Thanks. Done. I actually thought it was there already!
31,295 karma · joined December 3, 2012
Though of course, if that were the case I'd be cussing at how much they got wrong. :-)
That is, the password might have looked like
1234
but it was actually
12^H34
because at that point, the backspace character was still a terminal command.
/me looks around for more...?
For example, in the mid 90s we went to the Dominican Republic for a week, and we were oh-so-broke. We stayed in a hut (actual hut) behind a friend's house; we borrowed their bikes to go to town to buy groceries (including food items where I had no earthly idea what they were); we cooked on a tiny alcohol camp stove (and when it ran out, we discovered that the alcohol it used was a bottle of rum). We saw nothing that was a tourist destination; it was all "just folks." ...and we got a huge amount of understanding about what it meant to live in a poor country without resources.
I've also stayed in 5-star hotels in Paris and indulged myself for a week falling into every tourist vortex. That's perfectly fine, too, because it's okay to appreciate beauty. However, you appreciate it _better_ when you know its context and history; I highly recommend Rick Steves _Europe Through The Back Door_ because it gives us Americans a better sense of European history, not to mention how it affected art, architecture, etc.
Mind you, Steves' travel guides are rarely my favorites. He's not a foodie, and I regularly choose destinations based on what I can eat. And he's opinionated, which I appreciate, until we disagree on those opinions. (He's meh on the Black Forest, and it's one of my favorite places.) Then again, I'm not his target audience. I think he's a treasure nonetheless.
Mostly, for me, it meant I couldn't access alt.music.katebush.
Perhaps, if many people in a community complain, you should assume that they have a reason to do so? And you might listen, in order to learn the source of the upset and what can be done to fix it?
Do you take the same attitude with your customers, clients, and users? It's an example of "It works on my computer:" "I don't see why they think the software is slow. So I'm not going to investigate to learn why they say the application isn't working, and I certainly am not going to try to improve its performance."
Sometimes a past client will approve a snippet of your work. Choose something that clearly is out of date but representative of the project; put it into a suitable format and ask for permission. For instance, I have a short segment of an analyst report (in PDF) that I wrote back in 2004; it shows that I can write that sort of stuff, but the data is so stale that nobody would worry about it sharing proprietary information.
But thousands about "send me a letter."
Back in the day, the much-waited-for Version 3 of Lotus 1-2-3 was called Godiva. (Just because everyone liked the chocolate, I think.) But Lotus knew that a lot of customers wouldn't own the high-end computer that the new version would require (hoo-boy a 386!), so they also created Lotus 1-2-3 version 2.2. That was far less sexy of a project to work on, so its code name was Chunky (after the much cheaper chocolate candy).
At the same time, Lotus worked on a SQL database that never _did_ see the light of day. Its lead designer was one of the original 1-2-3 programmers, who'd gotten tired of people asking him what he was working on next. So the code name for our project was, "No comment." Then when he responded, "No comment" to "What are you working on?" he was being explicitly correct. (...I still have the polo shirts and other swag from that project, too. Cool logo of /* */ )
His book, The Secrets of Consulting, was the first to help me get my head screwed on straight. I can't tell you how often his "Orange Juice Rule" helped me make a better decision.
He truly did make the world a better place.
That doesn't mean it's true.