RTFM

I have spent a considerable portion of my career writing clear and concise documentation for projects that I have completed in the past, status reports and specially commissioned reports. As I'm rather anal about my written skills, I typically don't throw together a piece of junk like so many people do. Believe me, most people in the IT field tend to enjoy doing the technical work and loathe all other aspects of it, such as documentation.

I get especially annoyed when after spending so much sweat and blood in an important document, the person for whom the report is intended for comes to me and ask a bunch of basic questions, all of which are included in the report AND in the executive summary portion as well. Or when I wrote a instruction manual on how to make use of a relatively simple product with a table of contents, someone comes up to me and asks If I want to do this and that, how do I do it? My response has always been unequivocally the same: RTMF. Or in laymen's terms, read the fucking manual. Of course, if the person is someone important or my manager, I'll actually spend the time answering him/her, while hoping I don't Freudian-slip the choice words floating concurrently in my mind about him/her.

And I've been like this forever. And it seems so funny and ironic that today, I realized that I have been the kind of person I loathe so much for quite a long time now. You see, there is this really awesome image viewing application tool that I have been using for over five years now called IrfanView. It is simply the best, with so many things you can do, and it loads images the fastest of any other image viewing applications out there. Best of all? It's free. Of course, the purpose is not intended as something like, say, Adobe Photoshop, but provides quick and easy image and file manipulations typically desired by those who take lots of pictures and want some easy way of organization.

Anyway, for the longest time, I couldn't figure out how to crop out a section of the image and still maintain a desired standard width to height ratio typically found in standard prints. The typical standard keyboard/mouse combination methods employed by many other applications didn't work in IrfanView. And to work around that, I have been using other applications to do just that, and it was a pain in the ass. But this time, since I have recently reinstalled everything on my computer, I have yet to reinstall some other applications other than the critical ones. And I need to do a special cropping with a fixed ratio. But I couldn't find the other application to install, so I was a bit irritated.

Then the unthinkable happened. I opened up IrfanView, went to the Help manual, and did a search on keyword "crop". And what do you know?!? Number two in the hit list was the instructions on how to do the common standard ratio-locked cropping. Although it may not be the same procedure as other applications, it is quite intuitively simple. This feature has been there all this time, yet I have never used it for years. Or simply put, never bothered to spend 30 seconds to look up how.

Then I shook my head in disgust and whispered to myself, "Read the fucking manual; read the fucking manual."