Too Busy For Words - the PaulWay Blog

I've spent a bit of time hanging around on the #fedora channel on irc.freenode.org today. In the process I've had a couple of people help me with problems with gstreamer and rhythmbox, and been able to help people with advice on LVM and RAID, getting someone's monitor working (he hadn't found out that the little right-arrow beside the "Generic LCD Display" in system-config-display -> Hardware -> Monitor -> Configure would expand that list when clicked...) and in general been able to help people on their way. A couple of people have thanked me for helping them, and I've basically said that I'm just trying to pay back the help I've had in getting my systems working, and to pay forward the help I wished I'd had when I'd struggled with something for hours before getting it finally working.

There seem to be some people, especially on IRC, who think that helping with simpler queries is beneath them. And there seems to be a small minority who seem to actively enjoy calling people morons when they can't understand the intricacies of the KDE interface or why to not worry about finding a man page for fstab-sync (man fstab tells you that there's this automatic tool...). I can't always answer every question and I usually try to make sure people know when I don't know something but am only guessing. But if I can contribute to the community by answering 'moronic' questions, then I see that as good for me and for them.