A not so simple gadget

I just bought an iPod shuffle. Some time ago I bought a La Crosse weather station, a surprisingly simple and useful gadget.

Looking at an iPod Shuffle, one would be forgiven for believing it to be simple. It is not. I have used four previous models of iPods and the shuffle was by far the most daunting. I had to spend time reading manuals and checking discussion boards before I managed to get one single track onto the Shuffle.

Sometimes I had the feeling that Apple complicated the Shuffle, to make people consider Mac OS X simple in comparison.


To the left: simple gadget
To the right: trouble maker

Etiquette

I just stumbled over an extraordinary person in a discussion forum. He did about everything wrong to get an answer. Here are some of the highlights from some of his posts.

Anybody heard of OLE?

The interesting thing here is that the question was posted in an Apple forum, and OLE is Microsoft technology. A fairly big part of Macintosh users shun Microsoft, so asking about OLE was very optimistic.

But not only that, the question was not about what the poster wanted to do. It was not about what he wanted to achieve (for example inserting a spreadsheet in a word processing document). It was OLE and nothing else. He had made up his mind on what the solution was before defining the question.

...essential for many in the real world...

Here he attacks the first person who tried to help him for not living in the "real world".

Judging from the responses so far this is indeed a very limited forum.

He then goes on attacking the entire forum as "limited".

...responses have come from users who must be permanently engaged in posting items...

Then the people who tried to help him are attacked for being... too experienced?

...you either both lack work experience in using spreadsheets, or you don't quite grasp the usefulness and the essence of OLE model.

Still no trace of explanation of what the poster wants to actually achieve, just a remark that the people who tried to help are inexperienced and/or stupid. Further, there is no attempt to prove this lack of experience or stupidity. No attempt at promoting or explaining the advantages of OLE. Just a blanket statement that this Microsoft technology is so great that Apple should adopt it.

waste of time

Those three words, without capital W or any full stop or other punctuation, are so far the last entry from the original poster.

I disagree with the last entry. Other posters in the forum got going a quite interesting discussion about OLE and OpenDoc and other document models. This was no waste of time at all.

I still do not know what the original poster was actually after, and I am sorry if he wasted his time, but I would like to thank him for initiating an interesting discussion.

A typical result of OLE. Take an aspirin and try again tomorrow.

The simplest gadget

How much time does mankind spend each year trying to make electronic devices work? How many electronic devices are never used, because the owner gives up trying to understand the manual?

Personally I dread each new device, because I know from experience how much they shorten my life, tying my hands to manuals and buttons that do not work properly.

Even my first Mac took about a week to understand. I did not even have any programs for it, but just understanding what it was all about, coming, as I did, from a monochrome DOS PC, I needed five full days, before I could say to myself that I grasped it.

Yesterday I bought a much simpler device, a La Crosse weather station. I hesitated a lot. Life is too short, I said to myself. I will not have the time to configure it, set it up and customize it.

It turns out that it took no time at all. Two batteries in an outdoor transmitter. Check. Two batteries in the display. Done. That's all. After that, I now have a display that shows me accurate time (radio transmitted), temperature indoors and outdoors, air humidity and air pressure.

It is not important if I need that information. I is not important if the station was cheap or expensive. I am anyhow impressed that one still anno domini 2008 can build devices that need no configuration at all.