Sean Middleditch

I’ve found a new big pet peeve.

“We…”

I’m just as guilty as many other at doing this, unfortunately. I’ll try to stop now that I’ve noticed the problem. Allow me to explain what this blight upon humanity is:

We need to work hard to fix this. If we put in the effort, we’ll reach our goal. They can’t stop us, because we are too good for them. We just need to cram for it. We just need to try really hard.

Any one of those sentence or some variation thereof can be found all over the place, on mailing lists, forums, chat rooms, live meetings, phone conversations, etc. Anything with a community of involved leaders and followers. The problem with “we” is that the person saying it is, more often than not, not the person who will be doing any of the work.

For example, the most recent place I’ve seen this problem is on the Ubuntu forums. A user, who I will bet my favorite hat hasn’t in any way shape or form done an ounce of development work on Ubuntu, said something along the lines of, “we just have to work really hard during the next six months to get this feature done!”

It seems so innocent. After all, the user is part of the community. Ubuntu is a community effort. The use of “we” thus sounds quite motivational and pure hearted to many. I see it as something else entirely. I see it as a freeloader giving the “rah rah let’s all work together” speech while expecting other people to do all the work. What that user **should** have been saying was something like, “**you** just have to work really hard during the next six months to get this feature done!”

Now, had the user said that, there would probably be a ton of replies telling the user to stop being a demanding, selfish jerk. Funnily enough, neither the intent nor the amount of effort put forth by the user is going to change.

The problem appears everywhere. Most of the places I see it is on Open Source development sites and in politics, but there are other places I’ve seen it. KANAR being one. “We just need to fix…” No, what the person meant was, “Someone who is part of KANAR and who isn’t me needs to fix…”

I have moved my blog from the SourceForge account for AweMUD to my personal web server. I had not wanted this server to be public, but I just can’t stand having this thing running on SourceForge any longer. Hopefully I’ll be able to get access to a real server sometime soon and move this thing again to there.

The URL has changed, although the old one still works, and will continue to do so for some time. The new URL is http://blogs.awesomeplay.com/elanthis/. A little DNS trickery and mod_rewrite line in the .htaccess on the SourceForge server causes all attempts to access the old site automatically redirect to the new one with no troubles.

Of the advantages of switching, my posts should now start mirroring on Advogato again, and various errors from SourceForge’s overly-restrictive configuration should now disappear. Unfortunately, the speed may become an issue as the blog is server over a cable modem, and/or the site may end up getting entirely blocked by Comcast. Since this is a temporary solution, I hope there won’t be any big problems with these.

Here’s my Todo from the last week. Looking good.

- Complete gateway exam for Calculus III **- Done**
- Study for Latin Exam 2 **- Done**
- Minor contract work for one website **- Mostly Done**
- Minor contract work for a second website **- Punted**
- Kanar.org PayPal code to test with the winter feast **- Punted**
- Push the final releases of AweMUD 0.23 and Scriptix 0.31 which are several weeks behind **- Punted**
- Clean my room **- Done**
- Clean my Ranger **- Punted**
- Drink lots of rum **- Done**

5/9 done (the “mostly done” will be “done” by tonight). That’s more than 50%, which is probably a new record for me. :-)

Only two of the punted items are in any way important. Once I get them complete, I think I am going to feel a *lot* better. Huge drop is stress levels and all that.

I’ve got a rather nice looking Todo List for the weekend. Who wants to place bets that I get no more than two items on it done, despite having enough a time for all of them?

- Attempt gateway exam for Calculus III **- Punting**
- Study for regular exam for Calculus III **- Done**
- Study for Latin “quiz” **- Done**
- Do Latin homework **- Done**
- Minor contract work for one website
- Minor contract work for a second website
- Create kanar.org forums (visible and usable by staff/board members only) **- Done**
- Kanar.org PayPal code to test with the winter feast **- Punting**
- Kanar.org event editing UI **- Done**
- Push the final releases of AweMUD 0.23 and Scriptix 0.31 which are a week behind
- Watch the Trigun video (VHS, shudder) I rented **- Done**
- Clean my room
- Clean my Ranger **- Punting**
- Drink lots of rum **- Done**

Prizes to whoever guesses which of those items are the two I successfully get done this weekend.

**Update:** Marking items done as I finish them.
**Update 2:** Looks like I got everything done except for the AweMUD stuff and the work that actually earns me money. :-/