30 hrs on one assignment

When I think about it, it's staggering. It's a difficult assignment, yes, but not particularly so.

The assignment was due Tuesday. On Sunday, I spent 8 hours coding, and on Monday, an astounding 10 hours pecking away at the keyboard. To be frank, the code still has bugs but I think I've put in a good effort so I simply turned it in.

I guess in the first place, I was just rather rusty with C -- it's been *years* since I last used C (7 years in fact), and the very first thing I had to do was to install the compiler on my laptop... and the very first error I ran into was a 'bus error', which I had never seen before and upon googling it, found out that it was 'system dependent'. Now that's so helpful. I didn't know whether it was my compiler that installed wrongly or that it was my code. Turned out that it was my code.

Another big problem was that I didn't really understand the problem (and theory behind) very well, so, it's basically GIGO (garbage in and garbage out). There was a lot of wasted effort -- the electronic equivalent of balling up a paper of scribblings and throwing it away. Many times.

And that's just a *weekly* assignment.