Yeah, OK, sure Bill. All likely enough, but it's clear you missed the point. You forgot the OT in the subject line...unless...maybe...if it's about the way we interact with the list, maybe it's not really entirely OT after all. Now I'm confused again. In any case. great post Bob! Really. David Skolnik At 11:12 PM 2/15/2004 -0500, BB wrote: >At 11:41 AM -0600 2/15/04, Ron Nossaman wrote: >>The subscribers choosing not to contribute to the blather in the OT >>political crap are not necessarily oblivious to it. Some of them are >>seriously weighing educational benefits against the volume of shoveling >>necessary to get to them. > >The ones who take advantage of the power of filters don't have to waste >their time shoveling. It should be pointed out that to get to the real >gold on this list, it's not necessary to read every single post coming in >from this list, nor is it necessary to delete every post deemed worthless. >I let them all pile up in the hard drive. Any email client app worth its >salt acts like a good database. Sort the posts by subject if you want to >read an entire thread. Sort the mailbox by name if you're looking for a >comment by someone in particular, and pre-sort by date if you have an >approximate idea to the nearest month when it was said. When you find >something you want to be able to retrieve fast, tag it in the priority field. > >Just because my PTx mailbox may be 60% fast food containers, beer cans, >and cigarette butts doesn't slow down my access to what I know is in >there. I've got a PTx mailbox going back to early AUG 2002 which is ~125MB >in size. It's not cumbersome in sorting. It also is about 0.3% of my hard >drive space. (These days, 40G is not enormous.) Assuming I could clean out >the above mentioned 60% junk, that HD space would would drop too 1/8 of >1%. But oh, the work to do that. No, it's far easier just to leave it lie. > >So four pieces of advice, to all of those who find the list too much work: > >1.) Don't expect yourself to read every single post. Learn who posts the >valuable stuff and who posts the fluff. If you're not sure whether a >particular thread is one which you should have been following with each >post, drop into it every once in a while to check it out. Learn to >recognize goofy threads by their subject lines. And for heaven's sake be >grateful to those of us who do bother to mark a subject "OT". > >2.) If you can't be expected to read every post, then you can't be >expected to weed the keepers from the flushers. So don't worry at the >growing size of your PTx mailbox, it won't prevent you from panning the >real gold. > >3.) If you don't know how to set up a filter, speak up. For every person >who doesn't know how, there at at least two running the same OS and email >client app who will step forward to help out. I've seen this happen >several times in the last few years. > >4.) Don't take the list in digest form unless you are absolutely compelled >to. The digests do not save you any HD space, nor do they download any >faster. What they do do is to obstruct the database capabilities of the >email software which are vital to enjoying the wealth of knowledge here. >If there is an advantage to digests over individual posts, I'd like to be >informed of it. > >Oh, and the other one about filtering out a particular person, if you >really decide they're a consistent waste of your time. > >At 8:50 PM +0100 2/15/04, Richard Brekne wrote: >>Hmmmm... well there's plenty enough blather to shovel through of all >>sorts that has nothing to do with politics or religion. If its just a >>matter of weighing the education benifit against the amount of shoveling >>necessary to get through it all.., then I think more then a few should be >>a bit wary of pretencious moralistic preaching. > >"Great post, Bob"....."thanks for your suggestion, it worked"......"you >owe me a beer, I'll collect at the National"...."Hey, how 'bout them >Brooklyn Dodgers"..... and on and on. (Not to mention one of the newer >people here who thinks this is a chat room instead of a mailing list.) > >Like I said, even if we could decide on a standard for acceptable >contributions to this list, it would be a part-time job for a human being >to moderate it, and an impossible one to leave up to a computer. I happen >to enjoy the human dimension brought in with all the OT stuff, and it >certainly doesn't get in the way of my getting at the real "on topic" gold >on this list. > >BB > >"The truth is inside you, Don Octavio. I cannot help you find that." > ...........The mother of a delusional patient to his psychiatrist in > "Don Juan DeMarco" >+++++++++++++++++++++ > >_______________________________________________ >pianotech list info: https://www.moypiano.com/resources/#archives
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