I took this afternoon off thinking that I would spend the time making the binding for the last of the quilts that need to be bound (bed-sized quilt to bring in to my cold office) (lots of people have blankets in the office) (when you set the thermostat to “heat,” it got colder). But that did not happen, so maybe that is not a success.

If I had known that I was going to spend so much of the afternoon sitting on the couch telling the cat how beautiful she is, maybe I could have stopped at a mall and bought myself more socks. (Or at IKEA and bought the cat the RENS that I keep thinking that I’m going to buy. Or at the Joann and bought her a few yards of fleecy material like the blanket that she is obsessed with.) But is it really a victory to buy socks at the mall? Why haven’t I seen a Facebook ad for some service that will send me socks in the mail every now and then? (Aside: I did try Stitch Fix at one point, and everything that they sent me reminded me of something that my mother would have picked out for me. I thought of my mother when I was getting dressed yesterday, as I used her descripiton of my fashion sense, “refugee from a rag bag,” to construct my outfit.)

Also, one could argue about whether or not it really is a success when I went to go ask a colleague a question about the project that I’m working on, he was in the midst of solving some Google recruiting-puzzle because he had googled enough things that were interesting to Google, so after one of his searches they sent him to some page with a puzzle to solve. He closed the window with the puzzle and answered my question.

But, the real victory is that he had hidden a unique_id column in the data that he had worked with last year (the one where humans looked at 36 colorful rectangles of various sizes and then divided things into tiers based on a holistic view of the information conveyed by these rectangles), so I was able to compare the results from last year to the results that I constructed though a whole bunch of fussy queries and dull analyses. And for the most part they matched! And when they were very non-matchy, it was pretty clear why. There is one place where I need to replace the_value with something like min(the_value, fudge_factor), but aside from that, I am done with the mathy parts of the project. Next up we get to see how well the solution scales and how well we can turn the results into thousands of pieces of paper to be given out to thousands of children all over the country.