Text 22545, 135 rader
Skriven 2011-10-08 13:10:03 av Richard Webb (1:116/901.0)
  Kommentar till text 22544 av Janis Kracht (1:261/38)
Ärende: FidoNews Vol. 28 No. 40 Sustainability IV
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HI Janis,

On Sat 2011-Oct-08 00:34, Janis Kracht (1:261/38) wrote to Richard Webb:

> I struggled with that instrument too as a kid, small
> fingers, I knew where the notes were, I just had trouble
> with the hand contortions.

JK> I have long fingers :)  really, this is something my piano teacher
JK> mentioned to me.. it's the way that one holds your hands when
JK> getting ready to play that he complimented me on..
<snip>
JK> respect (I've had MS for for about 36 years now <g>) I'm still
JK> walking and playing piano, but things like the guitar kick off too
JK> many nerve pains or something <g>

That would make a difference.  With me it was motivation to
practice, because I could sit down at the piano and play
what I wanted to play, but then as an adult for a long time
I lived where my piano and organ were at the band practice
place or the gig, and if I wanted to play for leisure the
only instrument handy was this acoustic guitar I bought, so
I got more proficient with it <g>.

>> Sure, sometimes the gating software available is lucky to be able to
>> filter out spam, nevermind specific  messages..

> RIght, and a lot of the newsgroups related to the various
> professional sports teams are mainly spam from what I've
> seen.

JK> hehe.. I hate sports.. used to love watching Bjorn Borg play tennis
JK> though :) I guess part of that is not being able to even f'n run
JK> anymore.. bummer. So I've not seen the spam there.

I looked in on some of them occasionally but found the snr
to be extremely poor so gave up on them.

<snip>
JK> Yeah.. very neat to actually meet the people you've been typing to
JK> :) Another FIDONET+ :)

YEp, or in the case of the ham radio talking to <g>.
<snip again>

>> That's sad.. though from what I've seen a good number of newsgroups
>> have floundered much in the same way as fidonet echos as people took
>> off for places like facebook and web blogs, etc.

> INdeed, but the quality of the people who remain has a lot
> to do with whether an echo or newsgroup thrives.  Even the
> rec group I mentioned has lost many good people who got fed
> up, who probably would have enjoyed a fIdonet echo on the
> same topics, but some of them were well respected folks in
> the business who could get the resources together to put up
> their own web forums.  A lot more fragmentation, and lots of competition.
> That's why we've got to get better at what we
> do, although our FTSC chairman says it's all a waste of
> time.  NO it's not a waste of time, if we sharpen up our
> game a little bit.

JK> Boy do I agree there as far as our FTSC chairmen :) He has a feeling
JK> all is for nought.. though I can agree that we'll never see the
JK> numbers we saw in the 90's, we sure can try... because those people
JK> who were here years ago may decide to see where things are at today.
JK> :) Several sysops have, so it makes sense the users will as well.

My argument runs much along the same lines.  The die hards
in usenet stay around, they like the variety of discussion
topics available at one log in, and are willing to forgive
the newbie the faux pas and help him learn the rules of the
road as it were.  Occasionally one of the old hands from my
favorite newsgroups will drop in, at least in the rec group.

I don't ever expect to see the nodelist with 30k individual
systems listed again, but if we expect to remain viable we
have to remember what are strengths have been since the
beginning, and develop new ones.  Imho one of our biggest
strengths is still the variety of ways to transfer the mail, and the systems
that can be used to actually participate.  I still thank the good lord for Emsi
and the zmodem session
over pots when I was having so many phone line difficulties
a year or so back.  NO I'm not expecting that some guy's
going to break his old Commodore 64 out of the closet, but
if he can find a way to do that and he wants to it's sort of nice knowing he
could do it <g>.

>> Over here, I have a user that started an echo for his Mensa friends
>> where the topic is esperanto.. a language they are intent on keeping
>> alive <smile>

> YEp, I've seen small groups try to keep that one alive in
> the ham radio world oto.  trouble with that one is they were too late,

JK> True, but for them It's important.. and timely.

> default pretty much made English the international language. WOuld esperanto
> have been better?  DOn't know, never learned it.

JK> Me neither though I have always loved languages...I can read
JK> esperanto when they post in the echo, but I wouldn't try to write in
JK> it :)

<rotfl>  IT's somewhat based on the usual romance languages
isn't it?  IF so I could probably decipher a bit of it.  I
took four years of Spanish in hs because it was the only
other language offered at my small high school, unless I
wanted to do the Saturday extension courses offered through
the junior college nearby.  I was already doing electronics
via one of those courses two years,  and the only options
there met the same times as the electronics course.  Spanish teacher and her
husband were refugees from Cuba when Castro
first took over, and she offered some interesting contrasts
between idomatic SPanish as spoken in MExico as opposed to
Cuba, and Spanish as spoken by the Spaniards.

She had us do a little exercise every MOnday morning which
helped one expand the vocabulary too.  ONe of these go
around the room and briefly tell what you did last weekend,
not using English unless you got stuck for a word.


I'm starting to hammer another piece together in this
FIdonews series btw.  Won't be ready for this week, maybe
next, will have to see if the skeleton of the thing still
makes sense when I've time to revisit it.  A bit of a
discussion of pointing in fact.  IT's always struck me that
there was something other than the telco toll charges and
their differences that made pointing so much more attractive in z2 than it was
over here.

Regards,
           Richard
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 * Origin:  (1:116/901)