[sf-lug] SF-LUG (list) for ... (was: Re: SF-LUG meeting notes for Monday 18 March 2019)

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Michael Paoli (Michael.Paoli at cal.berkeley.edu):

> Some people like telling stories.  ;-)
> Some even like listening to / reading them.
> "Let me tell 'ya 'bout the time I went to New Orleans in
> the Summer of '64. ..."  (No, I didn't, but ...)
> 
> Just sayin'.

Stories are absolutely wonderful and always appreciated, so they should
be encouraged.  However, there are a couple of specific reasons why
story-telling so often goes badly wrong when used to diagnose & fix
technical problems:

1.  They're told from fading recolleciton, after the fact.
2.  The story-teller risks omitting crucial details or getting them wrong.

Thus, it's common, if using a tell-a-story-after-the-fact approach and 
_not_ giving contemporaneous data, to go off on wild goose chases.
Which is why, as I said in the essay 'How to Ask Questions the Smart
Way', I wrote that diagnosticians are like Missourians:  Their motto
should be 'Show me.'

And, in that particular, the advantage of a copied/pasted session
collecting data using basic, reliable command-line utilities is that
it's complete and accurate, no 'Oh, I forgot that.'

> Purpose of [L]UGs, and (specific) list(s)?  Well, "it depends".

Of course.  

But they wouldn't exist if it weren't for sharing knowledge and solving
problems.