1. Step 1 – Determine your needs

   What is it exactly that you need? “I need a laptop” is not an answer. Do you need to have a computer that you can carry around? How often and how far are you going to carry it? How long do you expect to use it without charging it? What will you do with the laptop? Will you watch movies, play games, or just do office stuff? You can ask these kinds of questions about any product, technology or otherwise.

   This is often the hardest part for people. They are used to making decisions like “oooh, that looks shiny, I want it!” This is why iPods sell so well while many people would be better served by a Sansa or a Cowon. This is why people buy SUVs rather than sedans. You ask them what they need, and they immediately say SUV. They don’t say that they need a motor vehicle capable of seating 4 people comfortably, driving X miles per year. To make smart purchasing decisions you need to examine your needs on a more fundamental level. You also need to be able to throw away meaningless wants, such as desire for shininess. Heck, you might even discover that you actually don’t need anything at all! This is the best because you just put your money into savings.

2. Step 2 – Research, research, research

   Once you know what your needs are, you can start researching. The bigger the purchase, the more research you need to do. Buying the wrong computer mouse is not a big deal, buying the wrong car will have you upset for a decade or more. You should research every single product that can possibly meet your needs. Don’t think too narrowly either. You might start thinking about sports cars, but then realize that a sport bike meets your needs. You might start thinking about a giant video camera, but realize that a digital point and click meets your needs. Learn everything you possibly can about what you are buying until you are confident that you are almost an authority on it. If you don’t know more about the product you are buying than the salesmen selling that product, you haven’t done enough research. If you are going to own something and use it, you should know everything there is to know about that product. If you aren’t going to bother to learn about the things to buy, you shouldn’t be buying them.

3. Step 3 – Consider turning back

   It is only at this point in time that you should think about money. Thanks to your extensive research, you should now have a good idea of which products most closely meet your needs. I run into many situations where there simply does not exist a product that meets my needs. Other times I find that every product that meets my needs is out of my price range. In situations like this you must make a decision. Are your needs urgent? Must they be fulfilled right now? Perhaps you are willing to sacrifice some of your needs in order to save money and avoid waiting. If you haven’t yet found a product that is affordable and meets all your needs, return to Step 1 and change your needs.

4. Step 4 – Shop Around

   Once you have determined a product, or set of products, that meet your needs, it is time to shop around. Since you did research, you should know about all the different makes and models of whatever product you are considering. You should also know about what price is fair for these products. Go to every store you can until you find the lowest price you can possibly find. Do everything you can, within reason, to find the best price you can find. If you earn $50 an hour on your job, and you spend an hour of your time finding a deal that is $25 cheaper, you just lost $25. Meanwhile, if you spent an hour looking, and you found a deal saving you $100, you just made money. With the Internet, it shouldn’t take very long to realize what kind of deal you are going to be able to find.

5. Step 5 – Buy

   You’ve got the product you want, you found a place to buy it at an agreeable price. Just buy it already! Too many people wait around too long to buy something. Unless you research shows that there will be big changes coming soon, just buy the product. Don’t give me that iPhone BS. Buying such a product at launch for that ludicrous price was a dumb idea whether they had the price drop or not. Barring these extreme cases, waiting to buy a product usually just means your needs will go unfulfilled for just one more day. You’ll be paying the same price for the same product, but you’ll be getting one less day’s worth of use out of it. If that one day of use will make a difference, buy it. If you are still not confident in your decision, you might have done a poor job of research or poorly evaluated your needs. When you buy, you buy knowing you made the right decision before you take out your wallet.

6. Step 6 – Enjoy

   You bought it, now get your use out of it. Nothing is worse than when you buy something big, and then it sits on the shelf unused. If you do buy something and it remains largely unused, go back and figure out where you went wrong. Most likely you bought something you didn’t actually need. It’s also possible you may have purchased a product that doesn’t fulfill your needs. Think back to why you bought the product in the first place, and do a better job the next time. If you can, return the product and start the process again.

Yes, I know this article is incredibly generic, and full of common sense. It’s so generic that I feel it is almost pointless to write it down. I might as well write an article all about the sky being blue. If you are thinking this is all just common sense, then you do not need to read this. Move on. This is here for all the people who spend too much money on things they don’t need. This is for the people who buy things and then get upset only after making the purchase. This is for people without common sense. Learn to make a decision!

First off, if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it. One guy was having a problem because he was following some guide about how to setup the perfect Ubuntu install. He didn’t have a specific problem he was trying to fix or anything. He was just following some guide that claimed to provide directions to a perfect install. Luckily I was able to convince him that there was nothing wrong with his Ubuntu as it was, and none of that stuff was necessary.

Rule number two, don’t tweak things for the sake of tweaking things. Some people enjoy uselessly twiddling widgets on their computer for no reason. They like to do things they think increase performance just for fun. Not only do some of those tweaks not actually increase performance, but these people only use their computers as boxes of tweaking. If any performance is ever gained it is never used outside of a benchmark. Trying to uselessly tweak bits in your software without a reason is going to get you into trouble. Don’t be that guy. If you want to be that guy, get an old PC and install Gentoo on it.

Perhaps the most important rule is that you shouldn’t do anything unless you understand what it is you are doing. Far too many people find a howto guide and simply type all the commands in order. They don’t understand what any of the commands do. They don’t read the output from those commands. And even if they did read the output, they wouldn’t understand what it means. I put part of the blame on howto writers for not explaining what commands do, but simply giving direct instructions. However, users are not without blame. They blindly follow the instructions on random websites without even trying to understand what they are doing.

If you are planning on using Linux as your desktop operating system, and you care to actually get real use out of it, then follow my instructions. Do not fix what is not broken. Do not tweak or change anything unecessarily. Do not do something unless you completely understand what it is you are doing. If you follow these three rules, you will have a much better experience.

Okay, that’s cool. If I had a laptop I would probably write code in class instead of sleeping, also. But wait… That typing is too fast and too constant to be coding. Coding is short quick bursts of typing interspersed with long bouts of deep thought. This is non-stop word processing going on here. Maybe he’s writing a paper for another class? Maybe he’s really good at nethack? Maybe he’s making a blog entry? Whatever it is that requires such a quantity of typing during class must be interesting.

So I lean back and take a peek at his screen. As soon as I realized what it was I almost leaned too far. Which is good, because I did not want to provide the entire class with a weeks worth of entertainment. What I saw was Microsoft Word (blech! use AbiWord of OpenOffice if you want to save a few hundred bucks)and within it were notes for the current class. Get a grip, maybe he’s a paid not taker. But this class has no deaf people! There is no note taker! Oh noes! I can’t believe that there are actually people in class taking real notes. And this guy was taking some fancy notes! He had diagrams of the professor’s drawings and bullets of just about everything that was said or written on the board. If he posted these on-line the rest of us could have skipped class.

To let you understand my shock let me tell you my personal history of note taking. Around the fourth grade I had a teacher tell us to take notes. Taking notes then consisted of copying down the things she wrote on the overhead projector. At that point in my life I could not understand why this would be necessary, but I did it because I thought it might be an assignment. When I found out that the only purpose of it was to take home and read I ceased doing it. I had never taken notes before then, I just listened to what the teacher says and remember it. In fourth grade I was still capable of continuing to learn this way, so I brushed off note taking.

Time moved on through middle and high school. I was always told by various teachers that I should take notes. The reasoning was that I wouldn’t need the notes now, but that if I didn’t take notes in the higher level school I would surely fail. I always believed it like a dumb-ass, but thankfully I made an excuse; “Oh? Then I’ll start taking notes in the next school.” One middle schoolteacher actually required us to keep a notebook that was checked and graded. I made a very well organized notebook with the minimum amount of content to pass.One high school teacher also had notebook checks which were to look for homework as well as notes. At this point I had quit doing non-graded homework and note taking was obviously only going to be necessary in college. So I just got terrible grades on those. The teacher was pissed that I still got 90+ grades on the tests.

So here I am in my fifth year as a CS student at RIT. All I need to do to receive my BS degree is finish classes this quarter and take 4 more classes next quarter. I also have one more co-op, but that doesn’t mean anything. I am guaranteed to graduate a very high quality university without ever taking a single day of notes, in any class, ever.

Now, by no means am I a genius. In fact, my GPA is mediocre at best. I’ve never had an IQ test, but all of my friends like to think they are smarter than me and say it freely. Hell, sometimes I’m stupid and I know it. Neither my memory nor my attention span are so amazing as to draw attention. Hell, it takes me two or three weeks to remember my class schedule let alone anything more complicated. And even when I’m programming in C, which I first wrote in when I was 13, I keep a reference for syntax handy. As for an example of my weak attention span, ask my former roommate about me crossing NYC streets too soon or too late.

Given all this you can imagine how blown away I am by people taking notes in class. What are they doing? Why go through all that effort for nothing? What scares me even more is the library. The RIT library is a great place, full of free information in a comfortable atmosphere. But I see people there doing schoolwork. They make copies of books. They get huge stacks of literature and retreat to cube desks for research. I can understand if you were working on a thesis how this might be appropriate. But often I go in and see people from my classes studying. They are studying for the class I am in with them. There are people, in the library, studying, for a class which I am also in and am passing easily, yet I have never so much as cracked the spine of the book. What the fuck? Sure, I can understand maybe a cursory glance before a test or quiz. but people are spending multiple hours studying days before a test. I cannot believe this. Never has a class at RIT required that kind of effort to achieve a passing grade. From what I understand “studying” is when you read over notes and text using various techniques to refresh your memory of information in preparation for an examination. In this sense of studying I have never in my entire life studied for more than a few minutes prior to an exam.

Let me disclaim and make sure not everyone immediately takes offense and thinks I’m calling them an idiot, and that I alone am the only intelligent being on earth. First, I already have given a pass to paid note takers. They have a very good reason to take notes and their purpose is legitimate and necessary.Second, I have already devoted an entire paragraph to humbly admitting my own stupidity. Lastly, I understand that some people have different ways of learning. Some people have trouble “absorbing” information from lecture, and writing down and/or reading information helps them to learn.

Now let me make everybody offended and call you all idiots. If you can’t retain information given to you very quickly by people talking you are going to fail in this world. You cannot take notes on what everyone says to you everywhere you go in life. Do you see people walking around with notebooks writing down everything that every person says to them? No, you do not. People remember what they are told. Since I don’t remember ever seeing a person walk around campus taking notes on causal conversations I assume that the people I see studying also have this ability. Yes, it is true. Every single person reading this is fully capable of learning without note taking or studying. You do it in every aspect of your lives except for schoolwork.

First, I admit this. If I had studied and taken notes like all these other people I would probably graduate from RIT with a much higher GPA. Studying and note taking does work. However, here is the part where I rescind previous statements and tell you why I am smarter than every one of you studiers. Your GPA is an intangible imaginary number. The only time it will matter after college is in three situations. The first situation is applying to graduate school. The second is if you want to work somewhere that requires a GPA that is high, such as the FBI or NSA. The last is if you want a few extra Latin words added to your diploma.

Think about this. Twenty or thirty weeks I will receive an extremely expensive piece of paper from RIT. The same piece of paper that every other CS major gets. In the long term, my GPA will mean absolute dick. My rare and valuable programming experience will far outweigh any negative my GPA carries. And after my first real job nobody will ever ask me for my GPA ever again. And I was able to acquire this piece of paper for the exact same amount of money the rest of you paid. But not only that, I did it with less than half of the effort.I am smarter than the rest of you for one reason and one reason only. I was able to maximize my enjoyment of life by spending the minimal amount of time necessary to achieve a passing grade while leaving the maximum amount of time for enjoyment of my very few and very precious college years. Too many people I meet in the real world remember college as the best days of their lives that they long to return to. I wasn’t about to piss these valuable years away by spending time studying or doing other un-fun schoolwork related activities. And in the end, I get the same end result as every single one of you living in the library. If you enjoy studying and note taking, then you are excused. You are making your life more enjoyable. But for most people it seems that schoolwork is not the most enjoyable activity. That is why parties involve drinking and screaming and not math problems and history tests. Every single one of you is capable of putting in the minimum effort just like me. There is no reason for this excess of studying and note taking, none at all.

When I was in elementary school they said that my grades were the most important thing in the world, and failing at school was failing at life. In middle school they said my grades were the most important thing in the world,and failing at them meant no honors classes in high school, which means failing at life. In high school they said that my grades determined what college I could go to, which would determine the rest of my life. Thank god that after being lied to three times I figured it out. A slew of bad grades in high school got me into RIT, the college I wanted to go to.

I now share my secret knowledge with the world! Cast away your books and writing utensils! Get out of the library and grab a Frisbee! You can achieve your long term goals in life without wasting time with all that bullshit. For anyone who still isn’t convinced, just look at the President of the United States. How much time do you think the leader of the free world spent studying and taking notes? My point is proved. To all of you who already live my way, rejoice. To all of you who heed my call, congratulations! Despite what you have already lost in wasted time you have become better for realizing your error. For the rest of you still studying today and every day let the rest of us join with Nelson Muntz in saying to you, HA HA!