so i’m updating from home. from home? from home. this is one of those days when i love being a civil servant, and today i’m going to use the day off (and you know, honor the veterans) letting buzz torture me on another long run and then just relaxing at home all afternoon.
i need to destress after yesterday anyway. i alluded to a typo in a report we wrote, a simple “degrees per second” where it should have been “radians per second.” all of our calculations had it right, it just got typed wrong. i confirmed the typo, confirmed that our calculations were right, and thought that was the end of story.
nope.
because the amateur analyst who found the typo happened to email the head of the space center, the typo worked its way into the management chain. and now all of my division has to check all of its software for this one parameter (the rotation rate of the earth) and make sure it’s correct.
sigh. it’s not a huge deal, and i would be incredibly surprised if anyone found any errors, but it’s annoying to have to do it. i’m glad that this guy found a typo in our report; that’s something we needed to know. but he compared it to the mars climate orbiter (which crashed in 1999 due to an english-to-metric conversion error), and just hearing that phrase got way too many people in a tizzy.
it creates more work for me, because it raises all these questions about our software, and the modifications we/i make to it. but at the same time, i can admit that it’s about time we started documenting our code. especially if we’re going to use it for mission-critical stuff.
anyway. look at that. i have a day off from work and yet i write multiple paragraphs about work. crazy.
i gotta go get dressed to meet buzz for our run.
