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It's Twelfth Night, so tradition requires Xmas decorations be banished from the house and stay away until late December.
So the cards are down, the tree is packed away, the baubles are back in their box. Ah. Much nicer: I can go for a pee in the night with treating on half the baubles Dij has scattered all around.
But it's the lights and strings I wanted to talk about: I use old kitchen roll tubes to wind these things around so that next time they are easy to access and haven't attempted to form a massive Gordian Knot Of Christmas when the time comes to put them back up. (I did try the "rip 'em down and throw the damn things in a box approach one year, but after contemplating the result the following December and considering wire cutters to get them apart I ended up buying fresh instead.)
So are you a "tidy away" person, or a "chuck it and hope" type when it comes to these things? Or are you lucky enough to have an SO that does it all for you? 
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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SWMBO is very adept at getting the four strings of lights (total 260) back in their respective boxes. All I have to do is put the big box back in the attic.
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Nope, not until the 7th.
And that's not my problem anyway. I don't put 'em up, so I don't take 'em down.
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Tidy-ish chuck-it and forgeter.
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OriginalGriff wrote: So are you a "tidy away" person, or a "chuck it and hope" type
The answer to this question tells more about a person than one would guess.
I am a tidy person. I love organization. So, wrapping your lights and string, etc. around a paper towel tube or something similar is appropriate and should be encouraged.
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In large parts of the US this Christmas won't be over until the spring thaws, when it's finally warm enough to remove the outdoor lights without breaking them.
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Wrap them around card board. Put them and the needed extension cords together in the garage. Not allowed to touch the tabletop tree which is put away decorated. I do hold the door open.
We mail our cards out only to people who sent us one last year. Trims our list, over the years it has gone from 3 sheets of labels to only one. Many friends have departed this life. Any who made it to heaven probably figure I didn't make it.
>64
Some days the dragon wins. Suck it up.
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Christmas might be over, but twelfth night is the start of Mardi Gras here in New Orleans.
We solved the Christmas tree dilemma with an artificial tree pre-strung with lights installed. Remove ornaments, and stuff the tree in the box it came in.
However, it is the start of Mardi Gras and the Mardi Gras tree has to come out now, and I get to start all over again. 
Ed
modified 5-Jan-23 10:45am.
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OriginalGriff wrote: So are you a "tidy away" person, or a "chuck it and hope" type when it comes to these things?
Sadly, my proudest achievement when it comes to organizing physical things is to have come up with the idea of rolling individual Ethernet cables in those plastic blank CD spindles that have a lid you can screw back in place.
And then, I found out I'm not the first to have come up with the idea...
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I'd never heard of it, or thought of it - but I really wish I hade before I pretty much gave up collecting CAT5 cables ... 
Don't care who came up with it, it gets a thumbs up from me!
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Bah Humbug - not even tree anymore
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity -
RAH
I'm old. I know stuff - JSOP
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I am like you. I learned tidy is mighty, chaos is not.
"A little time, a little trouble, your better day"
Badfinger
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Being a "tidy away" person has always been part of my personality. I'm the type who likes to keep things neat and organized, and I find it much easier to focus when everything is in its place.
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I use old paper boxes for storing strands of icicle lights.
Start in the middle of the strand and lay them in the box.
Ends go in last.
Put a cardboard separator on top.
Repeat until full.
Next year, ends come out first.
No problems with tangling for years.
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I was looking back on my graphics library code.
I allow you to wrap a byte array with a bitmap object with a completely user definable pixel format/binary footprint.
Therefore you can declare for example, a pixel that's 18 bits wide if you want, and it will allow you to access the pixels in the bitmap.
Astute bit twiddlers here may realize that this requires potentially complicated bit shifts to make it all work.
I compute the necessary code for the shifts at compile time, optimizing for situations where I can, like where a pixel is an even number of bytes wide, or special casing for monochrome, etc. Bitmap blting is memcpys, either entire bitmaps, or lines at a time if you're blting from a rectangle within a bitmap.
It's nuts.
I'm looking back on it going "that's wicked code"
I love those moments when I impress myself. Unfortunately I'm not completely certain I could repeat this wizardry.
To err is human. Fortune favors the monsters.
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In a similar vein maybe....
I was stuck on a report generation corner case issue that was particularly head scratching and I was beginning to blame SQL's QueryResult.Read() for my troubles. 4 days I did toil. Yesterday I found an unrelated regression bug with discounts and hot fixed that, publishing the code to production knowing the reporting was in flux and broken is that published version (that's ok I have till February )
Last night I was working on the reporting issue on the dev box and was interested in a particular sale so I fired up the production code from the production server and the reporting corner case issue was fixed!!. WTAF???
I thought... no way and ran it on my phone (web App).... Still working.
- There, I fixed it.
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honey the codewitch wrote: I'm looking back on it going "that's wicked code"
I love those moments when I impress myself. Unfortunately I'm not completely certain I could repeat this wizardry.
As long as it doesn't lead to "I really should have commented this, even though I'm the only beneficiary"...
I've had my moments where I've hated myself for it. 
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Oh I understand it upon study. The problem commenting code like what I wrote is it's bloody hard to explain, but I have a sort of instinct for my own patterns so I can see the intent.
To err is human. Fortune favors the monsters.
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My comments are usually a summary of the activity. I try to apply basic software engineering so variables are somewhat self documenting.
Complicated comments can be misleading as code changes run ahead of comment changes.
"A little time, a little trouble, your better day"
Badfinger
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I agree with every word of this.
To err is human. Fortune favors the monsters.
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I sometimes introduce intermediate variables just to document code.
One team mate used to format the code to remove these “unnecessary” variables. Grrr
Boolean explainTheNastyCalculation = <chaos>;
If (explainTheNastyCalculation)
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In front of the boat are the top party people? (10)
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Figurehead ?
Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming “Wow! What a Ride!" - Hunter S Thompson - RIP
modified 5-Jan-23 3:50am.
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I was thinking that too.
// TODO: Insert something here Top ten reasons why I'm lazy
1.
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And ... you were both wrong!
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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