PMS

I just got to thinking about PMS. I'm wondering if it's really a myth created by men who aren't willing to accept that sometimes they actually do just behave like assholes.

Witches Under the Bed

Last night my daughter had trouble falling asleep. She was afraid of witches. I soothed her and tried to help her over her fears. She's still somewhat pre-logical, at age 6, so I was able to use two contradictory arguments and have them both be fairly convincing. I told her there were no witches. And also, many of them are nice ones.

What finally made the difference was posting a sentry under the bed. We had to find just the right stuffed animal to do the job. She has a bumblebee, who could sting any bad witches. My daughter reminded me that bumblebees can only sting once. But I assured her this was a magic bumblebee who could sting as many times as necessary. So that was OK. And she went to sleep.

Open Source

My early impressions of open source software is that "open source" is synonymous with "buggy." It pains me to say that, because I love the grass roots energy of the open source movement. I like being part of something that feels utopian, or at least populist.

But I'm also comfortably used to software that works, that has thorough, readable documentation, that follows a set of standards, and that has been thoroughly tested and debugged. So this is a new experience - wasting/spending hours on making software work before actually being able to work with it.

And I'm enough of a geek to be enjoying that new experience. (I don't think I ever claimed to be consistent.)

I'm finding that another synonym for "open source" might be "rude." I've been working with an open source content management system that is unbelievably frustrating to use.  The CMS's site has lots of documentation, much of it good, but it's fragmented, incomplete, often referring to older versions than I'm using, much of it containing broken links.

Yet, despite that, people are very ready to scold one another for what they think are stupid questions posed to the forum - and I quote "People should read the code and docs before posting questions." Sheesh. Would it have killed the cranky person who wrote that to mention which of the literally thousands of files of code and which of the thousands of docs?

I wish the populous involved with this system cared enough about it to try to lower, instead of raise, the barriers to entry for us newbies who've inherited large, hacked systems that we now need to master.