How to Know You're Being Dumb

If you're having a problem - tech or otherwise - and you google and google without shedding any light (or you find a small handful of other lonely queriers, none answered well), this nearly always means you're doing something really really dumb.

It goes without saying that this only applies to mainstream-ish issues. If you've hit a snag translating Norwegian poetry into Esperanto, or attaching a solid fuel rocket to the roof of your VW Golf, that's a whole other story (though you still are probably doing something really really dumb).


This is something I particularly need to keep in mind. As a very early Internet adopter, who started out surfing with command line tools (via Telnet, Usenet, FTP, Lynx, etc.) and has great fondness for Yahoo for its invaluable curated index of cool web sites, I sometimes forget that nearly everything's now online.