yes.. but it still wasn’t wasted. Good job~ 👏

Let’s go, June 10. Please come sooner for Georgina. ;)

Hello! So I’ve dropped by your blog on numerous occasions, but I have yet to comment on one of your posts. I was able to relate to this one really well, and I was unable to resist.

Last term, I took a computer course that was on web designing. I had spent hours coding layouts and figuring out what went wrong with some of my scripts. There was this one time where I spent a good 6 hours on a layout, making sure that it met all the requirements and that it looked pretty in all browsers. The last thing I had to do was validate the HTML and CSS. I remember it came up with 2 warnings and 30 some errors. I just wanted to shoot myself to put me out of my misery. My last assignment consisted of macros and other various scripts. Now that one was a pain. I remember having so many issues just trying to get my JavaScript forms to work. If I had lemon cheesecake, maybe times wouldn’t have been so rough? lol

omg, that reminds me of when I took Intro to Computers at my university a couple of years ago. In pairs, we had to write some Javascript code and create this question and answer thing. I paired up with my best friend. We did the code correctly, but for some reason the q&a thing was not working. It kept saying “null” everytime we would try to generate the required answer. After spending days pouring over the code, and even asking the teacher’s assistant to look over the code for us (and having him say our code was, indeed, correct), we discovered that on one of our lines of code, we started it with a lower case “j” instead of a capitalized “J”, which basically broke our code. It was such a relief to get it working, but such a stupid, stupid thing to break our entire code.

Geez-a-lou! I’m going to honestly say that I didn’t understand half of what you said, but what a pain! That’s awesome that you kept at it though and didn’t give up until it was exactly how you wanted it to look! I can be that way sometimes too, where I won’t give up until it’s absolutely perfect. I think it’s actually a good quality, even if it makes you a little sleep deprived.

Thanks Georgie. Be grateful that you can only sympathize, it’s really hard to see my grandparents, who I’ve always looked up to and loved, just start to deteriorate. But, everyone has their time. It’s reassuring that I have family up there that can take care of them. I was glad I could see them too.

I was going for a pastel kind of summery feel but eco works just fine :D And since I live in Indiana, it wasn’t THAT bad like other states like Louisiana or Missouri. Indiana got a couple tornadoes but mostly it was crazy wind and crazy rain lol.

Whew! You definitely get an A+ in perseverance lol. 8 hours?! Craziness. That’s how it was with physics and me last semester and I’m sure it will be the same with physics and I next semester spending countless hours struggling to get like 2 problems done or something so I understand! I get ya! It especially sucks when it seemed so simple lol. I just have to laugh at myself. LOL at the stress eating of the cheesecake hahaha. I totally do that too.

Wow! This program sounds so difficult I don’t think I’d ever have the patience to deal with such a thing. Although I’m glad you stuck with it and figured it out, sucks that so much time was wasted! 8 hours?! Wow! I would have been so annoyed and probably would have forgotten about it and accept a fail, ahaha but then again I’m not in college yet so I don’t understand the value of those kind of grades. I will be soon after the summer haha so by then I’ll learn.

But I’m sure you’ll get an awesome grade! Here’s my mini celebration to you! 👏 👏 👏 👏 👏 👏 👏 👏