I compulsively take notes, whether I want to or not. Sometimes, the notes lead to documentation, and other times they lead to very large files or stacks of spiral-bounds sitting in a shelf in the closet gathering dust.
Sometimes, my notes are useful. For instance, I recently upgraded my photo gallery software from 1.5.2 to 1.5.3. However, after I did the upgrade, my Sitemeter bug vanished from each page.
Crap. Footer got reset back to normal. Same thing happened before when I went from 1.5 to 1.5.2.
So I went back through my notes, looked up “Sitemeter” and “Gallery” and found that I needed to put the code back into the wrapper.footer.default file.
I did that. And the Sitemeter bug reappeared on every page so I could track it all again.
Ta-da.
I’ve got more notes with Gallery in there. Customization tips and experiments I’ve run. This will come in handy when I gin up a gallery for photos and paintings for some friends that might turn into an online gallery for selling them.
Sure, I could blow off taking notes and just do the same Google search for these things. Or I could rely on my massive amount of Knowledgebase, Forums, FAQ, and documentation bookmarks by product and manufacturer in my browser. (I like to bookmark every driver and firmware page and then sweep through them every so often because I don’t trust “mail me when it updates” services on CNet and such.) Look it up each and every time, starting from scratch, hope nobody’s clogged Google with garbage since the last search.
But other times, it’s just good to have notes written out.
heh, and sometimes those notes are written in pencil on the front of an NEC Multisync 19 inch monitor, when you are famous I’m selling some of this stuff.