Wednesday, July 25, 2018

Tredding Water

I'm keeping my head above water at least, figuratively speaking.  Teaching Patrick's course is a good workout but strenuous in some sense.  I'm the Mr. Professor character, holding forth, but sometimes I experiment, take risks, and fall on my face in so doing.  I figure having students watch me flail a little, is truth in advertising, where learning to code is concerned.

In this case, what bit me in the butt was a missing commit after a bunch of SQL inserts, meaning none of the records were actually saved, appearances to the contrary.  My implementation of a context manager in Python, characteristically about connecting to and disconnecting from a database, failed to list out the expected dogs, because in fact, the dogs table was empty.  Live and learn.  I see what I need to do to fix the code.  However it'd be great to fix it in the master copy, as every session starts fresh from that source.

Lindsey Walker is my house guest again, but for only hours, not years, this time.  She's enroute from her academic lifestyle in Corvallis, Oregon, to another set of self disciplines in Kathmandu.  Religious studies.  Lots of ritual, Sanskrit, yoga, dance moves.  You'll find lots of entries about LW in my blogs.  We're heading out to the airport shortly.

Last night, we dropped in on Wanderers, where Barry was sharing about his southern hemisphere vacation.  However Carol (mom) was seeking to navigate her way to the pharmacy, pushing her walker, so Walker and I decided our higher calling was to supervise that process, after which we sought out Patrick, the original author behind the course I've been teaching, every day this week, from 7 AM until 1:45 PM.  We work on an East Coast timezone.