dira | A library anecdote

Yesterday, I was trying to create a predictive pattern for Plant Molecular Biology, which comes twice a month in January, March, April, July, September, and November, and once a month in February, May, June, August, October, and December, for a total of 18 issues per year in three volumes. I was all excited because the pattern had already been established (I guess they get Plant Molecular Biology at Harvard, too). Unfortunately, the prediction was completely haywire, so I had to fiddle with it.

First I figured out that someone had set the frequency to biweekly with no exceptions instead of semimonthly with exceptions, so I changed the frequency and then started working on the exceptions.

First, in the vain hope that Aleph would be clever enough to follow my logic, I tried this:

853 y = pm01,01,02,03,03,04,04,05,06,07,07,08,09,09,10,11,11,12

I thought it had worked, because Aleph correctly predicted three volumes of six issues for the given year--but it predicted all of them, from the fourth issue onward, as being published in March 2003. Problem.

I fiddled pointlessly with variations on that string of exceptions, and then it was quitting time, so I gave up and went home.

This morning, I looked carefully at the content of the predicted-issue codes and realized that Aleph was generating four-digit dates (mmdd) from my two-digit months, and that it had somehow gotten stuck on 0311 as the date for all the subsequent issues, so I thought that if I gave it four-digit dates to start with it would work better. I also noticed that in February, which Aleph had correctly predicted as having only one issue, the date generated was 0211, while in the two-issue month of January, the dates were 0101 and 0111.

So I tried:

853 y = pd0101,0111,0211,0301,0311,0401,0411,0501,0601,0701,0711,0801,0901,0911,1001,1101,1111,1201

(Silly me. You can see where this is going, right?) But now Aleph was only predicting thirteen issues! It had completely skipped the months of May, June, August, October, and December, and I was baffled and IMed

iuliamentis:

Dira: 8:10 am.
Dira: Already stabbing Aleph.
Iulia: Gah, is that all?
Iulia: I'm sorry.
...
Dira: It's just skipping five of them *randomly*.

Except, of course, as soon as I said that, I looked more closely at my 853 y exception note and realized my boneheaded mistake! My only excuse is that it was barely eight in the morning and I stayed up past my bedtime last night.

So then, of course, I corrected the note to read:

853 y = pd101,0111,0211,0301,0311,0401,0411,0511,0611,0701,0711,0811,0901,0911,1011,1101,1111,1211

And then it finally worked correctly!

...and that's why I haven't had much to say, lately. It all sounds like that.