Today, I added the two timers to the right sidebar.  The first counts down to when I move.  The second counts up from my date of birth.  The timers are plugins for Wordpress (the blogging platform I use for this blog) that were developed by someone else.  After adding the second one and seeing the total days since I was born, I felt the need to double check the total.  I don’t know why.  Turns out it was wrong.  The years, months, and day totals were right, but the overall day count was around 150 days too high by my calculations.  It was showing 11,870 days.  So I dug into the PHP code to see if I could figure out what was wrong.  I spent around a half an hour trying to figure out why the calculations weren’t working.  At first glance (and the second, third, fourth, etc), all the formulas seemed okay.  Eventually, I finally noticed what was wrong.  In his formula he was converting from seconds back to days (I won’t get into why).  To do so you would divide the total in seconds by 86400 to get days (60 secs/min x 60 min/hr x 24 hrs/day), but he had made a typo and was dividing by 84600.  Because the numbers are so close, I didn’t notice for the longest time.

What surprises me is that since Wordpress is a very popular blogging platform and there are undoubtedly hundreds if not thousands of people using this countdown timer, nobody else ever noticed the error.  Apparently nobody else ever thought to double-check the math.

So here’s my question: does the fact that I double-checked the math on something that, in the grand scheme of things, is so completely and utterly unimportant make me very thorough or just incredibly anal?