Took the train to work today, saving gas and getting a little time for writing. Added about 300 words to the space opera folk tale story and edited a bunch of the existing words. Also did some critiques. And as for that reopened bug? Turned out the submitter wanted to talk to me because the problem was really subtle. It’s a mental model problem — the user has a consistent mental model of what the software is doing, but it doesn’t match the software’s behavior. It would be easy to say that the user is wrong, but others also have the same incorrect mental model, which means that the software isn’t doing enough to educate the user about how the system actually works. I need to find a way to gently persuade the user to think about the problem in the right way. Not yet sure how to do this, but I’m accepting the reopened bug as an indication that something needs to be done. Tomorrow: off to Foolscap!
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