Sinan > wrote
I don't know what to make of you.
Sinan,
I wrote the following post just after I read your post.
And if you read it you'll see why I didn't post it then.
And why I decided not to post it at all.
I often write this way.
And almost never post this way.
And I'm sure I'll never do it again here.
But I just I kept thinking about you saying
you don't know what to make of me!
And that started making me feel very lonely.
And that's why I've decided to post this after all.
Just so you'll know what to make of me.
In this one instance anyway.
But please understand me --the temperament that
appears here is not anything that ever lasts in me
for more than a minute.
It just so happened that around the time this thread occurred,
I happened to be searching for something in Google,
and it seemed to me that every single promising looking
hit I followed --- wound up in a empty red-herring like
post - just like Tad's is in this thread.
And that's the whole point I want to make.
All the rest here is "colored bubbles".
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Greg:
I don't know what to make of you. What is the point of that remark? Tad's
signature is just that: A standard sig which is separated from the body of
the post with the proper sequence of characters so that any reasonable
newsreader can automatically snip it in replies.
If you haven't read the posting guidelines yet, you should read them and
follow them so as to maximize the chances of getting useful responses.
Sinan
--
~~~~~~~~~
What is the point of that remark?
Well, Sinan,
What is the point of Tad's contribution to this thread?
Please break out of the little world here for a second
and read it objectively.
It is a nasty, insulting, trivializing, pontificating,
officious -- and - content-wise - a completely
empty thing.
~greg t said:
Gentlemen, I'm old. Me too. Bummer eh?
It would never have occurred to me that explicit
"use strict"
and "use warnings" is a courtesy to others.
Please see the Posting Guidelines that are posted
here frequently.
I will do it from now on.
Thank you.
[ snip TOFU.
Please don't do that either.
]
I had said to you (Sinan) that I will
use the "use..." stuff from now on.
So what was Tad's point in bringing it up again?
right after I said I would?,
- in his quoting me saying so?,
--and in his chiming-in with (--what emoticon?)
"Thank you" ?
(The answer is that he was being passive agressive.)
Morevoer, and more tellingly,
-- I do not find anything at all in Tad's famous guidelines
about "use strict" and "use warnings' !
I had written >>
And he answered:
Please see the Posting Guidelines that are posted
here frequently.
and then:
Is there something, - anything, - specific in his guidelines
that he wanted me to see?
Some generality, perhaps, of obvious applicability
to "use strict" "use warnings"??
Or is his mentioning his guidelines
on every pretext he can think of,
to everyone he can get away with it,
--simply a completely empty mechanical habit with him? .
Is his doing it, therefore, spam?
~~~
I did see one interesting thing in Tad's guidelines.
And you have asked me. So I will tell you.
The meaning of my remark was not the same thing as the point of it.
But the meaning of it was this: ....
Right near the very top of Tad's
"Posting Guidelines for comp.lang.perl.misc ($Revision: 1.7 $)"
it says:
"This newsgroup, commonly called clpmisc,
is a technical newsgroup intended to be used for discussion
of Perl related issues (except job postings), ..."
And near the middle it says:
"Never quote a .signature
(unless that is what you are commenting on)."
And near the bottom it says:
"AUTHOR
Tad McClellan <
[email protected]>
and many others on the
comp.lang.perl.misc newsgroup. "
~~
I am now commenting on Tad's .signature.
Note especially the specifically-mentioned parenthetical exception:
"(except job postings)"
Note how it is given pride of place,
right near the very top of Tad's document.
So apparently Tad has written just for himself
some kind of secret-exemption to this rule.
So. Now.
Why does Tad tell everybody to go read his guidelines?
And why does he put "except job postings" right at the top of it?
Well, this is the reason: ...
It's so that any other "SGML consultant" who chances by,
and who wants to follow all "the rules", to be polite,
- will decide not to advertise himself
in the same way that (only) Tad is permitted to do,
in his .signature.
Thus giving Tad the market advantage.
And that's what's called Spam.
The sneaky effort to achieve an unfair market advantage.
~~~
But don't blame me!
I wasn't among the so-called "many others"
involved in the authoring of Tad's "guidelines."
~~~
Now, honestly, I don't care at all about little hypocrisies like that.
(Big ones in the government are much more fun to spot.)
And I don't have any grudge at all against Tad.
Certainly not a personal one.
After all, I only know of him from that single post!
Obviously I am pre-judging him, based on some
past experience with a certain type of character
that that single post reminds me of.
More than that. I do know that Tad has done
a lot of good here. In fact I suspect that he is probably
the most responsible for much of the efficiency of this newsgroup.
- exactly what makes this place such a
pleasure to romp through.
Guidelines are good things.
And I always try to follow them, whether or not I agree with them.
But, having said that, .....
~~~
What, pray tell, was Tad's point in commenting to me
the way he did?
--this way? : ...
That remark would have sounded very different
if it had a clear purpose. Or if it had been
elaborated in some friendly way.
As it stands, though, it is pure monkey business.
It's a razz. It doesn't have any point at all
other than being catty.
And my point, - the one you asked me about,
was simply to respond in-kind!
--- the better to help Tad become a kinder,
gentler old man.
In Peter Jackson's King Kong,
Kong thinks it's so funny the way he keeps knocking
Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts) down. Until she makes him
stop. And then he throws a tantrum. And then a rock
falls on his head. And then, just a few seconds later,
he gets the connection. And he becomes (almost) human.
If you, Sinan, honestly believe that it is ok for Tad to be
as nasty and as irrelevant as he wants to be,
- to any one he so happens to feel like being nasty to
- and if you also honestly believe that it is not ok
for anybody else to respond in-kind to him
--under penalty of being ostracized,
(-- and not just by Tad, and perhaps you,
--but by everybody here --- you two speaking for everybody! ...)
Well, then, Sinan, that is what I would call
"megalomania by proxy".
( Your comment:
"maximize the chances of getting useful responses".
is a blatant euphemism for
"if you don't follow Tad's rules to the letter, you'll be ostracized here".
)
I prefer plain language.
(by the way,
"the guidelines" has it slightly different:
In "the guidelines" it's: "maximize your chances of getting meaningful replies"
-- ie, "meaingful',
- not "useful".
(--the difference is that "useful" is a dime a dozen,
whereas "meaningful" is close to the essence of humanity.)
It's possible, - just possible, --that you, Sinan -- in quoting that, and all,
- were throwing just a Tad-bit of a curve in your post.
But I'll probably never know.)
~~~~
I know it was ... something...., of me to admit that I'm old.
But - quite unlike Tad's monkeying of it
- my saying it had a clear purpose.
Clear enough anyway that you got the point, since
you wrote:
"As I wrote that message, I replaced your script with the
copy-pasted version of my script but gave no indication
of the fact that I had changed a single line in it.
That's my fault."
There is probably a rule about it somewhere.
Something like
"when you add improvements or make corrections
or in any other way alter somebody else's code,
please comment on what you've done, above the code,
so that old people, who don't see so good, and don't
scan so well no more, can better see that a change
has been made, so that they can then better
apportion their dwindling ability to concentrate to better effect."
If there is such a rule, and if I were Tad,
I could say:
"please ****. thank you."
"****" meaning
"(please) Comment Over Changes, (you) Krazy (person!)"
or something equally obvious as that.
I mean really --- if Tad is permitted to tell me:
" [ snip TOFU.
Please don't do that either.
]
making me having to guess that "T" stands for "TOP"
(--which I did immediately, because immediately
after posting the offending "TOFU", when it was too late,
I had already, all by myself, realized the goof .)
- then, certainly, I should be permitted to tell Tad:
"PDMAWOPFFNGR"
(--"Please Don't Monkey Around With Other People's
Feelings For No Good Reason")
So I got the "T" part no problem.
But there is no way that I or anybody else
could ever guess the rest of "TOFU" :
"TOP OVER, FULLQUOTE UNDER".
For one thing, "fullquote" isn't a real word.
So I had to waste my valuable time looking up "TOFU".
(Bean curd.)
Which I bothered doing, - only because I suspected
that the "FU" part meant something quite different.
(Which it probably does, for the cognoscent,
since, again, 'fullquote' isn't a real word.)
Whereas I'd thought that the whole point in having rules in the first place
was to help people avoid wasting other people's time!
~~
I know that Tad is truthful when he tells me that he's old too.
Because this kind of pointless cutesy acronym did once
play a vital role in Usenet. Back when connections were
full-duplex 300 baud over phone lines.
Today however they are more often used
only by obnoxious adolescent cliques,
(And some dwindlingly percentage of us troglodytes.)
As for my "TOFU" blunder
-- I had really thought that it was pretty obvious that I had
simply forgotten, in my hast, to delete the automatically quoted part.
Quite obviously so, to anybody who read the post,
because the bottom quoted part isn't referred to
at all in the "TOP OVER" part.
Being in hast is not a sin.
Spelling mistakes are not a sin.
Posting to newsgroups is not the same thing as publishing
active legal documents.
~~
I have posted perhaps a dozen posts in total to this newsgroup,
over the last 7 years. So I don't know.
Maybe I have made this same mistake before?
If so, then it would mean that it is a persistently bad habit with me.
And, if so, then I would have to be grateful to anybody who
pointed it out and made me stop.
However, when a mistake is made just once, or twice,
it isn't the mistake that wastes people's time.
It is obsessive commenting on this kind of trivia,
- the way that some people seem to be addicted to doing,
for whatever inscrutable pleasure they derive from it,
- that is the greatest waste of our time.
~~~~
But I have to tell you the real reason that I am going on like this!
It is because the greatest frustration in Google newsgroup searching
is clicking on the about 20% of the Re: posts that look promising
for an answer, --only to have to scroll down to one or another
variation on:
"This is not an appropriate question to be asking in this
(read: 'my') newsgroup.
Go ask somewhere else."
Or, for another example, anything like:
" [ snip TOFU.
Please don't do that either.
]
Can't you-all see, those of you who habitually post
blanks like that how much happier the whole world
at large would be if only ---when you have nothing to say,
-- you simply refrained from saying anything?
If everybody did obey my little rule,
then, when I go through a Google return list
and see that a particular post doesn't have
any responses,
- I won't have to waste my time on red herring!
When somebody doesn't get a response in a particular newsgroup,
why can't you-all conceive that they just might be intelligent enough
to figure out for themselves that it's just probably the wrong group
to ask the question in?
If they persist, obviously, then you must tell them.
You must put them out of their misery.
But, honestly, how often does that happen?
No. Some people are just way too-cocked for jumping
on the heads of rules-violators -- for me to believe
them when they say that they are just doing
the rest of us a service.
Because the truth is, clearly, that they derive
some sort of perverse pleasure in playing the
authority and telling people off.
Read Foucault.
"His work concerning power and the relation
between power and knowledge, ...
have been widely discussed and applied...." - Wikipedia.
It's precisely the incessant picayune carping that wastes the most
of people's time. Negative comments are always, whatever their
claimed holy intent, a waste of time. And when they become
too high a percentage in somebody's overall contribution
then, --bummer: -- maybe that person really is just too old
and dried up, and ought to be let out to pasture.
Sinan > wrote
What is the point of that remark?
There was no point, Sinan.
I was joking.
Just responding in-kind to Tad.
ERIKSSON: Pardon me sir, what's your point, sir?
HILL: There ain't no point, Eriksson. I'm simply
trying to illuminate the terrain in which we currently
find ourselves deployed. You don't mind that, do you?
And if you do ...
(- "Casualties of War").
Vietnam was "my" war.
And we had a word
- a rule -
for the way to deal with Taliban-like self-appointed prefects:
"frag 'em".
--
~greg.
(but please understand!
I am old.
And I have just been to the dentist!
And that is, honestly, the only reason
this post sounds the way it does.)
