This was a rough week. First, I was on call, which is always stressful. Second, everyone else in the house had a head cold of some sort. We suspect it was weather related. I ended up working from home, bouncing back and forth between putting out fires/handling normal requests for work, and checking on the kids and wife/fixing meals/handling household chores to keep us from falling too far behind. Third, Saturday was the 10 year anniversary of the murder of my little brother. I’ve been in a dark place this month, and that event was the primary driver for it.
As a progress report, I can say that I managed to get past a few more of the Essentials Badge exercises. I also completed all of the newest unlocked exercises for the Unix badge. This brings me to 18/60 Essentials Badge total, and 32/35 Unix Badge total exercises. I got stuck on another Essentials Badge exercise, caved a little early, sent a support request, then figured it out on my own about five minutes after sending the request in.
The issue was that I wasn’t URL encoding the plus sign with “%2b” since the browser was encoding most everything else for me. I didn’t realize it also needed encoding. I’m almost positive I read that it needed to be, but my brain again translated that as “if it needs it, browser will take care of it” and I didn’t check my work. As soon as I figured it out, I tested with manual encoding, and got the flag for completion.
I’m not stuck on the next exercise, but it’s a little more involved, and I’m already exhausted from my hell week adventures. I’ll tackle them more later this coming week.
As a depression management tactic, my wife took me to see Avengers: Infinity War, on Sunday. It was a real tear jerker, but I was expecting it, and it really did me more good than harm, so it was a good call. Any kind of date with my wife helps, but I’m really impressed with the Marvel Cinematic Universe movie franchise, thus far, so I was glad for the distraction.
This coming week, I’m supposed to be learning a little Python with some other coworkers. I have a distaste for the language, due to the structure of the code (it always looks like it wants to just drift off the page, then wakes up and slams back to the left to do it all over again.) I’ve been forcing myself to try to learn it a little along, however, and this class will give me some structured direction to my learning. My current tactics have mostly included converting the python2.x code from Violent Python into python3.6 compatible code. In this way, I learn a little of both 2 and 3, and it forces me to think about the code, not just blindly type what’s in the book and pray that it works.
That’s all I have for this week. Hopefully, next week will be a better update in general.
hows the prep going?