Obsessive, compulsive me

I have little doubt that I "suffer" from a mild case of OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder). What other explanation is there for the TEN BOOKS I have published on the Oracle PL/SQL language?

[ Note: I put "suffer" in quotes because pretty clearly I haven't actually suffered, in fact, I have benefited from my obsession. I also use quotes because I generally find objectionable the tendency of medical professionals to give names to behaviors and medical conditions they don't necessarily really understand or are outside the norm. ]

And then there is my attitude towards GUIDs. I talked about these "Globally Unique Indentifiers" earlier in my blog. A GUID is a long sequence of characters that are supposed to be globally unique -- that is, the likelihood of a particular sequence of characters appearing (returned by the GUID generating function) more than once on any computer running on our globe is miniscule. Thus, you can use GUIDs when you need unique values that span, say, database instances or multiple networks.

I just ran into the need to generate about a dozen GUIDs for new assertions I have defined in Qute, the Quick Unit Test Engine. Unfortunately, I forgot to enable output to the screen for my block of code, so I could not use those GUIDs.

And I found myself feeling sad, a sense of loss. I found myself thinking: I just wasted those GUIDs. They will never reappear (as I would ever know!), they are gone forever.

Worrying about "losing" or "wasting" GUIDs? Now, that's surely a bit obsessive!

Time to enable output, run my script again, grab those GUIDs, and get on with my life!