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Tuesday, January 02, 2007

Why One Should Read The Freaking Manual

One of my New Year’s resolutions is to start reading the freaking manual of any new device and gadget I get (and I have a lot of those in my queue right now). In geek lingo, that’s know as RTFM (and the “F” means something rather more crude than “Freaking” in case you hadn’t guessed.

This all stems from the fact that when we bought the house we are living in now, we remodeled and added ceiling fans to every room in the house. But, Bonaire has flaky power, and for the last two and a half years we have been attributing the fact that the remote controlled lights in the ceiling fans are sometimes dim and sometimes bright (changing over a period of months from one to the other, or at least so it seems) to that power instability.

So imagine our surprise when a couple of days ago we discovered that if we hold the “light” button on our ceiling fan remotes, the corresponding ceiling fan’s light actually dims or brightens gradually over a 10-15 second period from one extreme to the other. We have had dimmer functionality in the lights all along and never known it. Why? Because we didn’t RTFM. So, from now on, I will RTFM, even when the device is seemingly trivial, as everything is definitely not always as simple as it seems.

Posted by Jake Richter in • Tech Toys
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EEFund  on  01/03  at  03:48 AM
Oh yes - recently I was convinced that a new PC my company had built up was doomed to a life of instability - I blamed everyone and eveything and even contacted various semiconduictor manufacturers to pass on my anger. I need to adhere to an acronym that I just made up but which has a baseline concept I should know: TTBFD - Try The Basics First DumbDumb After about a week of frustration, as a "last ditch" effort I flashed updated bios to the mobo and it solved everything. Um - yeah.
 on  02/22  at  08:41 PM
Jake, you should have asked me...I know how to dim the lights on your ceiling fans with the remote wink heh heh - Cynde

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