Ouch! Done!

I managed to finish reading the changelogs, finally, despite so many interruptions. We're almost done with this release now, but things are going weirdly. It's not necessarily bad, it's just that we changed our approach to development so much, things just aren't how they were before. As I was discussing our toolset with cpirate yesterday, he pointed out that we might very well be at the leading edge of these practices, innovating as we go along, somewhat explaining how the tools were a bit short sometimes.

Einstürzende Neubauten sent me an email today telling me that my CD and DVD are finally being shipped this week! Oh, I'm so eager to get my hands on this, you can't imagine!

Had an interesting discussion with wlach today, where we did the deconstruction of a small class in our backup system, and I realized that the obvious, well, isn't. My current theory is that what is obvious to one is only obvious to another as how much two persons have in common. For example, the proper design for that class we deconstructed was blindingly obvious to me, I simply did not understand why it had been done the way it has, while wlach didn't seem to really know why it's been done that way, but was able to justify it a bit. To the person who wrote that class, my design could be highly unintuitive, I suppose, and every bit of weirdness would have some justification that is unclear to me.

I've encountered this trust in the "obvious" in the past, often related to how to behave in society. To those people pointing out how I am uncivilized and rude, it often seem unfathomable how I could not know these obvious things. I often use examples of cultures where not belching after eating is considered rude, where here it is the opposite. But while their higher-level logic agrees with my example, their lower-level logic often goes "but this is obvious!", to my dismay.

To take it to an extreme, it would seem obvious that cutting oneself with a knife and bleeding to death would "obviously" be something one would avoid, but even then, a few people do it on purpose nonetheless, every day, killing themselves. But it would seem (thankfully!) that valuing one's life seem to be something that most people have in common.

A lot of people underestimate the difference in perspective that can exist between their own point of view and the point of view of someone that they are dealing with, and how it is possible for completely opposed things to be "the right thing" to each of those persons. It's one of these things you can acknowledge at a high level, again, but is very hard to integrate at a lower, more intuitive level. All of this, even though we are literally surrounded by examples of this.

All of this really highlights for me the importance of proper communication, to avoid misunderstanding, get expectations across and in the end, having everyone have as much as they can out of exchanges.

Hmm, I didn't expect to write so much. My bed calls now...