tomandzoe.com - live from the northside

Part III - Pseudoephidrine not endorphins

This website is more disheveled than the top of the Tour de France’s general classification: there’s people commenting on all sorts of stuff, all over the place. In the last week we’ve had pictures of UncleGeoffie in his pyjamas, timtim’s been commenting from hospital where he’s having his nose reconstructed in order to increase his max VO2, and I’ve been writing posts that are only a line long. So, in order to get things back on track I thought I might give you the third installment in the strategies series.

Last week I had a cold. I also had lots of work to do. Not a good combination. I decided that instead of lying around, like I normally do, I would take some medication. I went to the store and got some Codral, an aromatic blend of codine, panedine and pseudoephidrine. I got the packet from the girl and said, “mmmm… psuedoephidrine”, at which point she snatched the pills back and said, “I’ll need to see your licence so the pharmasist can dispense your medication”. I could only laugh and resist the urge to tell her I had enough morphine tablets in my medicine cabinet than a coke-starved Columbian. I finally got my drugs, after they critically looked me up and down: drugs which are basically designed to make you so wired that you forget why you were feeling lousy in the first place and can “soldier on”. One side benefit I wasn’t aware of, though, is that, when combined with caffine, the drugs provide a great sharpening of the mind: I got more done in two days on Codral than I had in the preceeding two weeks!

Then today, just as my cold cleared up and I kicked the habit, I took a backward step. I was playing with some data on the gut fullness of the fish species that I dissected for my PhD when something went wrong. Microsoft Access was adding random numbers to my values between 0 and 1. So 0.1 became 0.10000046267 and so on. I thought, ‘I know what I’ll do, I’ll go into Access and change the field size so that it only goes to two decimal places, then export it to Excel again - problem solved’. It asked me if I was sure I wanted to make the change because some data would be lost. “No shit” I said, it’s the random data that you put in there. Jeez!”.

How wrong I was. Somehow the program (or me, but lets blame the program for now) managed to make it so there weren’t any decimal places at all! The values were now 0 or 1. WTF? This would never have happened if I was wired on drugs! In order to clear my head, I took a bike ride about half way out to uni, and back, a distance of 20km. While this in not a monumental journey, when you have trouble walking to the bathroom in the morning, as I do, it is quite an undertaking. It was also raining, so I quickly got cold, wet, and tired. I had a great time - I went through puddles, took whatever route I felt like and generally mucked around. It was like being a 13 yr old again, only far more manly. Grrrrr. When I got home I was high on endorphins and starving so I said to myself, ‘whatever, I do what I want’, and ordered two large pizzas. I ate one and a half of them! Now I’m a little tired and full. Next time I’ll remember to stick to the drugs mmmK?

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 20th, 2006 at 5:21 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.