Re: Looking for job as a Piping Designer / Draftsman

From: <Christopher>
Date: Tue Feb 15 2005 - 11:30:00 EST

On Feb 15, 2005, at 12:42 AM, Steve McKenzie wrote:

> how do I hook onto the messiest Usenet group? I do so enjoy the
> occasional fix of mayhem.

It varies so widely, since there are upwards of 81000 newsgroups--but start with sci.engr. Sci.engr.mech has a bit higher signal to noise ratio, but it doesn't have any wackos to compare with John Turmel and Archimedes Plutonium. I'll let you get a good feel for those two on your own. Neither is actually certifiable, but you can always tell when someone's forgotten his meds. Most of their stuff is impossible to read, but often some pseudo-intellectual takes it upon himself to score points with a turgid critique of a post by AP or Turmel, and the whole thing starts sounding like a bunch of hyperactive first graders shouting 'beee quii-yut!' at each other. Reading between the lines there is actual content, but the level is roughly equivalent to bar-room chatter.

For total mayhem I've never followed one as bad as soc.hist.medieval. I've been into medieval history ever since I read a book about the Crusades in college, so it seemed like a natural. Boy was I wrong. The group is basically a shouting match dominated by two or three people, one of whom does nothing but level long turgid blasts and accusations at two or 3 others, who reply in kind. The turgid-blaster-in-chief comments on everything but history and is particularly fond of labelling his enemies as pogues and arm-chair warriors, and the 2 or 3 others always rise to the bait. Pet theories and hairsplitting makes up a large part of the rest. Every now and then you'll see a serious post, but rarely does anyone reply sensibly.

I have no doubt you can find others among the 81000 current groups. Download a newsreader from some freeware site (I use Newswatcher, but that may be Mac only) and find out what your ISP's news feed is named. You can also follow some newsgroups on the Web, but a web browser for this is slow, and you can't find everything. Maybe for starters you can Google 'newsgroup' and make contact. One thing to be careful of, if you're tempted to post, is spam. Spammers troll newsgroups for addresses 24/7 and if you post with your real e-mail address, your spam load will skyrocket.

Christopher Wright P.E. |"They couldn't hit an elephant at <a href="/group/PipingDesign/post?postID=EQDAFPn5WpwRPFuPrFN768ppSW_0VhWlj3UJSC2tT06afiwonvrLkVJdejOTPnAfj5m8jVhFKfZ3AjWQ">chrisw@skypoint.com</a> | this distance" (last words of Gen.

.......................................| John Sedgwick, Spotsylvania

1864)
<a href="http://www.skypoint.com/~chrisw/">http://www.skypoint.com/~chrisw/</a> Received on Tue Feb 15 11:30:00 2005