The most surprisingly helpful thing I have written
Posted by Tom Moertel Wed, 02 Nov 2011 02:55:00 GMT
Back in 2007, I repaired an aging and fairly obscure A/V receiver that had lost the ability to respond to its remote control. This I did by re-soldering some hard-to-find solder joints that had broken on its circuit board.
On the chance that someone else had a similar problem, I posted some instructions and photos on my blog. I didn’t think much of it at the time.
But since then, every week or so, another comment shows up, thanking me for writing it. Some typical examples:
Fixed my Kenwood V6030D 10 minutes ago. Life is good again, Thanks mate….
Ditto! Worked on my VR-209 like a champ! Thanks!
Thank you for this posting, which I stumbled upon when I was researching the problem of my remote control no longer working for this receiver (VR-507). These pictures were invaluable to locate the faulty pins. (They sure are small.) Re-soldering them restored full functionality to the receiver and the original remote control. Good job!
Thanks, Fixed my KRF-8010D with this, been 5 years fighting with remote working now and then.
There are now about 60 comments like that. I never would have imagined that 60 people would have read the post let alone get out a soldering iron because of it. But they did! And it helped them!
Now, every time I’m feeling down, I Google up that post and read the thank-yous. It cheers me up.
So here’s the lesson: Write it down. If you’ve figured something out, even if it seems unimportant, write it down. Maybe someone else will find it helpful. Maybe a lot of someone elses will find it helpful.
You never know. It might even cheer you up someday.
You know, there was a time when you could take your appliances to be fixed, but that was before the advent of planned obsolescence. I find it hard to believe that the same failure happened to so many people by accident.
Exactly my thoughts when I stepped out of line with an archlinux installation on GPT partitionned harddrive. Wrote down my steps on some blog and… nothing happened :D
Good advice anyway, internet really should be about communicating solutions.
Nice post. I will follow your advice.
I’ve got a similar post on my blog for a printer issue on OSX that I figured out that was bugging me (http://naleid.com/blog/2009/11/01/snow-leopard-shared-printer-job-on-hold-authentication-required-fix/). Not the normal thing that I blog about or that people who follow me look for, but put it up on the off chance that it might help someone. Probably took me 10 minutes to blog the solution once I’d figured it out.
Google Analytics says that I’ve had 13k hits on that post in the last 2 years and 88 people have taken the time to thank me for posting it.
Like your post, that post makes me feel good whenever I look at it :)
That’s a heartwarming story indeed!
When I think about how much useful knowledge I’ve gained in my life but not shared it with the world, I start wondering whether to make some of my voluminous notes public. I think this would be a useful habit to cultivate.
I only recently started a blog, and I’ve made some attempts to start sharing my notes on some things. For example, I started summarizing some programmer user group meetings.