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They are amazing to watch when they do zoomies, we have a few rescues (ex racers) that walk the beach with us in the morning, poor bloody labs just watch on in consternation of the flying streaks as they tear up and down the sand having a great time.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity -
RAH
I'm old. I know stuff - JSOP
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Mycroft Holmes wrote: they tear up and down the sand having a great time
The joy they feel when they run is amazing. When I first adopted Bacchus, we thought like everyone else; they had to be 'forced' to run and were subject to cruel treatment if they didn't. Nothing could be further from the truth. You haven't seen real joy until you've watched them. Even when they're very old and reduced to a slow trot, they love running.
That's why I refer to Bacchus as a retired racer rather than a rescue. He's a professional athlete who retired due to an injury (broken ankle, easily fixed but no more racing). His trainer called us twice after we adopted him to see how he was doing. Those folks love these animals; that's not cruelty.
Software Zen: delete this;
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Sleeps up to 20 hours a day, runs like s**t off a shovel.
Sighthounds are great.
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Brilliant! 
Software Zen: delete this;
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My own dog is a sighthound cross (hence she's a lurcher).
Her dad was Border collie x Whippet, her mum was a husky. So low boredom threshold, lots of speed and lots of stamina. Not a handful at all!
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Alister Morton wrote: Her dad was Border collie x Whippet, her mum was a husky.
That would make her a great polar bear herder! 
Software Zen: delete this;
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Definitely has the herding instinct of the collie, most of the prey drive of the whippet and the bossiness, digging and vocalising of the husky. Never a dull moment with our Truffle.
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Alister Morton wrote: Truffle
I love the name .
My greyhound is 'Bacchus', named for the Greek/Roman god of wine and revelry. My wife loves mythology and picked the name even before we met the dog. The couple who was fostering him told us he didn't bark, he just whined when he wanted something.
Yes. He's the god of, er, whine. 
Software Zen: delete this;
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Haha
Truffle is so named because of her colour mix - mainly white with grey and almost black splodges but some red too - she's a mix of red and blue merle.
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Bacchus is all black, the most common color in greyhounds. He's nearly ten, so his muzzle has gotten quite gray. I tell people that he's been going so fast for so long, the color is draining toward his tail.
Software Zen: delete this;
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I usually make it a walk to the coffee machine ![Java | [Coffee]](https://codeproject.global.ssl.fastly.net/script/Forums/Images/coffee.gif)
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Yea, but I'm out of this mornings allotment of coffee. I did spill a little while getting my last cup. I looked at the spill, wondering if I was irked because I had to wipe it up, or irked because I lost that bit of the morning's last cup.
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I think it doesn't count as a full cup anymore, so you can have one more
Enjoy 
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I think most of us can relate.
>64
Some days the dragon wins. Suck it up.
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My moment was in a complicated mathematical computation. Was getting wrong results for about a week. Then one afternoon was debugging when I saw that a minus sign was keyed in as a plus sign. After that fix, all results became correct.
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Reminds me of when I took the computer graphics class in college. I had been debugging a 3D clipping algorithm for a week, and it kept failing in a weird way. One night, after I'd been in the lab for almost 40 hours straight (yes, I was insane back then), I went out to the hallway with a listing and stretched it out on the floor. I looked at it for a couple hours, chain-smoking (I was also stupid back then) the whole time.
I finally got up and started walking the hallways. After about ten minutes, the thought occurred to me to check my variable names against the original algorithm. I had used the names the algorithm used, which were unfortunately single lower-case characters. In one place, I had typed a 'b' instead of an 'h', both of which were variables in the algorithm. Go look at your keyboard; I'll wait.
Software Zen: delete this;
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Ah yes. Spreading out listings. I visualize listings on fan fold printer paper. I realize you can get a listing on sheets of paper from any modern printer, but it's just not the same.
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Sounds like a good moment. I'm a big fan of some good math code.
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YES! and like you when in the middle of a particularly annoying problem. I actually begin fantasying about what the get up and walk around is going to be like.
It is particularly fun when I have "budgeted" lets say 8 hours to fix something and have a moment of brilliance and solve in an hour or so. I almost always take an hour or so to bask in my walking around moment. I barely ever take the full 7 I have allotted myself.
It is a wonderful feeling.
To err is human to really elephant it up you need a computer
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Certainly! I recognize the feeling, and the action, very well.
I'll take the opportunity to tell of two other ways of reacting to a victory. This was a math problem, but it might as well have been an algorithmic one:
In preparation for the math finals, two of my University classmates, Jon and Berit, were solving problems from the finals of previous years. Berit was the undisputed #1 in academic results, less so in self confidence. Jon was the other way around - certainly so for the confidence part.
For one problem, they got stuck, couldn't make out how to solve the problem. So rather than locking up each other's way of attacking it, they agreed to split, sit at separate tables apart from each other, trying to solve the problem alone. And so it happened that they both 'saw the light' at the very same moment.
And Jon exclaimed: Boy, am I smart!
And Berit exclaimed: Boy, have I been dumb!
(Those who know them both, says: Right! - That is just like both of them.) After Jon told me of this episode, with a laugh, I asked Berit if it was true. She looked down, and nodded: I guess that is exactly what happened ...
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Anymore I look out the window and thank God in heaven for helping me, then run off to facebook to see what the rest of the world has been up to, play some phone solitaire and just be "analog" for a while before perusing the bug log to see what one will be next on the pole.
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BBar2 wrote: a variable the should be volatile, and it’s not
Ah, memories of Microsoft 'C' 6.0 back in the MS-DOS days. They didn't implement the volatile keyword, and their optimizer would move what looked like loop-invariant code outside a loop. Made for a dandy interrupt service debugging experience. I had to disable optimization entirely.BBar2 wrote: Do you have other victory rituals?
I do the get up and walk around bit too. I wander around for a bit and then come back and make really sure I've fixed the problem.
Software Zen: delete this;
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When I hit a snag and have no idea what else to try, I usually get, take a walk outside and when I return, I normally have some idea of what to try next, etc, until it's solved and time for a bourbon on the rocks.
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Did you ever try to explain the problem to your rubber duck?
I, and many others, can tell you that it works!
A slightly modified variation: Write the documentation for it. Both the user/API documentation explaining how it is intended to be used, and the detailed maintenance documentation, explaining the data structures and the processing logic. Besides: Then the documentation is there, when someone asks for it!
For non-programming stuff, I have been using a further slightly modified way. I really never thoroughly understood how a gyro works. How a heat pump works. How genetics and inheritance works. The chemistry of a battery ... So in my imagination, I keep alive gang of smart junior high school kids in a "Young Scientist Club" giving presentations of various stuff to their schoolmates. As I gradually learn more about a topic, I write it down as these young people's 'lecture' to their schoolmates - including the questions they receive from their audience when something is not clear.
The rubber duck is a children's toy. A child needs to have things explained simply and clearly, yet in a correct manner. And you must be prepared for (sometimes shockingly) logic questions about why and how. Pretending that your rubber duck is that oh, so logic kid asking 'why' is a great help. Letting them materialize as an audience, and forcing that simple and clear explanation into a kid's presentation is mostly a way of 'formalizing' it, but for me, it has great value.
This is an excellent way to force yourself to really get a thorough basic understanding, extract the fundamental ideas in a simple way, making sure that all you say (while impersonating one of the "young scientists") is correct, even if in a simple form. And the question part pinpoints what you have not yet mastered: I write down, as question from the audience, all those nasty 'sorry, I do not have a good answer to that', and then keep up my search for information on the field so that I can provide and answer.
I rewrite 'lectures' all the time: If I manage to express my newly acquired understanding in simple terms, it goes into the basic presentation, but to keep the presentation at the simple level, some advanced parts must be kept as question/answer. It it definitely a goal to get as much as possible into such simple terms that they can be included in the basic presentation.
This is a great way of learning, in a way that ensures that you really understand the problem completely, that you know how to bring your understanding out to others, and you are prepared for a lot of 'surprise questions'. I'll say that I now am capable of explaining to a twelve year old both gyros, heat pumps, optical lenses, batteries, the heterozygote inheritance of apples, how to make cheese, starling flock formation and lots of other things, in far better ways than the school textbooks.
When my daughter was that age, she sort of proved it, coming to me with a schoolbook text that made no sense whatsoever (not even to me...). I explained it "my way", and she sighed: But if it is that simple, why didn't they say it that way, then?
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