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RE: mac recording question



Title: RE: mac recording question
At 3:31 AM -0800 2/26/05, Tim Nelson wrote:
Are you going to do that yourself, or are you
suggesting that someone else do it? :P

-t-

Good point!
Bernhard or anyone else has my permission to re-post anything I post to this list to any other list (this permission does not extend to the contents of any of my private e-mails).

I assume that what Bernhard wrote was a rhetorical way of saying he agreed with my comment. However, it's distinctly different from what I was commenting on.

Curmudgeon that I am, there are a couple of mailing list behaviors that bug me:

1) The "poor little me" questions, wherein someone asks for information that is readily available through a Google search or a search through the list archives. This can be in the form of "what's the name of that computer company that makes the Macintosh?" or "about a year ago there was a discussion on this list about sardines...anybody remember that?"

2) Really brief interjections that add no useful information and that either express agreement or approval ("mee toooo!" or "right on!") or else  levy a critique couched as a suggestion ("why don't you RTFM" or "don't complain that it's too expensive...get a job!").

That's not to say I'm not myself guilty (especially in the second category, and especially late at night) but most of the time I do try to follow my own advice and offer up some useful information. In particular, if someone asks for information that may seem obvious to me, or may seem simple to find, I will often spend the 30 seconds or 3 minutes needed to find the information and then I'll post it. In doing this I accomplish at least four things: 1) I answer the question, 2) I tender a mild rebuke to the questioner for being either too lazy or too unimaginative to find the information him/herself, 3) I offer some instruction to the young and inexperienced about how to learn things using the Internet, and 4) I often learn something myself in the process.

This last point is important in at least two ways. First, the information itself can become part of my personal knowledge base, and second, the location of the information becomes part of my data acquisition technique. For instance, I now know that on the Apple Web site the technical information about computer models is presented in at least two or three locations and that the degree of detail differs from the top level to the sub-pages in the product description.




--- Bernhard Wagner <loopdelightml@nosuch.biz> wrote:

>
> This should be printed and framed and cross-posted
> to any mailing list!
>
> > I wasn't interested in the specs either, but one
> of my pet peeves is
> > when people post terse and generally uninformative
> responses to
> > mailing list questions.  I feel that it's
> generally better to either
> > remain silent or to take the extra step of
> following one's own advice
> > and retrieving the information and posting it for
> general use. It
> > generally doesn't take very long and the result is
> that some
> > potentially useful information is there in the
> archive for future
> > retrieval.


-- 

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Richard Zvonar, PhD      
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