Wolfram was down

It's been a week since I came back to school and life is accelerating back again. It’s been a pretty busy week since the start of the first class – I became the leader of our community service project, joined a programming boot camp, and have various different classes flooding in my timetable as the week progresses. Well, I should be grateful that I don’t have to pick elective courses :) 21 hours class per week is horrible enough.

Today’s a Sunday and I spent one whole day revising physics and calculus – physics is kinda easy, but calculus isn’t. It’s actually not hard, but I forgot all the required knowledge from the previous course last semester. A one full month of holiday is indeed fatal enough to the memory. I guess that’s why we don’t have holidays with such duration in primary and secondary school, teachers would be yelling so hard when school reopens.

When studying calculus, there’s one wonderful tool we students like to use and abuse. Meet the al-mighty Wolfram Alpha.

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To be honest, when doing calculus or any math-related course, it is the definitive tool we all like to rely on. Key in the question, and whoosh you get your answer, together with graphs, equivalent notations, shape properties, differentials and other related stuff. Well, it can’t show you the most detailed graphs and steps to the solution without you paying, but still, it is a wonderful site to tell you more about the question and to check your answer mid-way. And of course, see how beautiful graphs can be if you are interested.

I am trying hard to recall all my calculus skills from last semester, and the best method to do so is to do more exercises. As I am trying to solve some stuff, I shot up the site to do a quick check on the shape of the graph…

Oops.

Crap.

To coders, this is like the equivalent of Stack Overflow is down. To others that don’t catch how bad this is, just imagine that your car broke down when you want to go out and get a meal. In short, a big bummer and some frustration because you don’t know what to do with this stuck here.

It kinda reminds me about how we are actually used to stuff we use every day and we assume that they will be there all the time when it is actually not the case. We all use Google every day, enjoy a steady supply of water every day, get supplies from shops whenever we need, anytime, communicate with others with whatever communication channel we are used to, etc. Sometimes we treat them as granted, but when it suddenly goes missing, everyone cries.

It is really a little hard for us humans to appreciate everything around us, but we are indeed a little too good at feeling bad when something we relied on is gone.

A few hours later, I did a search unconsciously and found that their servers are back up and running. It's indeed a moment of joy, like getting a downpour after a bad drought. It's not just about getting the solution and finally get to continue the work, but it's about knowing that something is still there and we all can use it for good.

To be honest, I became quite careful when touching Wolfram ever since. It sounds funny, but once something breaks, it feels so fragile. After some time, people forget it and went back to normal usage, and when it breaks, the loop happens, again.

A little interesting, eh?

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In the end, I managed to finish what I wanted to finish for the day. Although it isn't really great spending one full hour on one integration problem, but I guess it takes time to regain those skills, right?

My school will also suffer a 48-hour water outage from Tuesday, 9 am. Guess we really cannot take anything for granted :) Don't worry, I got my water supplies in my room. Hopefully, with the proper preparations, the crisis can be cushioned properly.

See you next time :)

--Lilacse

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