Tag archives for obsessive compulsive

Saturday, August 4, 2007

100 things (a twofer and a bonus)

14. I've talked before about being a little OCD about locks. This tidbit is somewhat related to that one. I cannot rest at night unless I've double checked immediately before bed that the front and back doors are closed and locked. It doesn't matter if I checked the doors a half hour earlier, I must check them again immediately before bed. I have a very hard time falling asleep if I do not.

I'm not paranoid about someone breaking in and stealing my stuff or molesting my cats or anything. It's about The Chicken. Every night when I check the locks I always think the same thing: "Remember Danielle Van Dam." Do you remember her? Five years ago she was snatched out of her bed by a neighbor while her parents slept. They forgot to lock the back door. Her body was found in the desert a few weeks later. She was seven.

Anyway, that's what I think. Every night I think of that little girl and I must check the locks before I sleep.

 
15. I hate boats. Hate them. Absolutely despise them. I'm not afraid of boats. I don't have a phobia or anything, or if I do it's a very mild one. I don't get panic attacks when I'm on a boat. I don't get seasick. I just really don't like them, and I'm not completely sure why.

I love water. I really like to swim. But I don't want to be on a boat. I'd rather swim a kilometer or two across a lake than take a boat.

The last time I was on a boat, I was kind of suckered into it. Bunny was in a bridal party and the wedding was on a boat. I kind of had to go. But I certainly wasn't happy about it. The whole time I was wondering if I could slip over the side and swim to shore without anyone noticing.

If I had my way, I'd never be on another boat again. But there are something like thousands of navigable lakes here. I'm pretty sure I'm going to get sucked into one again.

 
Bonus — I'm on vacation! Woo hoo and stuff! We'll be out of town at a family water park for several days and after we return I might take a break from all things blog related for the rest of the week. I may come back with fascinating and exciting posts about our adventures if (a) anything interesting happens, and (b) I'm not too lazy to write about it. See you all again in a few days… or a week… or something like that.

posted at 08/04/2007 11:03 pm : Permalink
Categorized 100 things : Tagged , , ,

Wednesday, May 9, 2007

100 things

11. I'm really anal about locks. If something has a lock, I want it to be locked. If something has a place to add a lock, I'll get one for it.

The enclosure under our back deck is like something of a tool shed. It's where we keep our lawnmower and many assorted things we don't want to deal with. This shed-like thing has two sliding wood doors. I went out and bought a ginormous, heavy padlock for each door. And they're keyed alike, so woohoo! (You know I'm a lock dork if "keyed alike" is an exciting phrase.)

The planks on the shed walls are rotting away. Locked doors do absolutely no good when a would be lawnmower thief (or would be junk thief, for that matter) need exert only minimal effort to pull away pieces of the wall. In spite of this, I'd still like to have those doors locked. The only reason I don't is that Bunny already looks at me like I'm a hideous freak and I certainly don't need to give her any more reasons for that.

posted at 05/09/2007 08:24 am : Permalink
Categorized 100 things : Tagged ,

Friday, April 13, 2007

A Pyhrric victory

So I've mentioned before how I'm a little OCD about our DVD library, right? We have over 800 DVDs now and our collection is constantly growing. I have to keep track of them if I want to keep tabs on who's borrowed what. Also, I have to keep track of them because I have to keep track of them.

The other day I came home from work to find chaos in DVD Land. Our little niece Elaine was over at the house for a while and like most toddlers, she thinks anything within reach exists for her enjoyment. All those pretty, glossy cases must have been calling her name. A bunch of discs were scattered around where she'd been looking at them and the rest of the section was all out of order.

That simply would not do. Like the hideous mutant freak I am, I had to get this sorted out immediately. I gathered together everything that should have been in that section and placed them all back in the rack. And there was a hole, an empty space that would have fit two DVD cases.

Me: Bunny?

Bunny: Yeah?

Me: Did your sister borrow any movies?

Bunny: Oh, yeah. I loaned her Click.

Me: Just one?

Bunny: Yeah, just that one.

Me: It seems like there should be two here.

Bunny: No, it was just that one.

But it didn't seem right. There should have been two there. I rearranged everything the day before to fit a new purchase and I know a second disc was definitely missing. Or at least out place.

I was a little quiet and withdrawn through dinner as the thought of a missing DVD nagged at me. After dinner, I double checked the living room for any hidey hole into which little Elaine might have dumped a case when she'd tired of drooling on it. I even looked under furniture. No DVD.

There had to be one missing. There just had to be. I could not rest or relax until I figured out what was gone and where it was. Bunny insisted she only loaned one movie and I'd checked everyplace the baby was likely to have dropped one.

The first thing to do was to determine exactly which DVD was missing. Normally this is pretty simple. I just check the discs before and after the gap and look it up in my database. (OK, so maybe I'm a lot OCD. Shut up.) I couldn't do that this time around because Elaine had shuffled everything. I didn't know from exactly where the disc was missing.

I had to eyeball each of them to find out.

…And God Spoke? Check

12 Monkeys? Check.

2 Days in The Valley? Check.

200 Cigarettes? Check.

2001? Check.

28 Days Later? Check.

Sometime around Collateral Bunny asked if I was checking each of them.

Sometime around For A Few Dollars More she said something like, "Wouldn't it be funny if when you find which one is missing I'm like 'Oh, yeah… I guess I did loan that one too…' "

After around 30 minutes and 500 movies, I came across one I couldn't find. I stopped. I stared. I checked again.

Bunny: Did you find one missing?

Me: Where's The Pursuit of Happyness?

Bunny: Oh.

(pause)

Bunny: Um…

(pause)

Bunny: Yeah…

(pause)

Bunny: I loaned that one to my sister too.

 

A small part of me feels supremely vindicated because I was right. An even larger part of me feels like a complete tool because I'm so freakishly obsessive about it.

posted at 04/13/2007 01:08 am : Permalink
Categorized General, Snippets : Tagged ,

Sunday, January 14, 2007

I might be a little nuts

Just the other day I was talking about WordPress 2.1 and how excited I was about it. Yeah, I'm not so excited anymore. 2.1 has some nice new features, like new plugin hooks and overhauls to the page and link systems. It also comes along with a handy new feature to export your blog to a WXR-XML file.

The biggest thing I was looking forward to was the fact that 2.1 is essentially a complete rewrite. Nearly all of the code has been rewritten and optimized to be cleaner, faster and more efficient. And it mostly is. Gone are things like the cumbersome, monolithic functions.php. In their place are leaner, more logical files.

The only problem is that 2.1 kind of sucks. Or at least for me, and at least right now. After using development builds of 2.1 on a test blog since July, I was chomping at the bit to get the new version deployed here. So last week I installed WP2.1 beta 2 on this blog. Wow, was that a mistake.

Within a day, I'd found several bugs and plugin incompatibilities. The bugs were mostly pretty minor, but the plugin problems just about killed me. Two plugins I consider absolutely crucial no longer worked worth a damn. Both of these plugins are in active development by very smart people, but 2.1 killed them anyway. Although, to be fair, one of the plugins probably works perfectly and instead the problem was with my own setup. After all, I've been using this blog for a year. That's a lot of plugins running through my database with dirty feet.

But not anymore. If you visited on Friday or part of Saturday, you were probably greeted by a "down for maintenance" message. I was yanking 2.1 out by it's roots so I could go back to a version that did all the things I wanted it to do. Incidentally, reverting like that is not something you're supposed to be able to do. The WordPress team makes upgrades easy as pie, but downgrades? Pfft. Why would you ever want to do that?

I generally agree with the idea of not making any kind of downgrade path. Developers have a general interest in moving their user base forward, not backward. But it sure did make what I wanted to do a big pain in the ass. Sometimes, installing a new version of WP will make changes to the database structure. That's the step that makes downgrades such a pain in the ass. 2.1, with it's radical changes under the hood, is definitely one of those upgrades.

I make database backups regularly (and you do too… right?), so it would have been simple to restore a pre-2.1 backup, delete 2.1 and install an older version. But that wouldn't necessarily fix any database issues that might have been exacerbating the problems I was having with 2.1. I'll probably end up upgrading eventually, so as long as I'm up to elbows now, I might as well clean house on the DB too. So database backups weren't much good to me.

I used the handy new WXR-XML export to download a backup of my blog and then used a plugin to import that XML. But there are a few issues with this. First, the XML export isn't configurable. You get what you get, and what you get kind of sucks. The exporter snags posts, comments and categories. It doesn't export your options, registered users, links, custom plugin tables, etc. That's ten shades of suck.

Second, the XML files are HUGE. When I use Scott Merrill's database backup plugin (the one bundled with WordPress), my download file is about 3MB in size for the entire database. The XML backup, with just three database tables, clocks in at a whopping 13MB. And this is the new feature intended to replace Scott's plugin, which by the way is no longer part of the WP core. WP2.1 does not include wp-db-backup, so if you intend to keep it (and you really should), you'll have to make sure you hang on to your older versions.

Even the parts the XML backup keeps are woefully incomplete. The process of exporting for 2.1 and importing to an older version stripped a lot of things. All of my tags and post layouts were lost. The tags I could do without because one of the troublesome plugins was UTW, but the post layouts? That's a pain.

Sigh. Oh well.

Another pain in the ass is that post and comment ids were lost. I kind of like that the post ids were lost because now my ids are numbered more or less chronologically, rather than the hodge podge I had before. I brought in a lot of archives from previous blogs after this blog was well underway, so I had things like post #548 being ten months older than post #547. And since I use permalinks, this isn't a big deal for me. For the most part, people have no way of knowing which post is #548. However, if I wasn't using permalinks, if I had the default cruft-based structure like /?p=548, all of my links would suddenly point to the wrong posts. This is similar to what happened to my comment ids.

On nearly every theme, including mine, the permalink to any given comment is defined by the comment id. So every link I ever made to a comment needed to be manually repaired. Fortunately, there were only about 40 of them throughout the entire blog. The thing that really kills me about this is that I pointed out this shortcoming to the dev team months ago. I had the misfortune of voicing my concern during the middle of a cat fight and I was essentially ignored.

The export/import process also stripped away all my post slugs. All slugs were automatically regenerated from the post titles. Which, if you're like some, could be a significant problem. I don't tweak post slugs often, but I have retitled posts (like adding "Updated" to signify new content), which breaks the permalinks for those posts.

Anyway, after a lot of grumbling and cursing, I'm back on stable footing again. Through a combination of SQL backups and XML exports, everything is running smoothly and all my data is back in place. Well, most of my data. It'll take ages to tag everything again and replace all my post formatting. But I'd say the effort is worth it if it leaves me with what I really want.
 

100 things about me

7. I'm a little OCD about a few things. My blog is one of them. Those few days I used WP2.1 beta drove me absolutely batty. I felt like my blog was broken, even though it really wasn't. There were some things that didn't work, but possibly I was the only one to notice. All the basic functionality was just fine. Pages loaded without error messages, people could read and comment and the site feed worked fine. That's the essence, the core functionality, of any blog.

But the little things were making me crazy. I knew they were there and I was bitchy and irritable because of it. At least now it's fixed and I'm not freaking out about it anymore.

Another thing I'm a little obsessive about is our DVD library. We've got over 700 DVDs… and they're alphabetized. With each new purchase, I rearrange everything to accommodate the new addition.

So maybe I'm a little crazy. At least now, way down here at the end, you understand the post title.

posted at 01/14/2007 11:45 pm : Permalink
Categorized 100 things, Geekery : Tagged , , , ,