Troubleshooting III: Return of the Bugs!

Is It Me?

It’s a question I don’t often ask myself, these days. Since somewhere around high school, I have pretty much expected it was me. That’s just the way I ended up wired, I guess. But I do have a few core competencies and within these circles, I am pretty much not worried that, if something goes wrong, it’s because of something I have done.

I made very sure I knew how to fly. I was terribly anxious when I had three flight instructors in four hours of instruction. How do they keep it all straight? What are the odds that each of them is going to think that one of the others taught me how to, say, Land A Plane? So I did a lot of reading and studying, hung out with pilots and listened to what they had to say and I made sure that I was fully in the moment, whenever I bought “an hour of dual” and actually went up to learn something. People have died doing this. I was going to make damned sure that I was not one of them.

I am slowly regaining that kind of feeling with my guitar. For thirty years I didn’t play at all and lost almost all of my musical mojo. A year ago, I assumed that if something went wrong in the band, it was something that I had done wrong. Now I am getting back to that confident place where I love playing. Wanna change tempo? I’m okay with that. Wanna change key? Let’s give it a shot. I’m good.

But for years now, I have been really confident of my markup skills. I embarked upon the journey of learning all I could about HTML years ago and the powers that be blessed me with a stagnant technology that hasn’t changed in meaningful ways for a dozen years. You can start today and learn a tag a day and how to use them and still learn as much HTML as anyone in the world knows, within a year. A month or so and I was good with XHTML, too. CSS came hard, but by biting off manageable hunks and really wailing on them I have picked up most of it by now, too. When and if a new standard of CSS or HTML is announced, I’m probably not going to have much trouble moving into it because I know the current stuff so well. Someone coming in new would have to learn everything. I’ll only have to learn the changes.

But this week, a couple of things happened and in each case, for some reason I lost half a day to self doubt.

In the first, I had been applying the new Template to my web application that does the scheduling for the various training we give at work. It used to have “this” kind of a shell around it, and now it has “that” kind of look to it. On some level, I knew that the only thing that changed was the shell. It’s like if Frank Sinatra came out in a dark blue tuxedo and sang for half an hour and then took a break and returned to the stage in a dark gray tuxedo and sang some more. In both cases, you’re listening to the same guy, only the clothes have changed. That’s how the Templates update should have worked.

But I applied the new Template to a page that adds people to a class on Thursday morning. And Thursday afternoon, someone called saying they couldn’t get logged-in. If it had happened last week, I would have gone down the Do-You-Have-The-Right-User-Name-And-Password tack, not the Oh-My-God-What-Have-I-Done tack. But because my changing the page and the complaint came so close together, I assumed one had something to do with the other. I still don’t know what caused me to see if I could add myself to the class, which worked like a champ and reset my thinking back to the account name and password, which is where the problem really was. Once I found the right information, I was able to get the guy loaded into the class quite easily, just like always.

This morning, I was working on styling a Table and could not get rules to work. I had put all of my page styles into the head of the page, and no matter how specific I made them, nothing seemed to register on the page. I could do only inline styles, where you apply a whole long list of properties and values to individual tags. I even sought help, asking what I was doing wrong and nobody could find anything, until it was noticed that the Templates files on the server were wrong. It wasn’t me, it was my server administrator! But I immediately folded-up and spent most of a morning questioning just how much of this stuff I really did know?

I wonder how long it will take me to regain my former confidence? And I wonder how doing so might one day end up biting me in the hiney?