Not soundcards (was Re: [plug] Soundcards)

[Peter Wright]

[WARNING - STANDARD PETE RANT BELOW]

On Tue, Mar 12, 2002 at 02:30:23PM +0800, wayne wrote:
[ snip ]
> And why do we send all the rubbish at the bottom of eMails?
> Intelligentsia?

Perhaps that question should be added at the bottom of the list of which
"why the hell do such a high percentage of Outlook/OutlookExpress/Hotmail
users absolutely refuse to even consider trimming quotes? Is it sheer
laziness, ignorance, or a combination of the two?" is at the top. *sigh*

[WARNING - STANDARD PETE RANT ABOVE]

Though actually, no, your question shouldn't be added to that list, as it's
at least answerable. It's an old convention of email and Usenet news to add
"signatures" at the bottom of posts. The official standard rule is that the
sig-marker is a line containing just "-- ". The convention is that
signatures shouldn't be any more than four lines, and may contain personal
contact, URLs, witty or DeepAndMeaningful(tm) quotes, ASCII art, or all
four.

As is the case with any kind of communication, though, you need to think of
what is appropriate for your audience. I suspect that Leigh got this quote
from the lyrics of a song - in fact it is, song "Guttermouth" by band
"Guttermouth", album "Lipstick"):

http://www.letssingit.com/lyrics/g/guttermouth/1.html

Warning, the remaining words are just as offensive as the ones you saw, so
don't look if you don't want to be offended again :). Odds are that that
song quote is not a problem when he's emailing his usual friends, but he
simply forgot about it when emailing the list (usual thing - you get used
to seeing something in every email you send, you just don't think about it
anymore - and it was his first post to the list). A spectacular error, but
a forgivable one, and he did apologise.


Anyway - the rule of the sigmarker being just "-- " is there for a very
good reason - so that you can easily configure your email client to not
display sigs if you think they're a useless waste of space (which, to be
fair, they often are :).

> wayne

Pete.
-- 
http://akira.apana.org.au/~pete/
It isn't easy being the parent of a six-year-old.  However, it's a pretty small
price to pay for having somebody around the house who understands computers.