Down with tinyurl! (was Re: importing excel data into a pythonmatrix?)

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Tue, 21 Sep 2010 03:01:53 +0000, Seebs wrote:

> On 2010-09-21, geremy condra <debatem1 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I use them when I want to conceal the target of the link. Usually here
>> that just means its a letmegooglethatforyou.com link, which I find more
>> amusing than is probably healthy.
> 
> I thought the idea was funny at first.
> 
> Then I posted a question on an IRC channel.  I had done a ton of
> searching already, and I started by explaining the top three
> near-solutions I'd found and why each of them wasn't actually a solution
> to my problem.  And someone handed me a URL... which was to lmgtfy on
> the first search terms I tried.

Yeah, some people are just self-righteous dicks.

Hey, that would be an *awesome* google bombing project... to get lmgtfy 
to come up as the first link for "self-righteous dicks". 4chan, where are 
you when we need you???


> And this caused me to realize just how amazingly insulting that can be
> when done to someone who *did* already do the research.

Yes, although in fairness people aren't mind readers. If you (generic 
you) don't give any indication of doing the research, you can expect to 
be ignored or told to RTFM. Google is just the new FM.

Personally, I found LMGTFY to be amusing for about 1.3 microseconds, 
followed by annoying. The joke also falls flat when you send somebody 
there, and they have Javascript turned off.

I prefer the old fashioned version:

"Google Is Your Friend"

followed by a URL to the appropriate google's search results page. Or 
even more to the point:

"Did you bother to google for the answer first? Because the very first 
page that comes up gives exactly the answer you want."

Although sometimes people genuinely don't know what search terms they 
should be using, or if they're too generic.




-- 
Steven