Thursday, April 23, 2009

Chase the rabbit down a hole...

And find a time vampire!



All I was supposed to do was fix some capitalization issues with our new DITA build. It was picking up a title attribute it had ignored in previous versions and I just had to edit the Navtitle attribute in about 100 references.

But there was a nitty little anomaly in how the css was rendering some paragraphs. Probably just a tweak needed here. Tweak, tweak, build...hmmm no that didn't get it. Time to move on and do what I came to do: fix capitalization. Oh wait, I wonder if this other little tweak will do it.
...
Two hours later, still renders wrong in some paragraphs and let's see, how many more topics do I need to edit? Oh, the 100 or so I haven't touched in the last two hours.

I should know better; we all should know better. As it was, I kinda got pulled into this quick sand pool by a buddy who had already been thrashing in it for a day. But we get sucked in by this never-ending thread of "just one more thing and it should work" morass.

Lesson learned. That rabbit looks so easy to catch up with when it jumps down that hole.

Be scared of the rabbit that goes down a hole; be very, very scared.

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