My Little Dance with 101 Seconds
So, I got this idea stuck in my head a while back – this “101 seconds” thing. Sounds a bit daft, I know. But sometimes you just gotta follow these weird little paths, right?
What was it all about? Well, I had this ancient piece of code, a tiny little program I wrote years ago. It was supposed to generate a simple fractal pattern. Nothing fancy. But I got it into my head that I wanted it to complete its generation and display cycle in exactly 101 seconds. Not 100, not 102. One hundred and one. Don’t ask me why 101. Maybe because it’s a prime number? Or maybe I just liked the look of it. Who knows how these things start?
The first run? Oh boy. It was all over the place. Sometimes it would finish in like 70 seconds, all rushed and messy. Other times, it would chug along for nearly three minutes. Inconsistent, that was the word.
So, I started tinkering. My process was pretty old-school:
- First, I just stared at the code for a good hour. You know, hoping it would tell me its secrets. It didn’t.
- Then I started adding little delays. Tiny `sleep()` functions scattered here and there. That was a clumsy way to do it, felt like I was just stuffing pillows into a machine.
- I tweaked the loop conditions. Made ’em a bit more complex, then a bit less. Back and forth.
- I remember one evening, I must have recompiled and run that thing at least fifty times. My computer fan was probably cursing my name.
- I even tried messing with the system’s process priority. Don’t do that at home, folks, unless you like random crashes.
Getting it close was one thing. Getting it to hit 101.00 seconds, or even consistently within that second, was maddening. I’d get it to 100.8, then make a tiny change, and it’d jump to 101.5. Argh!
Eventually, I sort of got it. It wasn’t perfect, but it would land around 101 seconds, give or take a few hundredths. I called it a win. A very, very small win in the grand scheme of things.
Why did I even bother? Looking back, I think I was just… stuck. Not on this little code, but on bigger stuff. Life stuff. You know how it is. Sometimes when the big picture is a blurry mess, you find yourself focusing on these tiny, controllable details. Making something, anything, work just the way you want it to. Even if it’s just a silly program running for a silly amount of time.
It reminds me of this one job I had. We were building this massive system, truly complex. And nobody, I mean nobody, seemed to care about the small details. Things would be “good enough” or “mostly working.” We’d ship stuff with known bugs because deadlines, you know. And here I was, years later, obsessing over a fraction of a second in my own little sandbox. Maybe it was my way of finding some of that precision, that control, that I felt was missing back then. Or maybe I just had too much coffee that week. Probably a bit of both.
Anyway, that was my “101 seconds” adventure. A bit pointless, a bit frustrating, but hey, I did it. And sometimes, that’s all that matters.