[sdiy] open letter to Aaron Lanterman

[Paul Cunningham]

OK, I'll definitely have to say I'm really turned off my all of the  
negative postings here. On this topic and others.

I'll agree that youtube is not the way to document projects, but as  
someone who is learning how to DIY, these amateur accounts are  
nothing but encouraging to me -- giving me reason to believe that I  
can actually Do It Myself and probably even do a better job at it.

Some of you are paid professionals and should really bite your tongue  
before putting down less educated attempts at electronics. Sure I  
could have accepted that MIT scholarship 25 years ago and learned how  
to do all this the right way, with all of the appropriate high-level  
math and documentation skills to back it up, but I didn't. Hasn't  
kept me from learning anyways, and I don't think it should discourage  
anyone else here from doing whatever they are able in order to  
advance their knowledge.

I joined this list looking for support and commonality, and some of  
what I read lately just puts others down because they didn't  
accomplish some lofty standard in their DIY attempt. This open letter  
to Aaron was done respectfully with good humor, and shouldn't be used  
as a vechicle to bash the poor quality of amateur video. Some of us  
don't have the nice gear it takes to make a great video, but we still  
would like to share our accomplishments with the rest of the world.  
Sharing them makes us feel good, and feel like doing more.

Here are my fuzzy/grainy/poor quality videos: http://www.youtube.com/ 
ugufru

Please enjoy them if you can make out what's going on. I'm happy to  
answer any questions you have since I have not gotten around to  
documenting anything else about them yet.

Post whatever you want to youtube. Post the details here on on a  
separate web page. That's good enough for me. -pc