Well, January sure has been interesting for me. A bit too much, in some
respects, such as the U joint in the Jeep blowing apart on my way to a
party this afternoon. So what if the last 10 days has seen the weather
in Salt Lake trying to catch up all at once for two months of non-winter?
Who needs snow tires and four wheel drive?
At any rate, one of the things I had on the schedule for January is dealing
with a new server for these mailing lists. With the new and rather popular
shop-talk, as well as the Morris and newsletter lists which I've not yet
mentioned to the world at large, the count of public mailing lists run out of
here is around 20. I've not counted up subscribers recently, but my guess
would be it is still under 4,000 individuals. While there are a number of new
subscribers, I've had to remove a lot of names from the autocross list due to
full mailboxes, thanks to a handful of folks who should pick up the phone and
call each other, rather than drag out their arguments for weeks over the net.
So it goes.
About 200 or so of those individuals remaining are probably wondering what has
become of their money. Well, I would like to say I have taken it all and just
returned from a few glorious weeks in some lavish resort at your expense, but
the truth of the matter is I have not yet spent it. RealSoonNow, likely
before the Fat Chance Garage Beach Party in February. What I have done is
managed to set up one of our lab machines as a temporary aid, such that
triumph is still doing all the mailing list work, and I am doing my University
work on a different machine. So the load on the server is not making me the
grouch I was a month or two back. I'm still a grouchy old curmudgeon, I just
haven't been reminding the list members of it!
Having the mailing lists separate from my daily work machine has taken a lot
of the pressure off to find something right away, so I have been shopping
around a bit more casually, checking a few more vendors. I'll work on being
better about communicating progress to the lists.
Assuming you've read this far, stick around for a few reminders on how to be
a good list citizen. First off, if you want to send a message to one of the
mailing lists you are on, send it to the proper place, that being
the_actual_name_of_the_list@autox.team.net
Do NOT send it to *-owner@autox.team.net, or majordomo@autox.team.net or
the_name_of_the_list-request@autox.team.net. Check your mail program for
where those replies are going as well.
When you do reply, try to use some common sense and editing, there is no
need to include the entire header, the overly long signature and all the
useless prattle in the original message, try to extract only the relevant
portions. If there are no relevant portions, you may want to reconsider what
it is you are doing. Remember your mail will be going out to a number of
folks all over the world, thousands in the case of one of the big lists,
like british-cars or autox, and what seems like just a little extra baggage
gets multiplied many times over. But do be careful about attributing quotes
to the proper person.
If you want to unsubscribe from a list, send mail to
majordomo@autox.team.net
with the command
unsubscribe the_actual_name_of_the_list
as the body of the message. The lists that the majordomo here recognises
can be gotten from sending mail to majordomo@autox.team.net with the
command
lists
If you send a command to majordomo, and get the canned help message back,
**read it**, especially the examples at the end that show common mistakes.
I am constantly surprised by the number of commands sent in that are
obviously a reply to the help message, and do exactly what the help message
tells you not to do. Kids these days!
What I will likely do in the near future is set up some automatic monthly
mail or something to remind folks of proper etiquette and the administrative
addresses of the lists. Or I'll just do it by hand, taking the chance to
pontificate about something or other every few weeks, since I so seldom get
a chance to contribute anything useful to the lists these days. So it goes.
For those of you who stuck it out this far, thanks for hanging in there!
And if you got this far and feel a need to contribute to the server fund
or the mjb Beverage Consumption Project, send a check, payable to Fat
Chance Garage, to
Fat Chance Garage
PO Box 58333
Salt Lake City, UT 84158
Thanks,
mjb.
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