Stanley Barthfarkle wrote:

Is being a Net Nanny a paying job, or is it an internship?

No its a hobby or passtime when its too *cold* *windy* or whatever to
either go sailing or do any worthwile boat maintenance and some newbie,
clueless or troll has exceeded my annoyance threshold.

There are *reasons* for most of the USENET conventions. Some are
legacies from the bad old days of slow connections and dumb terminals,
and appear to be somewhat dated in the era of mass cheap broadband but
if you've ever tried to catch up with your favourite groups (forums for
the Google impaired generation) on a slow dialup in some African port or
via a mobile data service or on a weak WiFi signal in some dodgy
anchorage, you'll appreciate other posters who also respect the
conventions such as bottom posting or interspersing with appropriate
snipping, appropriate quoting [hint: many readers don't know why you are
getting all ****y about 'net nannys'], preserving at least minimal
attribution lines and marking the subject as (OT) [never use OT: as the
broken Micro$haft newsreaders convert any two letter XX: to or its
equivalent in your local language, so the convention has been
pragmatically adapted] and changing the subject when the topic of the
thread changes but still referring to the old subject so that those
readers with broken threading can still easily skip what they dont want
to see, cross-posting appropriately rather than multi-posting if you
need to ask the same question in several groups etc.

I am not making any value judgements about (properly marked OT)
non-boating content or flaming grammer, spelling or whatever, nor am I
going to start on the whole anonymous poster thing (though for my own
sanity I have most of the anonymous remailers globally filtered), nor do
I follow you from group to group posting RFC numbers in responce to your
every post - in other words - I have a life!

Its a bit like the guy next to you when you come back to the bar saying
"by the way, you're flying low". The correct response is to
inconspicuously adjust your attire and quietly thank him, not to climb
on top of the bar and scream and shout and jump up and down pointing at
the guy who tried to help you while you let it *all* hang out.

Now as I said before, if you dont like criticism, *please* killfile me,
and if you continue to irritate I will likewise killfile you.

For the rest of the audience, normal service will resume shortly.
Meanwhile, some obligatory boating content: I fitted a SBC 140 ADV PLUS
battery charger last weekend and I have to go down the boat tommorrow to
check on it and splice up and reeve some new halyards. Whats on your
winter maintenance list?


--
Ian Malcolm. London, ENGLAND. (NEWSGROUP REPLY PREFERRED)
ianm[at]the[dash]malcolms[dot]freeserve[dot]co[dot]uk
[at]=@, [dash]=- & [dot]=. *Warning* HTML & 32K emails -- NUL:
'Stingo' Albacore #1554 - 15' Early 60's, Uffa Fox designed,
All varnished hot moulded wooden racing dinghy.