Don't reboot your computer

This morning I came in and started to work where I had left off last night. However, last night I had rebooted my machine since it had been a while. Apparently, that was a BAD IDEA.

I kept getting really strange errors about illegal characters and whatnot. So, I thought maybe my files were corrupt. I tried editing them and removing any potentially bad characters, then saving. No effect.

So then I tried writing a Ruby script to strip any characters that aren't normal whitespace out of the file and save it. No effect.

At this point I realized that when I refreshed the page, I would get errors generated in the SAME PARTIAL, but they weren't the same error each time. It would randomly change!

Figuring it was just my crazy Win32 box, I hopped over to the iMac and checked out the source from the repository (which luckily I had committed before reboot last night). After fixing one documented problem with LoginEngine and a problem I knew existed with acts_as_taggable, it ran fine.

So I had to delete the project in RadRails and check it back out from the repository, fixing those same issues I had with the plugins. And now, after all of that, it's still broken.

Moral of the story? Don't reboot your computer.