You're being rather unfair.  I'm certainly not the only one that thinks
getting private email asking for free help for a topic that isn't narrowly
related to something I did is a bad idea.  Quoting from Eric Raymond's
"How to Ask Questions...":

  In general, questions to a well-selected public forum are more likely to
  get useful answers than equivalent questions to a private one. There are
  multiple reasons for this. One is simply the size of the pool of
  potential respondents. Another is the size of the audience; hackers
  would rather answer questions that educate many people than questions
  serving only a few.

  Understandably, skilled hackers and authors of popular software are
  already receiving more than their fair share of mis-targeted messages.
  By adding to the flood, you could in extreme cases even be the straw
  that breaks the camel's back - quite a few times, contributors to
  popular projects have withdrawn their support because collateral damage
  in the form of useless e-mail traffic to their personal accounts became
  unbearable.

Not all of that is relevant, but it should be clear this is a widely held
etiquette.  Also, why didn't this guy first go and look for public venues
to ask his question?  It wouldn't take long to find the PIClist, the
Microchip Forums, and other places.  No, he found my name somewhere and
took the easy way out without doing apparently any homework about where he
should ask.


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