[TheForge] [META] bouncing e-mails

[Mike Spencer]

PF wrote:

> I wonder if it isn't time for ABANA to hire some poor but brilliant
> nerd, and bring Theforge up to 2013?

Yow! What are you thinking?  Conversation is old.  Old-fashioned.
12,000 years old at the very least.  "Brilliant nerds...of 2013" are
accustomed to fielding the most ghod-awful crap and *getting paid* to
do so.  They build venues such as Yahoo Groups, want you to do
everything through your web browser so that they can include dingbats,
50K pictures of 5-letter words, advertising, banners, icons, logos,
animations and, of course, more advertising.  They're enamored of the
latest cool stuff.  If you think there's a problem with the Gmail
medium that auto-clutters email replies with superfluous quoting, you
have undreamt-of horrors yet to enjoy.

It's already a problem that typical computer/internet users are so
encumbered with the creations of bright young nerds (albeit possibly
in response to technically clueless, pointy-haired twits from
marketing who want eye candy) that they can't figure out *how* to send
simple text email.

I'm on another list inhabited mostly by retired academics and
the better sort of bureaucrats. They:

   + Send an email message in several different formats, e.g. Apple
     proprietary format, quoted-printable ASCII and HTML.

   + Whack the "Email to all your friends" button on a web page,
     thereby dumping a megabyte of dingbats, advertising, banners,
     icons etc. into every list subscriber's mail along with the half
     dozen paragraphs of text.

   + Send (as Dave mentioned) all of the previous posts in a
     discussion thread as quoted text appended to their one-liner.

   + Send exclusively HTML marked-up text rather than plain text.

Some of them can't figure out *how* to send email as ASCII text, "plain
text" in Windoes lingo.  If we need anything, it's simplification, not
a new and putatively wonderful technical straight jacket. Email has
users; Facebook and similar services have livestock.

This is a conversation. The medium -- email -- supports very simple
tech, doesn't need the bells&whistles eye candy technical crap that
stands in the way of fluid conversation.

> We are anachronists, sure, but most of us no longer depend on a hand
> cranked grinder.

Having lived for all of the 70s without electricity, I'm grateful for my
electric tools.  But my 1/2" B&D drill and my B&D end grinder are the
circa 1925 models.  My electric toaster is 100 years old this year
although the fabric cord is a replacement from the 30s or 40s. I do
not need a toaster with a CPU and graphic display that will order more
bread when I'm low. Nor all-singing all-dancing email.

> As an ABANA member on the far left coast, i don't see much benefit
> for my buck.

Um, how do you figure that?  TheForge is ABANA-sponsored but open to
all. So I don't see that it's part of what you get for your buck.


ObSmithing:

I now have a jib crane for my big A&O hammer.  Working on die
modification, in particular, adding a clamp-on piece of truck helper
spring as a die more like those of smaller all-purpose hammers.  I
didn't know this was going to be a lifetime project.  Entertaining,
though, even if periodically frustrating.

- Mike

-- 
Michael Spencer                  Nova Scotia, Canada       .~. 
                                                           /V\ 
mspencer at tallships.ca                                     /( )\
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/                        ^^-^^