"But I thought your laptop was surgically attached," I cry. I'm in a state of shock, standing here in the parking lot where I've run into Ratso (on foot, not in car).
"Well, it was. But I left it at home today," he says.
All the data is (or "are" if we're being Latin) on the laptop.
Okay, backstory: Our new Hamster system generates data in a different format from the old system. Dr. Science et al. want to plug the Hamster data into the software they've been using to analyze data from the old system to see if it's "the same" (or at least similar if collected under similar conditions). After we set up the Hamsters down there, they suddenly started demanding a piece of software to convert the data into this format that nobody really knows what it is. Anyway, since Ratso's part of the rest of the project hadn't started up yet, I stuck him with it because he's the one who does Visual C# and I knew he'd hunch over his laptop for hours at a time, even during classes, once he got started.
Yes, I am evil. Taking advantage of a young man's obsessive compulsive disorder like that.
But he's done now and we need to test the files he generated with some of Dr. Science's software to be sure Ratso's conversion program works right before we send it down there. And we can't do it today, obviously, if the only copy of the software is somewhere out in the West End.
I bet he doesn't even have it backed up.
267 words | March 3, 2005 10:22 PM | Ivory tower