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Ok,. Ted, Alan, Don... some notes from your Moderator...



 
 
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  #1  
Old February 12th 05, 05:48 AM
Peter W.. Rowe,
external usenet poster
 
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Default Ok,. Ted, Alan, Don... some notes from your Moderator...

In no particular order, guys, but addressed to the apparent fact that you three seem to
be engaged, intentionally and willingly or not, in some minor squabbling. seems silly.
Here are my thoughts.

Arguments.

Please remember that this newsgroup is moderated. Part of my job as moderator is to
enforce the charter requirement that posts remain both on topic, and free from personal
attacks. As those of you who've been with the group a while know, I try to be pretty
easy going, and none of you have crossed or even approached and lines yet. But please
just keep this in mind. Insults, percieved or not, intended or not, are off topic. So
far, no actual insults have been intended. Alan, you're choosing (I think somewhat
tongue in cheek perhaps) to read Teds comments that way. Let me vouch for him, having
known him for a while, that he's not intending any such comments. lets just write these
bits off to language differences and perception differences.

remember that in usenet, we've only the written word to go on. Added information from
real communication, ie tone of voice, body language, other non verbal cues, are missing.
A common and sometimes unexpected result of this seems to be the online version of road
rage, where people pick up some percieved meaning and run with it, even when that
meaning was not intended in the first place. Please, lets all just relax.

News readers.

As Don mentioned, he does not use Agent. his posts arrive in my inbox with a newsreader
header indicating (at least today) that he's using outlook express. I'm the one using
forte Agent, since it's one of the few windows based programs that not only access both
email and news, but also allows me the needed access to headers, including the
"approved" header, which I need in order to moderate this group. Without Agent, or
something similar, I'd have to spend the extra money to do this with a Unix shell
account, or some similar more complex setup.

I'm unaware that Agent truncates posts when a sig block is in the middle. It might, but
I've not seen that happen before. Perhaps i've just been blind. However, I'd note that
because of the moderated nature of this group, posting formats can get screwed up.
Readers send things to a news server, which then get shunted to a mail server and sent
to me. Occassionally that transfer changes formatting. Then I get it, and my own
newsreader, Agent, has to reformat the message to some degree in order to repost it.
This sometimes causes unpredictable (at least to me) results. Oddities such as posts
arriving here just fine, but leaving with carriage returns inexplicably converted to a
=20 sequence, or some such nonsense. I've never quite figured out just how to set
agents formatting to always avoid all these conflicts. So oddities you may have seen
may be my fault, not Don's By the way, the folks at Forte, as well as other moderators
on the moderator's mail list, who I've asked about this, also report similar occasional
glitches, and not just with Agent. Some of those folks are much more computer saavy
than I'll ever be, so if they can't tell me for sure what needs to change, I doubt
there's much I need to change.

Also, understand that there are a significant number of news and mail servers out there
that are not quite properly configured. Ted's news server, for example, has the odd
property of managing, somehow, to loose about a third to a half of his posts to the
group. He cc:s em to me in email, and while usually I then get two copies, (one from
the moderatrion relays, one in direct email), just when I start to think his news admins
have fixed things, a string of his posts go missing again. And a number of years ago,
one unlucky poster to the group had a news server that would only forward random
sections of his posts to me in any single message. He'd send one message, I'd get two
or three, each with part of the message, that I'd then have to reassemble. This is
normal with some servers, in the case of very large posting, such as to binary groups.
But this was happening to posts only one page or so in size. And internet standards
themselves are fuzzy. The obvious example of that is found simply in Microsoft and AOL
trying to insist that HTML formatting or Rich Text formatting is somehow a standard in
email or news posts. Acceptable, perhaps (though not in this group), but certainly not
any formalized standard...

The technical matters of the original thread.

Ted's use of "washup water" and "washup gloves" were also somewhat confusing to me, as I
mentioned to him. A moment's thought told me what he likely meant, and I didn't worry
about it further. But Ted, it was a colloquial enough term that we colonials didn't
quite catch it without some consideration. Alan's question was reasonable, if he wished
to ask.

Your reply may have incorrectly assumed some level of incomprehension on Alan's part.
It WAS, indeed, somewhat condescending, i not insulting. but it was also funny as h*ll,
so I let it go. Please, everyone, let it go too. It was a joke, not an insult, and it
answered the question. asked. Continuing to worry about the language used, and whether
insults or jokes are involved, is just plain silly. And off topic too.

Alan is of course correct in noting that ordinary soapy water, while alkaline, is not
really an effective way to neutralize an acid spill. But assume that Ted is not talking
about more than minor spills and drips, and then his answer is correct. While soapy
water may not be a great neutralizer for the acid, it DOES do something almost as
effective. It dilutes it. A few drops of acid in a sponge full of soapy water is no
longer dangerous or corrosive to much of anything, simply from dilution, even if there
is still free sulfuric acid in that solution. It's so little as to not matter. So in
practical terms of what Ted was suggesting, retrieving battery acid, where one could
expect minor drips and all when everything went well, his kitchen gloves and soap and
water are perfectly fine.

However, Alan is nevertheless still correct. soapy water doesn't really neutralize the
acid all that well, and if the spill involved is more than minor, then more effective
means of dealing with it, such as the baking soda he mentions, would be needed.

The bottom line here is that apparently, you guys are both right, and apparently both
know what you're talking about. More, you're essentially in agreement, but don't seem
to have realized it yet. So relax, will ya?

Good grief, but I hate when I have to play mommy...

Peter Rowe
moderator
rec.crafts.jewelry
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  #2  
Old February 13th 05, 06:56 AM
Marilee J. Layman
external usenet poster
 
Posts: n/a
Default

On Sat, 12 Feb 2005 04:48:00 GMT, "Peter W.. Rowe,"
wrote:

Good grief, but I hate when I have to play mommy...


Is this why we had so many twins today?

--
Marilee J. Layman
  #3  
Old February 13th 05, 06:59 AM
Peter W.. Rowe,
external usenet poster
 
Posts: n/a
Default

On Sun, 13 Feb 2005 05:56:01 GMT, in rec.crafts.jewelry "Marilee J. Layman"
wrote:

On Sat, 12 Feb 2005 04:48:00 GMT, "Peter W.. Rowe,"
wrote:

Good grief, but I hate when I have to play mommy...


Is this why we had so many twins today?


Um. no. no mommy stuff there. Just a dumb tired moderator who didn't remember to
delete a batch of messages from the inbox after processing, and seeing them again, when
I sat down again at the computer, didn't recognize them as already having been sent. So
you get the double pleasure, and I get to say...

"my bad"...

thanks Marilee, for pointing it out. Would you believe I didn't even notice I'd done
that...?

cheers

Peter Rowe
moderator
rec.crafts.jewelry
  #4  
Old February 13th 05, 10:40 AM
Abrasha
external usenet poster
 
Posts: n/a
Default

Peter W.. Rowe, wrote:


News readers.

As Don mentioned, he does not use Agent. his posts arrive in my inbox with a newsreader
header indicating (at least today) that he's using outlook express. I'm the one using
forte Agent, since it's one of the few windows based programs that not only access both
email and news, but also allows me the needed access to headers, including the
"approved" header, which I need in order to moderate this group. Without Agent, or
something similar, I'd have to spend the extra money to do this with a Unix shell
account, or some similar more complex setup.


Try Mozilla Thunderbird!

Abrasha
http://www.abrasha.com
 




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