(What is “yak shaving“?)
I needed to add plots to a final draft of an article that my co-author had just finished revising. Most of the plots were pre-made but two of them were new–just minor changes to existing work.
Normally, I would fire up my laptop to do this. That’s where I do most of my work in R. But earlier this morning I had installed a new battery on the mid-2012 MacBook Pro workhorse, and that meant it has to go through a power calibration cycle, so it was unavailable for service.
I turned instead to the small auxiliary laptop I use for presentations. I adjusted the code. Then I went to run it …
… and the small auxiliary laptop didn’t have the new package I use for this project now.
I downloaded it…but it didn’t run on the version of R installed on that machine.
I updated R…and then had to re-install all of the packages. Including packages to load older versions of other packages that work better than the current version.
Meanwhile, Microsoft Office decided that everything needed to be updated.
All of this led the computer to crash. But at least I have new versions of all the tools that I need to start the one simple line of code….
So if you ever wonder “but how did that take so long?” remember: it’s the yak’s fault.