Mostly, it's Gemstone. SURPRISE! Except not, because no one who reads my blog will be shocked by that. I'm helping with data validation, which is fine, except people in the step before this screwed stuff up which means I can't do anything meaningful anyway and am instead for the most part flagging issues. Which someone (like John) will probably ask me to fix later. FUN TIMES.
I finished that around 1:30 a.m., at which point I endeavored to help my sister finish her programming assignment. To give a more accurate picture: she and a partner had an assignment which dealt with DNA strands. First, you take in two strands and determine their similarity in percentage terms. Then, given a test strand, determine the complementary strand. As extra credit, the more advanced part was to find a specific 3-character sequence in the test strand.
Not to brag about my sister (except I totally am), but she did the entire program except the EC without any help from me OR her partner, who completely stood her up. (A girl-partner, not a guy-partner, for the more curious souls). She loves puzzles, though, and constantly tries to impress her programming teacher by doing all sorts of random extra projects he thinks up for her, so she really wanted to do this EC. I tried helping her out with that for about 45 minutes, which didn't work so well, at which point I told her she should just go to bed while RachelK generously offered to help out (she gave you a shout-out, Linden! For spreading the "code-helping karma or w/e" ;)).
Well, Rachel had a keener eye than me. I was focusing on trying to make my idea work, which intuitively made a lot of sense, except I don't remember a lot of my syntax, which made things difficult -- my idea was to assign three given characters from the character array to a String, except I couldn't figure out how to initialize such a String (Linden! If you happen to know, please share, because this is still eating away at me). Meanwhile, my sister took a different route that I didn't even glance at / acknowledge in my preoccupied state of mind, and Rachel luckily looked at her idea first.
Basically, she was comparing each of three character array elements individually to 'A,' 'A,' and 'G,' whereas I was trying to write the 3 character array elements to a String to then compare the String variable to "AAG." Meghu had a couple issues (intt instead of int, declaring each array element when she didn't need to/shouldn't have, and using a 'while' instead of an 'if') which Rachel found, and I fixed (Megh was packing her backpack in preparation for sleeping b/c she assumed it was a lost cause -- reasonable assumption, with me at the helm, haha). BUT IT WORKED! Hallelujah! Major props to Rachel and my sister, since I had absolutely nothing to do with this, minus some finger-work (aka minimal typing).
Clearly I'm in no state of mind to be up, esp with my busy two days coming up (but busy for SOCIAL reasons, namely watching Alice in Wonderland with Di and the twins and then going to see LINDENNN), but hey, it's Wednesday night (ok, fine, Thursday morning), so I had to get my post in, since I didn't ask Linden for permission to postpone... *halo*
I have to edit something for my dad really quick, then bedtime for me, too. I leave you with a nugget from my sister:
Ekta: before she left, she was like, "Thanks for trying to help! This was fun, almost like a bonding experience!" [to me]
that's amazing
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