From 14 hours ago, when I was at the office (and had been for... oh, 6 hours, maybe.) I'm still at the office. Don't worry; I'm leaving for dinner soon.

It's half-past-two; I'm at the office, but I'm not the only one (Richard is in his lab). I'm taking a writing break in between going through test cases. I'm trying to read patches for the bugs I'm verifying as fixed to see how, exactly, you'd solve that problem in code. Maybe half the patches I read fall into the "Ok, I think I see how that works, but how the blazes did you figure out to put the changes there and that you needed to type that?" category. Then there are some that fall into the "...and to fix this, they used a Magic Tool that is Undocumented According To Google" category. I need to start making a note of those black boxes so I can ask about them when we have some free time* after this release goes out.

I can't overhear side convos that fly between the engineers who work around me (I never have been able to), so this is my way of trying to absorb the notion of "how things are done." That, and I read IRC channel logs for as many OLPC-related channels as I can, as close to every day as I can, and attempt to piece together fragments of the conversations there into some sort of "I should learn from this" thing. Tentatively, slowly, I'm starting to ask questions. (I am very shy. The hyperactivity just occasionally looks like chutzpah.)

*free time? At 1cc? I swear we have... some of that... sometimes...

The nice thing about concentrating on absorbing is that you don't have to worry about learning too many things at once; you touch a lot of different things, not much in depth, but you see what goes by. I need to find a way to balance that with the "I want to take an afternoon and sprint on learning X" thing for the list of X's that I've compiled so far. I think I'll think about this post-release, though. Only a few more days.