Purpose: a discussion of some of the information you should be prepared to provide when asking someone for help.
LV:
These steps will help you in that focusing on positive actions should slow down your heart rate and regulate your breathing... and for us it provides us a common background from which to try to help you.
Cameron: On communicating code fragments and the limitations of this medium: the constraint is a good thing. Working to reduce your situation to a textual description augmented by at most a couple of lines of code is sure to benefit everyone concerned.
LV: Good point - I really hammer my users on this point. Handing me a foreign piece of code thousands of lines and procs long is guaranteed to cause me to try to hand it back ... On the other hand, showing me a small piece of code - hopefully stand alone so that I can try it on my machine without having to load and build a thousand pieces - results in me being able to 'tinker'.
[Months later, CL muses on the idea of construction of minimal examples.]
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