On 02/02/2011 06:42 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:

> When I was working in IT on a daily basis, I would call my wife and try
> to explain a problem I was seeing to her - not that she could help with
> technical advice, but because if I framed it so she could understand it,
> the answer would frequently appear before me.

It's a well known cliché in popular story telling. ;-)

>> I like to pretend that this is the reason that I do this. Obviously, the
>> real reason is that until very recently, I was a sad pathetic loser with
>> no *real* humans to talk to...
>
> Well, I know plenty of people who do just that when they're preparing for
> a presentation as well.  I know several instructors who practice in front
> of a mirror, too.

...which is different from /actually/ not having any human interaction 
in your life. Fortunately, that's one problem I have somehow managed to fix.

>> Fair enough. Although, like I say, I've written plenty of smaller
>> documents, and they've worked out well. It's large documents that end up
>> not working.
>
> So it's time to move from small documents to slightly larger documents,
> rather than to a 300 page book.  So, how do you define a "smaller
> document"?

If it fits in one newsgroup post, it's a "small document". ;-)

>> I think Ode to Joy was about the summit of my violin skills.
>
> Well, that's included in the 9th Symphony (as I'm sure you know). :)

Hell, I can't even remember who *wrote* it! It was a long time ago...

>> I guess mainly it just comes down to extreme pessimism about whether
>> there's any useful documents to be found in the first place.
>
> Then you need to address that as well - instead of starting out with
> despair and the expectation that there's nothing available on the topic
> (after all, if there were nothing useful available on the topic, then
> nobody would get involved in whatever field it is, but as people are
> involved, they must've learned from somewhere, right?), start out with no
> feeling one way or the other.

Oh, I'm sure there are real hard-copy books on the subject. But I doubt 
there's anything useful that's freely available on the Internet.

And even then, I rather suspect that any hard-copy publications would 
assume that you're already an expert in signal processing...

>> Heh, OK.
>>
>> Perhaps not this week though, as (inexplicably) I actually have some
>> work to do. Yeah, I know, imagine that...
>
> I know the feeling, I do as well, but I'm willing to make some time to
> help you with this.  You've got the basic skills, you just need some
> practice and some guidance.

Mmm, OK...

Post a reply to this message