Obsessive Compulsive

I think I’m obsessive-compulsive.

Not like the guy who washes his hands hundreds of times a day, or like Adrian Monk — the TV detective that suffers from all sorts of phobias and anxieties and has these oddball little quirks — kind of obsessive.

But a little.

I think it all started when I was a kid. I was the kid that had to have all of my toy cars lined up exactly right, or it was no good. When I was about 5 years old, I randomly watched my dad put his socks on. You know that long line stitch in the sock that’s supposed to go straight over your toes? Yeah. My dad’s stitch was looping over his toes from the top to the bottom. I saw that and felt my brain short-circuit.

When I was in Jr. High or High School, I started noticing that if you looked at my socks you could see where the big toe went. Apparently this was because I unconsciously wore the same socks on the same feet. A left-foot sock was always worn on the left foot, and the same was true for right-foot socks. I would even go so far as to flipping one sock inside-out if I could only find 2 left or right-foot socks. I still do this to this day.

I always, ALWAYS keep my wallet in my right pocket, and my keys, chapstick, and a pen in the left pocket. If I’m missing any of those items, I almost feel naked. Well, no. I take that back. But things do feel not-quite-right. When playing Monopoly, the Chance and Community Chest cards MUST stay within their assigned boxes on the board. If I notice them out of place, I have to fix them. Except for the times when somebody else moves my things, I haven’t lost my shoes, wallet, or car keys in over 10 years. Why? Because I only put them in one or two places when they’re not on my person.

It seems funny to talk about, because it doesn’t seem like any of this is out of the ordinary… but for many people it is. My wife can’t keep track of her head, and it’s attached to her body. But even though I’ve been doing all of these things for my entire life (at least as long as I can remember, anyway), the thought of actually being a little OCD never occurred to me until last week.

Last week, I discovered OpenID. OpenID is a cool system, where you can authenticate (sign-in) to an OpenID-enabled service, and that will activate your URL (your website address, among other things) as your OpenID “key” to other OpenID-enabled services. (I know that was probably a terrible way to explain it, but it’s really not all that relevant to the story.) 37signals launched a new service last week called Highrise, which is a way to manage your contacts, conversations you had with them, follow-up tasks, etc. Highrise also supports OpenID authentication.

Once I got my OpenID set up, I logged into Highrise with it. I typed in “ryanparman.com”, and it logged me right in. I thought that was really cool, so I logged out, and again typed “ryanparman.com”. It logged me in again. Sweet. Log out, type “ryanparman.com” again. Log back in.

I’m not really sure how long this went on for, but I began looking for other services that supported OpenID, like Zooomr, and Live Journal, and there’s a Mediawiki extension that supports it, and there are at least a couple dozen sites and/or services that support it already. I just kept logging in, logging out, logging in, logging out. After a while I looked at the clock, and realized I’d been logging in and out of services for about two hours. Two hours of my life — wasted — because I thought that OpenID authentication was really cool. No… it’s, like, 5 minutes cool. Maybe 10. Not 120 minutes cool. Not two hours cool.

And here I sit, talking about something I never noticed about myself until last week. It makes sense though, and it certainly explains a lot of my behavior over the last 27 years. It explains why I have a sock “thing”. It explains why things need to be alphabetized. It explains why when I’m drinking a Pepsi from a can, I never leave any Pepsi in the lip of the can after each drink. It explains why I’m the one who’s responsible for how my furniture is arranged and how the kitchen is organized — not my wife. It explains why I became a web developer… and before that I was a musician… and before that I was a kid who was really good at math.

Thing is, I’m not sure if it’s a good thing or a bad thing. I mean, it certainly serves me well that I never lose my shoes or my keys. But I know it drives other people crazy. Should I even care? My impulsive side wants to arbitrarily change something about the way I do things. Sometimes that works out for me, and sometimes it drives me crazy. I’m not sure if I’ll even do anything about this new revelation, I just thought I’d take a few minutes to talk about it.

Nine Months

Nine months ago I simply stopped blogging. I’m not really sure why, although I suspect I just needed a break from writing for a while so I could take some time to gather my thoughts. I’d been blogging since early 2003, and I simply didn’t have anything else to say.

Since the last time I wrote, a few things have happened. First off, I quit my job last September to co-found my first startup, Foleeo. We’ve been keeping our eyes on the web and watching what’s been going on. We’ve been looking at the successful players, and have learned from them. We’ve been listening to thoughts and ideas from many people in the blogosphere to get a sense of not only what some of the existing problems are, but also how people want them to be solved. We’re working on some really cool stuff and I really hope that people are as stoked about this stuff as I am when we start pushing out the cool parts of our roadmap.

Geoffrey and I have released SimplePie Beta 3, and are trying to polish off our 1.0 release. SimplePie has really started to take off in popularity, garnering a TON of praise from the community. We couldn’t be more thrilled. It’s amazing to see how this little side project within a project has grown into a major player in the RSS/Atom space. This success would never have been possible without the community that has gathered around it to give feedback, submit patches, and make it better.

As a substitute for blogging (and as a simple showcase for SimplePie), I launched RyanParman.com a few months ago as a way to show the world the things I was interested in without having to blog about them. The site keeps itself up-to-date by tapping into things I’m already doing — adding bookmarks, listening to iTunes, renting DVD’s from Netflix, uploading photos to Flickr, watching funny videos on YouTube, and of course Twittering. Since this is my first official “comeback” post, I’ll be integrating this blog’s posts into that site as well.

Lastly, I recently had a friend pass away at the age of 29. I have the quite unfortunate knowledge that she made the conscious decision to reject a relationship with the Lord, meaning that she hasn’t actually gone to a better place like we’d all hoped. If so, I’d be throwing a party for that lucky girl because she got there before I did! Instead, I find myself mourning in the very depths of my soul.

But it got me thinking. If I was visited by an angel who told me I had 30 days to live, how would I spend today? I know the setup might sound a little odd, but let me put it into perspective: If an angel came and told me, it’s not like I could argue about it — I would know it was coming. If I’ve got 30 days, it leaves me with enough time to do a little planning so I don’t have to panic and try to cram everything into today. And if I knew I didn’t have much time left, what would I spend those precious few moments doing? Who would I spend them with? Would I stay angry at those people? Would I still be afraid to call that old friend I had a falling-out with a few years ago? Would I make long-distance friendships a greater priority? It’s really had me thinking, and I’ve been making changes to my life and my schedule appropriately.

Anyways, welcome back into the life of Ryan Parman. Hopefully I’ll be able to keep it interesting.

The proper way to blow your nose

I’ve had a head cold for the last 3 days (which is why some of you haven’t seen me online), and in that time I’ve gone through 5 rolls of toilet paper due to blowing my nose. I’ve tried various medicines, and although Sudafed was able to slow the drip, I’ve been blowing my nose almost constantly.

For those who are concerned about efficiency in all things (as I am), I believe I’ve found the most efficient way to get the snot as far away from your sinuses as possible.

1. Take the roll of toilet paper and wrap it around your hand 2 or 3 times. This is really all you need per blow.
2. As you cover your nose with the toilet paper, plug one of your nostrils to ensure that maximum airflow is being forced through the other nostril, ensuring that the greatest amount of snot is removed.
3. Do the same to the other nostril. Repeat as necessary.
4. Once you’re through blowing, you still have bits of snot that cling to your nose hair. We’ll want to clean these out as well.
5. Take one perforated square of the toilet paper and cram the whole thing into your nostril. Make sure that there is enough sticking out for you to grab. Once it’s in there, twist the toilet paper in a circular fashion. Give it a minimum of 4-5 rotations before pulling it back out.
6. Do the same to the other nostril. Repeat as necessary.
7. You’re done!

In my experience, this is the most effective way to get all of your snot out. It’s also safe to use this method without following up with a mirror to make sure that there is no snot clinging to your nose hair because the follow-up twisting is nice and tidy.