I have a screw loose

, Will Kahn-Greene | share this (mastodon)
Note: This is an old post in a blog with a lot of posts over a long span of time. The world has changed, technologies have changed, and I've changed. It's likely this is out of date, the code doesn't work, the ideas haven't aged well, or the ideas were terrible to begin with. Let me know if you think this is something that needs updating.

On Friday, I sat down at my desk at work, put my coffee mug down, and went to scratch my eyebrow when suddenly the lens fell out of my glasses and the tiniest screw in the universe dropped almost unnoticeably to the desk in a beautiful swan dive. This surprised me greatly and led to three different epiphanies:

  1. It's hard to fix your glasses when you can't use your glasses because they need fixing.

  2. When a jewelers screwdriver isn't handy, a paperclip can do--but poorly. For some reason no one has a jewelers screwdriver handy which is a shame. All mine were at home and I was at the office. I was able to screw the tiniest screw ever using the edge of a paperclip while squinting so much I was in that funky limbo between where I couldn't see because I wasn't wearing my glasses and I couldn't see because I was squinting so much trying to adjust for not wearing my glasses because that's what I was trying to fix. Anyhow, I fixed it enough that I was able to get home.

  3. When you ask someone for a jewelers screwdriver (which they don't have) they show you all the stuff they do have which might (but really doesn't) suffice. People have a lot of weird stuff at work.

Anyhow, I was amused to discover that Ted also had vision problems. We're like TWINS!!!

I got home today and totally forgot to fix my glasses until I had been sitting here for 10 minutes staring at this weird bug I found (or thought I found) in PyBlosxom that was happening in one of my blogs but not the other. The PATH_INFO for the url http://blog/george/sophia showed up (incorrectly) as "/blog/george/sophia.txt" and for the other showed up (correctly) as "/blog/george/sophia" Both blogs were configured almost identically, so I was perplexed. Then I realized that it was just me doing something silly. That's when I remembered that I had to fix my glasses. So I pulled out one of my jewelers screwdriver kit (I have several--one of which I should bring to the office) and pulled out a perfect screwdriver, fixed my glasses and marvelled at how a screwdriver of the right size can make all the difference in the world.

To summarize, my glasses are fixed, I fixed my configuration, PyBlosxom doesn't have a bizarre PATH_INFO bug, and I learned that a paperclip can be used as a quick fix.

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