Just got the change to give this the fair reading it deserves. As far as I am concerned, it winds up being the to date definitive statment on the subject matter. Nice Post Bill. Here Hear ! RicB Bill Ballard 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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