Hippo, birdie, two ewes...

... to capplor!!! I hope whichever one of you has a birthday today has a great one!!

Done yesterday (20090723)

( raw notes )

A pretty good day, but a rough evening. See upstream. OSCON continues to be very useful.

The parties were a mixed bag: Sourceforge was loud and crowded; Facebook's was not quite as loud but thinly attended; I had two good conversations, one of which yielded a job lead for a friend. I should probably have stayed longer.

River: "Should" vs. "Ought To"

Standards documents generally make a big distinction between "should" and "shall" -- the first is a recommendation, the second is a requirement. It seems that I make a similar distinction.

When I use "should" or "shouldn't", as I did last night, it seems to be just a reference to an ideal or preferred state of things, without necessarily blaming myself for the present state. Essentially what judifilksign said in this comment.

All of your "shoulds" and "shouldn'ts" are reasonable - if you take away the self-blame that comes along with them, and make them things to keep in mind about yourself.

If I'm being consistent, I'll use something like "ought to" to mark something that I will feel guilty about not doing or not being. I'm not always consistent, of course.

So, for example, "I shouldn't need so much sleep" is a parallel construction to "the car shouldn't be making that clunking noise" -- it implies that something is broken. "I ought to go to bed now" is more like "I ought to get the car looked at tomorrow", implying that something bad will happen if I don't.