2001-11-14 - 5:13 p.m.

The Kludge

This is a short work rant. Sorry. My diary, my rules. To be honestly, I'm hoping as much as some of you to talk about sex and love, but I'm not going to turn this into a work of fiction. =(

For most people last weekend was a 3-day weekend. For me it was over-time, as I came into the office to hopefully start the alternative scenario for a water quality study that I've been assigned. The study is a high profile project, and has some moderate political attention (i.e. it is one of the Governor's pet projects -- as well it should be, the guys who want the state to buy their land gave him at least $50k during his last election campaign). ::sigh::

What should have been only a couple of hours of work turned into 3 hours of frustration. The project I've been assigned basically has me using the model output of other engineers as my model input (and naturally they are months behind schedule). That is OK. It happens, and I can deal with it.

What sucks is that the geometry that another engineer gave me is bad. It slows down the model run time, and frequently causes the model to crash. Sunday it crashed. I double checked my input. I double checked (and printed hard copies) all of the hydrology feed into my model by the other engineers. Also OK.

The problem was simple: the geometry for my model is fucked up. Grrrrrrh

You Can Catch More Bees �

Um, kludge is a very bad word in the modeling community. Basically it means, "wave your hands and create some bullshit". We've got one staff member who is the kludge king. And yes, the bad geometry came from his project.

I've finished the base case scenario. I'm working on my alternative and it seems to be running. The end result is that the sucky geometry only cost me and the state two days short term. But the problem will come back. I'm certainly not going to let the problem remain unnoticed. I've just got to find a balance between my "Fuck them all" attitude and my desire to actually help the water quality community to accept that our science is no good unless we ensure quality in our runs.

Force -vs- Help

Damn, why is this so hard to balance? If I were an evil robot, I could just have a death ray in my eye (yes, I'd want just one -- it is EVIL). Then whenever foolish lazy environmental engineers spooned out kludge soup to me, my eye would glow red. They'd start to tremble. The smart ones would get their asses in gear. The others would be scooped off the floor by some other robot.

LISTENING TO: Stromkern Armageddon

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