The so-called ‘right way’ is bottom posting.  However I suspect this is really more for private emails and not Group lists.
Either way, private or a list, I don’t like bottom posts. One reason is because most folks don’t bother to trim out all of the unnessary and irelevant junk, including a lot of these >>>>. Sometimes there is so much junk I have to scroll and scroll to get to the sender’s respnse. I must confess, I don’t always bother. Because I sometimes receive as many as 300 or more  messages a day, I don’t have a lot of time to go through a bunch of junk.

On lists like Yahoo Groups there is always a lot of other stuff appended to each message. This includes a number of links pertaining to each group’s special interests and of course the group’s home page. (There is also the way to unsubscribe which unfortunately some people never read and instead of unsubscribing themselves, they whine for someone else to do it for them.)

Some people do trim out the unnessary junk and while they are trimming, they remove everything. Unless this message comes through immediately after the first post or soon thereafter, often I have no idea what that trimmed post was about. This causes me to have to waste time searching for the relevant message. Again, I don’t always bother.

One HUGE aggravation about bottom posting is when someone responds to a post just to say “Thank you” and I have to scroll through everything that went on before just to see “Thank you”. I eventually stop reading messages this person posts and I suspect I am not alone.

I try to remain open minded about bottom posting, but sometimes it’s hard.  Some people are very responsible about how they trim and those posts are mostly easy for me to read. Other folks just can’t seem to grasp the concept of trimming and I soon learn whose to read and whose to ignore.

Some email programs will automatically put replies on the bottom of a message. One such program is Eudora, which is why I don’t use Eudora for lists.

There is another method of replying to list posts; this is replying inline. Some of these inline replies work very well and others are such a disaster that I give up trying to read them. Some email programs make this easier to manage, but my email (Outlook) is not one of them. I suspect some people use colored text to reply in line, but if the group/list is plain text, the colors don’t come through.

I wonder, do you top post or bottom post?

Martha

But the folks at TechSmith sorta made me unhappy about one thing. I’ll explain. When Snagit 9 opened for the first time, a window came up asking me if I was a first time user or a returning user. I clicked the previous user link and………It opened in Internet Explorer!

My default browser is Firefox and it is my default browser for a good reason. I do not like Internet Explorer 7. Period. Since I am using Vista, that is the version of IE I have. I never use it, because I don’t like it. If I didn’t need to see how my web pages look in IE, it would be disabled if I could figure out how to do it.

TechSmith folks, listen up.  It is not nice to make IE execute in Snagit. Tacky! Really tacky! I hope you are listening!

Seriously folks, Snagit 9 is a winner. It’s great!

Martha

Yep, I now know for sure, I’m not as young as I used to be. That’s obvious every time I see myself in the mirror. But for some reason that didn’t really make me KNOW.

Notice I said I mowed some of the lawn. I decided I wasn’t ready to die, so I quit while I was still breathing, although I was still breathing hard!

But since I don’t want to be a quitter, I got a cold wet washrag, washed my face and back to mowing. I decided to take a break and went back in the house. My son decided to finish the job so I wouldn’t kick the bucket. (I was almost through, he needn’t have worried!) So now the lawn needed trimming and away I go trimming. This wasn’t bad at all and I am not as hot as I was mowing.

I finished up and came back in the cool house and looked for my wet washrag to mop my face.  I looked everywhere and couldn’t find it. Then I remembered where it was. It was on the back of my neck, keeping me cooler.

I told you I am not as young as I used to be and neither is my memory!

Martha

Apparently, so goes the theory, you can heat the egg long enough to kill the bacteria and it still won’t be cooked. Since a lot of recipes call for ‘raw’ eggs, this should be a great way to avoid the wicked salmonella that keeps popping up in everything these days.

You can even pasteurize your own eggs yourself! Recipezaar has the method on their site.

There are a lot of entries in Google about pasteurized eggs. Most of them are asking questions about them.  But I did find several interesting articles about milk and shell eggs with extended shelf lives.

This article, ULTRAPASTEURIZED & PASTEURIZED FOOD, on Chemical & Engineering News was really the most informative and makes more sense than most.

I buy ultrapasteurized milk. It is also organic and rather pricey, but since the regular milk goes bad long before I use it all and has to be thrown away, I think it is cost effective. But I have never seen pasteurized eggs for sale in any of my local markets. I think it is a good idea though, and maybe they will eventually sell those ’safer’ eggs.

Have you ever bought pasteurized eggs?

This is not the first time I’ve griped about the drug companies, but today I learned about one more that really has me steamed. This one takes advantage of folks that have a hard time getting to sleep. A very heavily advertised drug that costs about $3.50 a pill (and that alone is outrageous!) on average will give the user 11 to 19 minutes more sleep. The way I figure it, if the pill taker gets 11 more minutes of sleep, those 11 minutes are costing about 32 cents a minute. Pretty pricey sleep! The commercials show folks getting a good nights sleep. Ripoff!

I like catalogs. I get a lot of them as well. I know that if I order something from one catalog, that merchandiser will probably sell my name and address to a bunch of other merchandisers which in turn will sell my information to others. It’s an endless proposition.  I ordered some stuff from one of those catalogs that was supposed to remove baked-on crud from cookie sheets. It didn’t work at all. Ripoff! I should have known if it sounds too good to be true it usually isn’t, but even though I am generally suspicious I still get taken every now and then.

Magazines are purveyors of ads more and more. Readers Digest and Prevention magazines now have as many ads as they have content. (Maybe more ads than content!) Ripoff! I just don’t think I want to pay for ads anymore. I would rather pay more for the subscription and get content, not ads. I know they have to pay the bills, but really, half of the pages are ads? Maybe they could have two types of subscriptions; they could have one with fewer ads costing more and one with mostly ads costing very little. Dream on.

Shopping on line has it’s share of ripoffs.  Most reputable sites will let you know before you click the ‘Place order’ button what you shipping and handling will be, but I have encountered some that don’t. Since a lot of sites offer free shipping you may think that’s what  you are getting, but the ‘gottcha’ shows up when you get your credit card bill. Oh and there’s another ripoff waiting to get you, the little box that offers you a ‘discount on your order, just click here.’ What can happen and often does, you are signed up for something called ‘Rewards’, Discounts’ or some other misleading scam that will charge you $10, $12 or some other amount each month and bill your credit card. Ripoff!

Most likely the biggest ripoffs of all are the spurious products being advertised to make plump folks lose weight. They promise amazing results, but seldom deliver. Once you buy the product, an insert will tell you to follow the included diet and exercise regularly. Guess what, if you follow the diet and exercise you don’t need their product. Ripoff!

Martha

Popular Drugs have a lot of fine print. Mostly about the side affects. On TV they tell you about the side affects, but apparently people don’t listen to the ‘fine print’ either.
The fine print with the things they have to tell you about.

A lot of software has fine print as well. Usually it’s a disclaimer telling you they are not repsonsible if their software trashes your computer. Makes you wonder if it has trashed someone’s computer.

One thing that really gets to me is all of the warnings that are printed in fine print on a lot of consumer products.
Some of those warnings.  Apparently the reason for some of these ‘fine prints’ are because some idiot did just what the warning says not to do. The manufacturers have to protect themselves from lawsuits by stupid people.

So be sure to read the fine print! I try but I don’t always have the magnifying glass handy.

Martha

So far this year I have noticed a number of changes and most of them are not good.

I guess the biggest change is known by the local news pundits as ‘pain at the pump’. Since I am retired and pretty much a stay at home person, that change hasn’t affected me as much as the folks who have to drive to work in order to be able to pay the bills. Where I live public transportation is not generally an option as it is either very limited or not available. This is mostly due to urban sprawl and the fact most of the American people have long had a love affair with the automobile.

Another change is how much the interest rates have gone down. I guess that change is good for some folks, but I suspect it is good mostly for big business and not for the ‘little guys’. The people who carry a lot of credit card debt don’t seem to be benefiting any from the interest rates as not many credit card companies are lowering rates for those folks.

I don’t carry debt on credit cards so that doesn’t affect me. But what does affect me is how much less money I earn on my savings. Another change I could have done without.

A huge unwelcome change is how much more money it takes to buy groceries! Every time I shop for food something or several somethings have gone up in price and not by just a little bit either.

The big box retailers are trying to cut costs and most of them are doing that by cutting employees and as for customer service, that’s practically non-existant now. So the poor customers are left with no one to help them make purchases and sometimes it’s even hard to find someone to take their money. I wonder if those big box retailers realize that all of this ’saving money’ is costing them more money in the long run?

Now the politicians are promising ‘change’. So far all I have heard just makes me wonder, ‘what kind of change?’ I have always laughed at the old joke about ‘how you can tell if a politician is lying, his lips are moving’. I am beginning to think ‘change’ is a bad joke, and the joke is on us.

Martha

One of the biggest gripe about commercials is the fact they are so much louder than the programs. Some of them really blast out so that the mute button gets hit immediately. You would think the advertisers would have realized that by now, but it is very apparent they haven’t. I don’t know for sure who is to blame for this blasting of ads, the TV stations or someone else.

Some commercials can be quite entertaining, like some of the Geico and Capitol One ads. Some of the time I even watch those, except after awhile they begin to pall.

But some commercials just go a bit too far and fall into the ‘Quick, hit the mute button’ for most of us. Most of the ‘quick hit the mute button’ are the really obnoxious commercials like ‘Head on’ and there was a Vonage commercial that was really bad. Some more fit this category, but the ones that come to mind now are those terribly annoying commercials that want me to call now and order those junky products. What bargains they are! They will make my life so much easier! And just about all of them are only $19.95 (plus
shipping and handling). But Wait! If I order now, I will get a second product free! (In small print, plus shipping and handling. That makes it NOT free. Most all charge $7.99 for shipping and handling.)

The majority of these products are being touted by a guy named Billy Mays who must think we are all hard of hearing because he is shouting all during this spiel.

I think the mute button has to be one of the better inventions for the television industry. I sure use mine a lot!

Martha

People under 30 don’t just sleepwalk, they use their cell phones in their sleep. If you don’t believe me just ‘Google’ sleep texting.

That’s something that I find hard to believe, but apparently it’s true. The experts seem to think it’s true. I am not so sure. I have heard that people have been know to drive, eat and do a lot of other things in their sleep. Since I don’t have any of those problems as far as I know, it’s hard for me to understand. (If I do those things in my sleep, how would I know?)

I just don’t understand the need to be ‘connected’ at every waking moment. I do have a cell phone, but it’s turned off most of the time. I have it for emergency use only.

The local news stations tell me I can access the weather news on my cell phone. Sounds handy, but I can do that on my computer. They say I can access the weather on my cell phone when the power goes off. I have a laptop and it runs off a battery when the power goes off.

Personally I don’t want that phone to become like a third part of me. I already have a third extension; my computer! However, when I leave the house I leave the computer at home. If I decide to work in the yard (I do occasionally), the computer is in the house, not attached to my body.

When I go shopping I concentrate on shopping. When I go to bed I certainly don’t take the cell phone to bed with me. I hear a lot of folks do that as well. When I am driving I need to be focused on where I am going and the traffic around me, not yapping on the phone.

Some jerk yapping on his phone changed lanes right in front of me once and I nearly hit him. He didn’t use signals, just pulled over. I hit my brakes and horn at the same time. He just kept yakking. It’s a good thing no one was tail-gateing me or I would have been hit from behind.

I don’t have a problem with other people using cell phones where ever they may be, but I think they shouldn’t use them while driving.

I told you I was born 40 years too soon. If I had been born 40 years later, I probably would have a cell phone attached to me somewhere, more than likely my ear!

Martha

More proof I was born 40 years too soon!

People under 30 don’t just sleepwalk, they use their cell phones in their sleep. If you don’t believe me just ‘Google’ sleep texting.

That’s something that I find hard to believe, but apparently it’s true. The experts seem to think it’s true. I am not so sure. I have heard that people have been know to drive, eat and do a lot of other things in their sleep. Since I don’t have any of those problems as far as I know, it’s hard for me to understand. (If I do those things in my sleep, how would I know?)

I just don’t understand the need to be ‘connected’ at every waking moment. I do have a cell phone, but it’s turned off most of the time. I have it for emergency use only.

The local news stations tell me I can access the weather news on my cell phone. Sounds handy, but I can do that on my computer. They say I can access the weather on my cell phone when the power goes off. I have a laptop and it runs off a battery when the power goes off.

Personally I don’t want that phone to become like a third part of me. I already have a third extension; my computer! However, when I leave the house I leave the computer at home. If I decide to work in the yard (I do occasionally), the computer is in the house, not attached to my body.

When I go shopping I concentrate on shopping. When I go to bed I certainly don’t take the cell phone to bed with me. I hear a lot of folks do that as well. When I am driving I need to be focused on where I am going and the traffic around me, not yapping on the phone.

Some jerk yapping on his phone changed lanes right in front of me once and I nearly hit him. He didn’t look or use signals, just pulled over and almost hit me. I hit my brakes and horn at the same time. He just kept yakking. It’s a good thing no one was tail-gateing me or I would have been hit from behind.

I don’t have a problem with other people using cell phones where ever they may be, but I think they shouldn’t use them while driving.

I told you I was born 40 years too soon. If I had been born 40 years later, I probably would have a cell phone attached to me somewhere, more than likely my ear!

Martha