A while back Peter Miller wrote one of my all time favorite posts, regarding what he calls 'Faith-based' deployment. For some reason that article has always stuck with me as a measuring stick of how efficiently my projects are moving along. At times, every developer hits that Monday morning where the tasks seems to pile up a tad faster than the solutions, and a few hours quickly slip away. I'm an uber-freak for task lists, so if items aren't being pinged away quickly, I find it pretty irritating.
One quick reminder for everyone out there, don't be afraid to walk away. I know, I know, we're all cut from the mold of "I don't even want to pee until I solve this sucker". I'm terrible at breaking out of the zone myself, but I'm working lately on making myself find a reason to get up, get outside, grab a lunch, anything to relieve the stress that tends to build up when you're stuck. You'll probably come back a little more relaxed, and the issue will seem much more manageable.
To complete my pilfering of pmiller's phrase collection, today a full-on case of "tweak and pray debugging" was looming. Thanks to thinking in a more structured manner, and trying to avoid the sweet sweet life of "F5, wait, swear at the IE scripting error messages", I found my Monday morning case-sensitivity issue, and also found a nice little tool along the way... it's not pretty, and it ain't fancy, but it may save you a few cycles of hatred...Scryptik is a handy little javascript validator you may find useful.
Wait, the Hawkeyes and Bears are undefeated, how bad can life be? <g>