I had a bad day on Thursday. Generally, this is not a noteworthy thing, but this time the bad day happened to fall on the same day as a phone interview with a company I want to work for.

My brain was refusing to work on some things that I don’t generally have a problem with. Despite that, I still managed to answer a fair number of questions correctly.

Then came the fun part – I was given a small programming task to complete after the phone call. He gave me an hour with instructions to email him if I needed more time. (It’s at this point when a friend of mine and I both have the reaction of “an hour? This should not be about an arbitrary time limit, but rather about whether or not the code works.” Oh well. It’s their world.)

So I start by coming up with an algorithm to take care of the problem and then start to write the code. My old friend Murphy decides to stop by – the noise level rises, people start vying for my attention, and best of all, Eclipse grinds to a halt. We’re not talking about the IDE slowing down for a completion list. No, it just randomly started grinding to a halt while I was typing, stayed that way for several seconds and then the characters that I typed would finally appear.

I had never had this problem with an IDE on this machine before. Fine, I’m going to cheat – time to restart the laptop. A reboot later and it’s still doing the same thing.

Arg.

I email that I’m going to need more time and get back to fighting with my IDE. Fast forward a bit. Okay, now the code’s finished. Run it to test. Aaaaaaand there’s a bug.

No big deal. Let’s just run the debugger.

Eclipse hangs again.

Bugger.

That’s it. I need a break. Email and say I’m grabbing dinner before finishing because I ran into a problem. Come back afterward to find a response saying that was okay, but he wanted to see what I had already. Oops. Too late for that now.

Okay, so I can’t use the debugger because my laptop is being a pain. I’ll be silly and use printline statements since I don’t have much of a choice.

Five minutes later, the problem is found (infinite loop due to my accidentally skipping something), fixed, the code is cleaned up, and it’s emailed off.

Somehow, though, I still think the time thing is going to work against me because I didn’t get the email message. Oh well. If it does, it does. If it doesn’t, we’ll see what happens.

The next day I found out why I was having a bad day – I woke up sick, and I was sick all weekend.

Figures.

Current mood: tired
Current music: Collapsis – October