In the office upgrading hardy boxes to intrepid tonight in preparation for jaunty’s release. It’s mostly smooth, except that I didn’t realize nagios2 was so old until it disappeared, so I think writing a nice chef nagios3 recipe is probably next on my plate.

More of my earlier hypothetical story.

> You really need to read your messages before you sent them, because
> your tone is often negative.

Actually I put particular thought into the wording of this because I have a nervous problem with being a burden on people. Short of using an emoticon which I can’t decide on the appropriateness of with business people, “What’s up?” is the most passive phrase I could think of to express that it wasn’t a big deal. Being interpretable as slang to most, it denotes a personal nature and ideally this would be disarming.

Having grown up socializing electronically I’m pretty familiar with conveying meaning in a textual format, but those colloquial techniques don’t seamlessly apply to all electronic communication and must be used cautiously when interacting with people who may be unfamiliar with them. I tend to assume non-technical people are in this group, because it’s usually people who are involved in the open source community, and thus somewhat technical, that are most familiar. This is markedly different than generational context like chatting over text or instant message, because it develops from a community.

On a personal note, you can consider anything I say to have no negative connotations, my esteem lends to the BlameYourselfFirst mantra. Any sarcasm is another programmed response at lowering expectations and thus putting people at ease. I’m sorry I came off any other way.

I talk about this because it’s pretty interesting… communication is pretty interesting. I have really strong feelings, I often say this. This also makes me pretty nervous about my ability to communicate this with others. I’m usually pretty sure that people don’t get what I mean. Which isn’t to say they don’t, I just feel that way. Or fear that way perhaps.

I’m not sure I’d want to open much of a personal door with business people I don’t know, but I also tend to have a difficult time not doing that. I was consoling a old buddy over IM tonight who was having problems with his girl, and got to telling old stories he hadn’t heard, and how I’ve dealt with the consequences of them since.

Which, to devague that a little, was that I’ve compromised too much in the past in relationships. I haven’t always been asked to. Perhaps more often than not I did it naturally to ‘fix things’, even before they were broken, but I’ve since figured out that all this ranting about who I am does represent something that needs to be protected to maintain my own happiness.

Alright well, work needs my attention more than this and keeps distracting me.