On Fri, Feb 19, 2016 at 4:26 PM, Carl Lindner <[email protected]> wrote:
> Ted,
>
> Your "rant" included --- Also, you'll find, if you write the long post of
> the 5 What's I listed above, nine times out of ten you'll work out the
> solution. At least, it works for me. ---
>
> Very many years ago I had a professor - fraternity brother, Marine that
> served in Korea, amazing man - who said pretty much the same. "Ask the
> right question and the answer becomes obvious".
I suspect we've been re-learning that lesson since the days of
Socrates. Or Og the Caveman.
It's hard to methodically attack a problem with all the distractions
around us: the boss yelling, or the clients complaining or the phone
ringing or twitter tweeting. Sometimes it helps to have an uninvolved
3rd party look over the situation.
Some people seem to have an inclination, though nature or training, to
attack a problem in a logical fashion (I blame a natural inclination
towards science, and some pretty rigorous training as an electronic
and electrical technician, courtesy of the U.S. Navy). Some people
don't understand the inner workings of the software so aberrant
behavior is just more mysterious magic to them. A thorough theoretical
baseline helps a lot. I've wired NAND and NOR gates, flipped bits,
written in assembler, dug into database, ISAM, and b-tree structures
and algorithms, and written a fair amount of low-level stuff.
And some of us have been doing this for 30 or 40 years now and have
pretty much seen, or made, every mistake in the book and can remember
a few of them.
Even the one I wasted my Monday on. It was a 403 ("Forbidden") error
generated, as they usually are, by the last thing I had changed.
Couldn't see the forest for the trees and spent a few hours chasing my
tail and various wild geese until I went back to fundamentals and
stepped through the process to the point of error, and there was my
mistake, plain as day.
It might be fun to consider the opposite of the ProFox list, something
like stackexchange.org. There's no forum, no shoot-the-breeze, no [NF]
or [OT] drifting into business practices or politics or copyright law.
And consequently, there's mostly no "there" there. To me, at least, it
lacks any sense of community. There are questions, there are answers,
sometimes right ones, sometimes bone-headedly-wrong ones, and that's
that. Throw a couple keywords in the search box and take your chances
on finding the "right" answer. Even if you asked the wrong question.
> I have made a living from the Fox since the DOS days. I have been on this
> list since the Darcy days. I read almost all posts - easy way to gain
> insight, but generally lurk.
>
> I am amazed at there are people - not newbies - that ask to have someone do
> their work for them. Once they find water in the well, they keep coming
> back.
There's a sociology PhD dissertation in here somewhere, I suspect, on
email list behaviors.
> I am also amazed at how you, and many others keep providing guidance.
And there's a separate dissertation (or perhaps a psychiatric
diagnosis) on whether the most helpful of us suffer from a compulsion
or unhealthy need to be seen as helpful...
> Your rant was not a rant, rather a reality check. Thank you and numerous
> others on this list for their invaluable contributions.
Well, it's a worthwhile reminder to all we can make this a more
valuable list by each contributing what we can.
Thanks for the rare posting!
--
Ted Roche
Ted Roche & Associates, LLC
http://www.tedroche.com
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