Testing Episode IV: A New Lament

[The Spartan]

Join the club. Dreams like this are very common and super freaky.

Well, I'd like it to stop. I have enough stress and anxiety in my life without my sub-conscious looking for ways to add to it.

[Crazedwraith]

Join the club. Dreams like this are very common and super freaky.

Well, I'd like it to stop. I have enough stress and anxiety in my life without my sub-conscious looking for ways to add to it.

I sympathise. It sounds rough.

With a layman's knowledge of psychology though, aren't dream basically us processing your daily emotions or whatever? Sounds like you need to work on stress and anxiety in your waking life and the dreams might take care of themselves.

Alternatively, drugs! Medicine I mean. I don't if there are any sleeping pills that give dreamless sleep that hard ridiculously powerful and restricted knock-out stuff.

[The Spartan]

Actually, you might have a point. Given that I'm unemployed and living with my parents and have the anxiety, frustration and stress that comes out of that, it might just be the source of the dreams.

[evilsoup]

I get similar dreams when I have to do any sort of studying/essay-type work
even when it's stuff I really enjoy & went out of my way to do

[Ralin]

Good Hitler gave a speech to a bunch of Filipino Cub Scouts. He managed to avoid calling any of them a son of a bitch, though he did threaten to kill them if they ever do drugs. Apparently some of them were really excited at the prospect of killing drug dealers when they grow up.

He's like an irascible favorite uncle.

[The Spartan]

I get similar dreams when I have to do any sort of studying/essay-type work
even when it's stuff I really enjoy & went out of my way to do

See, I used to just get insomnia for that.

I very slightly would prefer that. I could at least deal with that by taking a nap.

[Crazedwraith]

So my friend destroyed his contact lens.

This means rather than taking a train down to visit him, and then he drives us. I'm going to have to drive down. When I've barely driven to the next town over before.

I'm so getting lost.

[Bounty]

So my friend destroyed his contact lens.

This means rather than taking a train down to visit him, and then he drives us. I'm going to have to drive down. When I've barely driven to the next town over before.

I'm so getting lost.

Open Google Maps on your phone, crank up the speaker, never get lost again. I have 0 sense of direction and get where I need to be, like, at least 80% of the time.

---

I went to the dentist. I don't like going to the dentist, but a broken tooth won't fix itself.

Well, turns out I react really, really badly to the anesthetic they're using now. Like, cold sweats, blood pressure crashing, call to my doctor bad. Turns out I'm not supposed to get anything with adrenaline in it. Fortunately the stuff worked so I told the dentist to just go ahead and drill once the room stopped spinning, but man, that's not an experience I want to repeat.

I'm going back in six weeks for a permanent filling. I may take a spew bucket just in case.

[Crazedwraith]

Open Google Maps on your phone, crank up the speaker, never get lost again. I have 0 sense of direction and get where I need to be, like, at least 80% of the time.

That's the plan.

[The Spartan]

I actually have a pretty good sense of direction and I still use Google Maps all the damn time if for no other reason than to get route updates when there's traffic. Nowadays anyhow.

First time I went to Munich, I didn't have maps on my phone so I got a paper map at the hotel and then, without using it, I went to the city center and got myself lost. Found my way back and it sort of set my directional sense. At least around the main places that I would want to go in Munich. A sense that failed me the next year when there was work being done on the S-bahn lines and I got dropped off about a kilometer from the stop that was right in front of my hotel in an area I hadn't been to.

I ended up walking off 90deg in the wrong direction and getting lost. Fortunately for me, I was spotted by an American there on business who knew the buses and helped me find the one that got me to the hotel.

[The Spartan]

Went to see Steve Martin and Martin Short's show last night and I got picked to go up on stage and do a bit with them and two other guys! Steven and Marty sang the Three Amigos song and the three of us did the Three Amigos "salute".

I'VE PERFORMED ON STAGE WITH STEVE MARTIN AND MARTIN SHORT!!!

[Bounty]

Your life has peaked. Everything else is now an epilogue.

[The Spartan]

I know right!?!

I should just let myself devolve into a bottomless pit of drugs and alcohol and prostitutes until my corpse is found face down in a ditch.

[Ralin]

So from what I'm hearing the Great Barrier Reef is all but certainly going to die at this point. A huge victory against the environment that could wipe out thousands of species.

Suck on that, eco-hippies. Now all of the animals are going to die.

[Agent Bert Macklin]

In the past few weeks, I broke up with my girlfriend, moved back in with my parents, totaled my car and now have no way to get around, quit my job after checking myself into a mental hospital. It's been really rough.

[Bounty]

Shit dude. Anything we can help with?

[Agent Bert Macklin]

Shit dude. Anything we can help with?

Nah. I'll make things work. Job prospects will open up when the summer semester starts. I can use my university to find another internship.

[Agent Bert Macklin]

I've been doubting my coding skills a lot over the past few months and really don;t think I'll make it in the CS field. I can't even pass data structures. I don't know what's wrong with me.

[Bounty]

You only need to be worried when you don't doubt your coding skills.

CS is such a huge and changing field that you cannot know, or be good at, everything it has to offer. You will never feel like you know what you are doing because by the time you get good at something you'll find out that either 1. everything you've learned just became outdated or 2. you've stumbled upon like half a dozen references to things you don't understand yet.

If you need help with anything you can always ask. I'm a technical consultant for a multinational company, currently working on critical systems that manage international logistics where a single bug can cause millions of dollars worth of delays. I also don't know jack shit about half the stuff I work with so most of my answers will be copy-pasted from StackOverflow.

[Agent Bert Macklin]

Thanks, Bounty. I figured out what happens to me: I don't sit down and plan out the code. I just start. I've been doing Code Wars to gain more experience and one problem had me transfixed when I thought I solved it. After thinking a while I realized I had to do more things.

A function has to take in two integers, the first of which is the start to a range and the last the end of the range. I then need to go through that range and count numbers that do not have a five.

I thought I solved it by doing a simple for-loop, but then I realized that I need to look at each digit in the integers to determine if a five exists. I'm working on that now.

[adr]

Looking at each digit is one option, though another is to do it mathematically: for numbers between 0 and 49, there will be one 5 every 10 numbers - 5, 15, 25, 35, 45. Then all of them 50-59. Then back to every ten: 65, 75, 85, 95, and so on until 150...

Sometimes, just writing something quickly is good, but indeed thinking about it can yield much better results. For this, I *think*, i might be wrong, but I'm fairly sure you can actually make it without a loop by basically dividing by ten, considering the edges, and remembering the tricky parts of 50, 500, 5000, etc.

[Agent Bert Macklin]

Think it would be good practice to solve it in multiple ways?

[adr]

Yeah, well, at least to think about it. Sometimes the most effective programming technique is to rethink the question into something simpler. Most of my job is doing that with clients, talk to them and figure out what they actually need in order to avoid doing unnecessary work.

But even if something does need to be done, it often pays to think about it a bit and see if you can simplify it somehow, take some other approach that is easier to code. (In your case, the for loop is probably the easiest to code anyway, but still it is good mental practice to at least ask how else you might do it just to make sure you aren't missing some easier approach.)

[Agent Bert Macklin]

Shit just keeps getting worse for me. I'm not getting interviews for jobs in the CS field, not even for internships. I've had recruiters contact me only to find out that I am not qualified because I do not know a single piece of software (Selenium) that I could learn easily. My stepfather wants me out of his house so he's doing his best to make that happen. I have no money for important bills, so I'll likely have to sell my guitar and guitar-related hardware, rendering me without art therapy.

I don't know what to do.

[Bounty]

Not getting internships is a good thing because they are a shitty way to dump shitty work on people for free.

How are you doing the job search? Need someone to go over your resume?

I've had recruiters contact me only to find out that I am not qualified because I do not know a single piece of software (Selenium) that I could learn easily.

Two things to take away from this:

- Selenium appears to be free so play around with it and boom, you "have worked with it"
- Recruiters want to hear a story that ticks off boxes on their search form. They are *not* the people you need to convince about your skills. Don't be afraid to tell them a slightly optimistic story. Don't lie, but if the question is "do you know Selenium" and the truth is "I am vaguely aware of it", round it up to a confident "yes".