RTFM
April 30th, 2006As I opened the car door this morning outside church, the warning buzzer sounded to tell me I’d left the lights on. As it was 9.25, this was unlikely, so I checked – no, the light switch as at ‘off’. Opened the door again, another buzz. Never mind, leave it – then as I walked away, I noticed the parking light was on. Now, this was odd, as I didn’t realise the car had parking lights… no time to investigate.
A few minutes later I was sitting in church, when some kind soul walked in and announced: “is there anyone here with a black Skoda? you’ve left your lights on”. Now it’s bad enough admitting to driving a Skoda in public; it’s even worse admitting you don’t know how to switch the ******* lights off.
After church, a trawl through the manual revealed the trick – if you leave the turn indicator switched on when you switch off the ignition, then that action switches on the parking lights on that side of the car. Now isn’t that really obvious.
No doubt the car enthusiasts will tell me that all cars are like that nowadays. Well, if so, good for you. I now know how all those ordinary people out there feel when their PC just won’t do something – “why is that menu option greyed out?” “why have they moved that somewhere else on the menu?”. PC gurus (including me) need to learn a little humility 
While on the subject of humility, I have to admit I’ve had to go back to using a cable plugged into the back of my laptop to go on-line. The new NetworkManager feature in Ubuntu’s latest beta looks wonderful – it automatically finds the best network connection, wired or wirless, and tries to connect you. It did connect to my wireless network once, when I switched off all the security. So it can do it! But once only, and never since.
Why did I break my new year’s resolution never to use beta software on a system I need… you can’t even RTFM, as it hasn’t been written yet 