A stupid little anecdote, probably not funny to anyone but me…
A friend of mine was telling me about how he recently tried to get all facets of his laptop working under Debian, and hit a couple of brick walls. A couple of Googles later he found someone who had successfully got Debian installed on exactly the same model laptop. He was slightly shocked to discover that it was a woman at least 20 years his junior 🙂 Swallowing any vestiges of macho-pride, he contacted this “girl” and they had a geeky exchange during which she agreed to send him her .config file. For the uninitaiated, the “.config” is the file that describes how the core, or kernel, of your operating system is to be built. Everyone struggles to perfect their .config, and it can be a very personal, time-consuming journey. And let’s not even start on the XF86Config….shudder…
He told me that he felt there was something slightly uncomfortably intimate about being sent a strange girls .config. In his own words, “it was a bit like asking someone to send you their dirty knickers in the post”.
I nearly had to change my own pants laughing.