Keep It Simple Stupid

Have you ever noticed that we tend to overlook simplicity in problem solving?

Point in case:

I’ve spent the last couple of days (and nights), configuring the new PowerBook and transferring data from my work laptop etc. Now, whilst I don’t consider myself a techie, I am comfortable and more than capable of finding my way around a computer. With that said, last night, I tried to hook up my machine to the internet via my cable service. I spent over an hour trying different network settings, restarting the machine, modem, etc. without any success.

Reluctantly giving into the urge to call for technical support, I rang my ISP. They tried for 10-15 minutes to troubleshoot and concluded that I needed to speak with Apple. After and hour or more on the phone to Apple Technical Support (who were fantastic), going through all sorts of options (many which I’d already tried), the product specialist advised that it was the ISP settings not recognising the new Hardware ID. Another call to the ISP with this information resulted in … “have you tried cycling the cable model?”. “No” I replied, “I hadn’t tried that, and no-one has suggested that during my 2 hours on the phone!”.

Well, to cut a long story short, I cycled the modem and it worked straight away. Something so trivial and easy, yet I’d gone down the path of thinking the ’solution’ was to start hacking the ‘pref’ files from the Unix command line.

Let’s never forget the K.I.S.S (Keep It Simple Stupid) principle, no matter how competent we think we are.

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