19 Jan
2007
19 Jan
'07
4:47 p.m.
First of all, I'm sorry that so many people seem to have taken my message
as a personal assault. In re-reading the message, it seems the primary
reason some people got upset is because I expressed my speech freely, and
I also expressed some rather unflattering truths. My tone was angry, yes,
but my anger was directed at eBay primarily (because I hate them), and
secondarily at the same old useless bitching about eBay that seems to
never end here. I think it's pretty clear that I was looking for
Hang on a second... Last time I checked, the owner/moderator of this list
was Jay West. Not you. Now, if Jay says that moaning about E-bay is
forbidden here, then we'd better all shut up, it's his list he gets to
make the rules. But I don;t see any justification for you to tell us what
we can talk about.
You remind me of a certain person well-known in HP calculator circles.
A commonly held view in HPCC (UK HP club) is that since he founded the
first such club he feels he has the right to tell _all_ such clubs how
they should be run, what they should do, etc. And this does not go down
well with certain HPCC members I can tell you.
[...]
Tony Duell:
I do not dispute this. However, IMHO it is irrelevant. You are no longer
contributing useful infromation _to this list_.
I was taught it was extremely bad Netiquette to
ask for help (or
physical items) on a list (or newsgroup) that you did not also
contribute to, and in particular on a list that you didn't subscribe to.
Somenbody helps you, you repay the community by helping somebody else.
Seems reasonable to me.
Tony, before I unsubscribed, I had been continuously subscribed to the
list (with the exception of a brief stint after the first VCF when I
decided I needed a break) since the list began in 1997. I was one of the
charter members. In the time I was subscribed, I contributed hundreds of thousands of words, most of which I (and I'm sure
many others) would
consider "useful". I helped countless people with questions, both on and
That claim could be made by many other long-time members here, including
myself. Anyway, as I've said before, in the context of which books are
useful/good value, I do not regard number of words as being a good metric
of usefulness of information.
off list (and continue to do so). If you can't
recall the thousands of
messages that I contributed here in your presence then please have your
head checked. In short, I think I've earned the right to continue to both
contribute and draw from a mailing list that I helped to build, regardless
of your petty concepts of "netiquette".
I don't feel it should be necessary to toot my own horn, but I can count
the number of people to whom I've provided free hardware, software,
manuals, etc., often covering shipping costs as well, in the dozens. I'm
Again, I can make exactly the same claim. As can, for excample, Al Kossow
(for setting up Bitsavers), and many, many, more.
not going to bother going into the promotion I've
given and attention I've
attracted for the hobby (for better or worse), without which we might've
still just been a small throng of nerds playing with obsolete computers.
I've been out on the front pushing this hobby forward for ten years now,
I hate to tell you this, but I've been 'pushing the hobby' for nearly 21
years. Long before this list. Long before the Web, in fact. Long before
the CCS/Bletchley Park. I've been getting people interested in saving
classic machines, writing repair information, supplying parts, and
generally spreading the word.
something one can't do from the comfort of their
parents' basement.
You might also recall the many times I privately responded to your regular
public laments about not being able to find a job by trying to encourage
you to move out to the US (this was during the dot.com boom) where your
considerable talents would've been in high demand (you always found some
excuse to stay within your comfortable little bubble).
I really don't see what this has to do with anything, but...
Firstly, I am not sure quite what use my skills would have been, since I
keep on telling you I am not a programmer and very little of the .com
boom seems to be hardware-related). And from what I've heard from friends
in the States, there certainly aren't jobs over there _now_ for eccentric
hardware hackers.
I therefore feel I did the right thing not to come over to the States.
Moving and converting even a small subset of my hardware would have been
'interesting' as I mentioned at the time. And I'd have had to do the
reverse a few years later. Ouch.
I don't see why I should have to justify not wnating to some to the
States. Maybe it's because I don't think I'd care for the American way of
life. Maybe it's because I want to stay near my friends and family over
here. Maybe it's bcause I don't want to have ot do 60Hz conversions to
all my hardware. Maybe it's because I can't darn well afford the flight.
Whatever. It's my business.
For that reason, I ignore any messages from
Sellam now.
Well, as long as we're being petty, I tuned out your incessant (and often
off-topic) jabbering long before I unsubscribed. for the VCF and raise its exposure. It's the same
reason I actively
contributed to this list for nearly nine years, never deleting a single
message without first reading it. I do this because I have a passion for
And yet you jsut said you didn't read my messages. Hmmm... Can you please
be consistent.
Lastly, I am not going to apologize for any particular
language that I
choose to use. I've addressed this at length before and don't find a need
to re-visit the argument, suffice it to say that I believe people who find
any kind of words "dirty" because of their sexual connotations suffer from
arrested development and need to mature. I'm stating my opinion. If you
can't handle it that's your problem.
No, I think it's most defineitely your problem if you can't see that some
language is appropriate for some situations and not others. There are
things that I would say to a couple of friends who I know well and who I
know won't be seriously offended, which I would most certainly not say in
public, or on a public mailing list. I you can't understand that, well...
-tony