Article:		Failing Miserably, If Not Inventively
Subject:		??
Date:		2004-02-08 08:06:47
From:		fofer
Response to: ??
You're not the only one chuckling, morbus. The question is asked, how anyone can be "religiously devoted" to an inferior technology, with the hopes of gleaning insight that may apply to the audience. (After all, your article was intended for mass consumption, no?) And yet your justification and defense rests solely on your own personality handicap -- an obsessive compulsiveness to which most of us cannot relate. There's no reason for the replies your audience to be insulting and curt. You begin your article by confessing, "When something hits me, I'll drop everything I'm behind deadline on and spend 20 hours automating a task that takes five manual minutes; I know I'll eventually recoup the benefits months down the road." You realize that this payoff (in time saved) won't kick in for about eight months, right? Yet in the meantime, you've neglected your current deadlines and refused to explore any alternative solutions. The more I see your overly defensive responses, the more I realize this article was not intended for an audience's feedback, but rather as yet another way for you to "catalog" your personal experiences. And that your quest for life automation is less about efficiency, than it is about personal empowerment over insecurity. Your workflow would be much more efficient if you focused on the one piece of software that was *really* slowing you down... your mind.

Showing messages 1 through 2 of 2.

• ??
  2004-02-08 08:22:18  Kevin Hemenway | [Reply | View]
  
  
  The question asked has little to do with the article at hand. We've all been on zillions of tech support lists, and a major problem that anyone question-asker will face is the answerer's desire to reinvent the environment from which the question was raised. This whole thread's line of reasoning is that my problem is NOT autoconnecting, but instead, dialup in general. If I wanted to entertain that line of reasoning, 90% of the article needn't have been written: why would I have bothered with the Applescripts, "scselect", pppd /etc/ scripts, etc., etc., etc.
  
  Again, your assumptionary state is showing, and I really do try to not fault you for it, since indeed, you can't "relate". Regardless, I've "explored alternative solutions" to dialup previously, and I've not been satisfied with any of them, either in regard to the evils of usage policies, the repetitive downtime of the service, or the ever increasing price hikes under the guise of value-added service. Irregardless for how you feel concerning broadband or dialup, the fact remains that *I* am satisified with dialup. Challenging the basic assertion of an article ("oh, well, his problem is dialup, not autoconnects") is not a solution, it's merely a 10 message thread that has gotten out of hand.
• ??
  2004-02-14 08:20:58  mozart11 [Reply | View]
  
  
  In on of your replies here you state " Regardless, speed ignorance or lack of experience isn't an issue: I'm on a T1 nine hours out of every weekday, and I still prefer dialup".
  
  Then in this reply you state " Regardless, I've "explored alternative solutions" to dialup previously, and I've not been satisfied with any of them, either in regard to the evils of usage policies, the repetitive downtime of the service, or the ever increasing price hikes under the guise of value-added service. Irregardless for how you feel concerning broadband or dialup, the fact remains that *I* am satisified with dialup".
  
  My question - why do you use T1 nine hours a day? Why don't you switch where you use the T1 to dial-up if broadband is so unsatisfying to you? And by the way this whole thread I imagine gives you great joy. Because it sure is a waste of my time.
  
  I think I'll skip including MacDevCenter as part of my daily reading. It used to be informative, so I bought the two O'Reilly books "Mac OS X Unwired" and "Mac OS X Panther". I'll stick to the other Mac sites for solutions. Leave the horse & buggy crowd here.
  
  Bye