41 Paraskevidekatriaphobia

I had no idea that there even is such a nice word as paraskevidekatriaphobia. Don’t worry, it’s just a $100 word for “fear of Friday the 13th”. No reason to get all sesquipedalophobic on me.

I’m definitely not the superstitious type. Well, OK, sometimes when a program doesn’t run and I can’t understand for the life of me why not although I’ve done everything right, I find myself leaving it alone for a couple of seconds and then running it again, in hope that this time it will work. That’s not superstition, is it? I call it “being statistically thorough”.

Anyhow, I definitely don’t believe this silly thing about Friday the 13th, I think it’s completely bogus. I’ll prove it to you.

Let’s see, what happened to me today that’s worth mentioning… Oh yes, I somehow managed to wipe an entire database in half a second flat. By the way, do you know what it says in “Mastering PostgreSQL Administration”, under “accidental DROP DATABASE?” It’s only one line on the entire page: “restore from previous backup”. That surprised me a little, it did. An entire blank page with just a few words scribbled at the top. Did I have a previous backup, you ask? Of course I did, don’t be silly. It was 6 months old, but it was there. And I also had the browser cache (cool invention BTW) and I spent a nice couple of hours copying and pasting. And I did learn that color-coding your terminals’ background is a nice idea, so it was actually a learning experience. That, and now I take daily backups.

Let me see, what else… oh, right, did I ever mention how much I hate osCommerce? Don’t think I did. We go way back, it’s gotten personal by now. I once blurted out that I think it’s a hacked up piece of work glued together with duct tape and mashed potatoes, and it told me that I am a maniacal control freak with bad taste in graphical design and a complete disregard for the finer things in life, such as OOP. We’re not on speaking terms ever since. But it looks like I may have to do another site using osCommerce anyway. This should be fun…

It was a pretty uneventful day otherwise, I’m squeezing my brain here trying to think of anything that might’ve be considered “unlucky” so I can wrap up. Well, there was this entire hour I spent frantically searching and browsing the PHP bug database and Google for stuff like “configure error reporting” and “zlib not detected”, trying to figure out why the ./configure script for PHP refused to pick up zlib, libxml2 and libdb4 even though they were right there in /usr/. Only to discover that my ./configure line had pasted wrong and had some options stuck together. And while I was there I also noticed I was explicitly asking for libdb3. And then we laughed…

Other than that, my day was completely uneventful and as you can plainly see this Friday the 13th thing is a bunch of hooey. I’m sure your day was just as quiet as mine. Leave a comment, let’s prove it together. Otherwise, see you in October.

Update: Nothing special happened on October 13th and nobody ever commented to say something bad happened to them. See?! It’s all a fabrication. Well, next one is in April 2007, I’m eagerly awaiting to once more expose this fabulation.