If I may wax poetic for a moment:

“If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

There's a thin line between inspiring others and unsuccessfully evangelizing. Also a thin line between persistent reminders and forcing an issue. Take for example my Excel woes, which I've all but given up on, that horse being dead enough. I've resolved that there is some intrinsically intuitive element to Excel that make it everyone's choice toolmaking environment. (shrugs). More power to it. The designers created a lingua franca for small-to-mid-range quantities of mathematical calculations. The point at which I get cranky is when people insist that Excel be used despite Excel itself getting in the way of solving a problem. I feel like the logical hop people make from using the system calculator to Excel should be met with the same hop towards using a more robust (albeit more complicated) tool. I can tell people that. Lots of times. I can smile, look up and to the right at nothing for a beat, and then look back self-righteously. But it offers nothing by way of teaching them to love the sea.

There's another element to the "Josh-type" thing, aside from just the Josh-type things being programming related. At the time when my coworker brought this up, it was a question of maintenance and involvement. "If this breaks, Josh, how do we fix it? Do we have to call you?" -"No, you can do X." -"What if we want to change it?" -"You can change the code." -"We don't want to change the code." -"Then you call me."

When I make a tool to solve a problem, the tool itself becomes another moving part of the machine that can fail. Of course, I build things to the best of my ability so that they don't fail, but things happen. Then it becomes a question of involvement: How many hours will it take Josh to fix it? How many hours will it take someone else to fix it, if they know how? How many hours will it take someone to learn how? And, usually the question that has me being told "don't bother" is whether someone else's involvement is worth the risk in ignoring the inefficiency/potential for failure/inability to perform a function.

It is this second part that I consider insulting. It is when, despite a tool or a set of tools' usefulness, any "quirk" that causes the dreaded involvement becomes associated with me and my handiwork. And for most people, involvement means merely having to spend the time to gain even the morst cursory understanding.

I understand that my perspective is terribly biased towards the things I feel comfortable with. And my excitement towards these types of things sometimes keeps me from objectively analyzing the value in creating a thing (see: my awesome random number generator, or "dice program" :) ).

The problem I have is when I'm dead on. (Not saying I am with XMPP, but pretty darn close). I can try to make a good argument, but I'm competing at the same time with people's technological apathy, their aversion towards complexity and involvement, and every quirky, backwards thing of mine I've forced them to use instead of a shiny Apple product. The odds are a little stacked against people like me (which is fine, it makes us feel even more correct). But for all the things I come up with, it's incredibly rare that any are used, despite how strongly I feel about them, or how hard I work on them.

Which is why I'm wondering why being "right" isn't enough. I guess I have to take solace that some of my children make it through.