Experiment: Blogging About Things While I Do Them

07/11/14

There has been a long period of my life where I have not had a blog. We're talking a good 23 years, 10 months, 17 days plus or minus a couple attempts at blogging that I barely remember (and would rather forget; past me was pretty angsty at times).

During this time, I managed to do some things that, had I documented it, I might've been able to help out others trying to do the same thing. For example, plymouth was breaking my boot-up of Ubuntu when I first setup Ubuntu. Plymouth and my NVIDIA graphics card didn't play nicely at the time. A lot of looking online did not provide any kind of fix or workaround. Eventually, I merged two pieces advice together, and at least got a workaround (that made bootup take a bit longer, but let me use nvidia drivers at least).

The Problem I Had Posted About By Someone Else

I never told anyone about this workaround. I lurked, I found a solution others had not posted yet, and I didn't help anyone. Remember that selfishness I mentioned in my first post, Stephan? This is the sort of thing I was talking about.

That workaround has been lost to time, and is no longer particularly valuable. The problem has long since been properly fixed. But there's stuff I'm figuring out all the time that I leave undocumented how I figured out.

Sometimes, I don't even realize how much stuff I've figured out until I talk to other people about it, and they look at me like I'm speaking a different language. The problem is, it's subtle and small at first. It seems insignificant, but it slowly builds up to a considerable amount of knowledge and capability.

So, I'm going to try to be better about documenting the stuff I'm learning while I learn it. To provide the means by which I learned it. Hopefully, I can provide a higher-quality roadmap to improvement to the next person to try whatever it is I try to do.

And maybe when I get around to implementing comments, readers will be able to point me in a better direction when I do it wrong. Though, I guess he could always just tell me in person.

Anyways, some future posts to expect out of this experiment:

Vim Setting Based on Extension of File Being Edited
Highlighting the 80th Column in Vim
Gamecube Emulator Setup
Super Smash Bros. Melee Netplay Setup on Gamecube Editor

Truth be told, I've already figured out that first vim one, but I need to retrace my steps again, because I didn't implement it after looking it up and I've forgotten the specifics.