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Back up your hard drive.
If I could offer you only one tip for the future, backing up would be it.
The necessity of regular back-ups, is shown by the fact that your hard drive has a MTBF printed on it, whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience.
I will dispense this advice now.
Enjoy the freedom and innocence of your newbieness. Oh, never mind. You will not understand the freedom and innocence of newbieness until they have been overtaken by weary cynicism.
But trust me, in three months, you'll look back on www.deja.com at posts you wrote and recall in a way you can't grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how witty you really were.
You are not as bitter as you imagine.
Write one thing every day that is on topic.
Chat.
Don't be trollish in other peoples newsgroups;
Don't put up with people who are trollish in yours.
Update your virus software.
Sometimes you're ahead, sometimes you're behind.
The race is long and, in the end, it's only with yourself.
Remember the praise you receive.
Forget the flames.
If you succeed in doing this, tell me how.
Get a good monitor.
Be kind to your eyesight.
You'll miss it when it's gone.
Maybe you'll lurk, maybe you won't.
Maybe you'll meet F2F, maybe you won't.
Whatever you do, don't congratulate yourself too much, or berate yourself either.
Your choices are half chance.
So are everybody else's.
Enjoy your internet access.
Use it every way you can.
Don't be afraid of it or of what other people think of it.
It's a privilege, not a right.
Read the readme.txt, even if you don't follow it.
Do not read Unix man pages. They will only make you feel stupid.
Get to know your fellow newsgroup posters.
You never know when they'll be gone for good.
Understand that friends come and go, but with a precious few you should hold on.
Post in rec.arts.sf.written.robert-jordan, but leave before it makes you hard.
Post in alt.fan.eddings but leave before it makes you soft.
Browse.
Accept certain inalienable truths:
Spam will rise.
Newsgroups will flamewar.
You too will become an oldbie.
And when you do, you'll fantasise that when you were a newbie, spam was rare, newsgroups were harmonious, and people read the FAQ's.
Read the FAQ's.
Be careful with whose advice you buy, but be patient with those that supply it.
Advice is a form of nostalgia.
Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the logs, reformatting it, and recycling it for more than it's worth.
But trust me on the back-ups.
(with apologies to Mary Schmich)
-Charlie (charles.meigh@obvious.spam.blocker.easynet.co.uk)
Last update: Friday, January 18, 2002 22:08
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