BMN Google Group: about Community

Brian’s Morning Newsletter for February 27th 2009
Good Morning
Holy moley, where to begin? Great responses yesterday. Not what I had imagined at all. I need to figure this out. The replies were indeed enlightening, but the picture and the future are far from clear to me. One thing I can see is that the 25 BMN regulars for reasons I don’t understand are not receiving two newsletters. Actually you all should be receiving two, and I thought I would have heard griping about it long ago.

Here is the way the BMN mailing list is setup at the moment, in this supposedly transitional phase, where I was supposed to be moving the mailing list at first over to the http://outfitnm.com list server, then when that didn’t work out, Google group BMN took over the list server: I have a mailing list of around 150 people here on my computer, including one addressed to the BMN Google group. That’s one BMN to everyone. The BMN Google group has its own list of 48 names, in turn (according to the users’ settings) mails out the BMN to group members as well as all the other messages to and from these 48 members.

Make sense? No, not to me either. Making matters worse my web pages are crashing for unknown reasons. Adam setup the Joomla style web site for me because I was having a difficulties keeping up with all the new html coding and I want to keep control over my site on a regular basis. Joomla uses minimal coding and I was able to post my newsletter there everyday. I figured one thing about the website and my abilities, because I hadn’t added any new web pages while we built the shop, after one measly year I needed to relearn how to work the site.

Instead of fighting with the semantics in detail, I quickly found a work-around for adding content to my site. Without going on a tangent about the difficulties I’m facing with my Website, compounded by the hopefully unrelated crash of my desktop PC, injuring my eye while working on the wind turbine, and several other nuisances, all occurring at the same time, making life interesting around here, I just can’t seem to keep track of everything. The bottom line is my cool little work-around for adding newsletters to the site has quit working. Now I have to figure out what the heck is going on there, or perhaps my personal prankster spirit is back and all these little troubles will go away when it leaves, if only I can let them alone awhile.

So, letters. Lots of responses, that’s good. Again I wish I had more time in the morning to post your letters in with mine, but I don’t, sorry. I might be persuaded to post your letters if you made it really simple for me. For example: Have everything you want to say in the message body, and sign it. This means you can’t have the intro in the subject box. I absolutely do not have time to copy and paste three times for each post. As to why some of you do not get responses to letters you send to me outside the BMN Google group, apparently you have turned off the send email feature in your group settings.

I know, we all know Mike Kitts sends in way too much extracurricular topic messages. As Hugh, said, the BMN google group is turning into the MIke Kitts Show. I have asked him to curtail the boilerplate copy and pastes from alternet, and wherever else he finds this stuff. The BMN google group is for talking about our community. It is already taxing our in-boxes to get a new email message for every comment sent into the group. We can’t afford to alienate anyone by bombarding them with political opinions that frankly we already see every day with the most basic search of the news. My point is, by sending in jokes, news stories, and politics, we take the chance that the fragile BNM Google group list server will fail in its purpose: To connect us.

To those who have already asked me to shut off the email feature of the BMN google group, I am sorry, we are all sorry to not hear from you. But I understand completely. It can be too much stuff in the in-box. I can’t have the BMN google group be a trade off of one person for another, but I don’t know what to do about it. Mike in my opinion, when he writes himself, sends in some really good material, but it is overwhelming and quite counterproductive when sending in five or six stories in a day. One story maybe, but I have said this before, we are all connected to the Internet, let’s not jeopardize last remaining and functioning BMN group by copying and pasting news we’ve already seen elsewhere.

Dig deeper my friends. Send in more references to gardening and survival in tough times. Leave out the politics altogether. Perhaps we can pull this group back together.

Sincerely,
Brian Rodgers
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Wind turbine pretty much all welded together. The three pointed stator bracket on the left, and the tail bracket angling off to the right.

The other side showing the tail pivot pipe welded on at an angle now on the left. On the right side is the spindle where everything that rotates mounts on the hub assembly. The three pointed bracket is drilled for threaded rod which holds the stator in place between the spinning magnet rotors.
Finally, our trusty arc welder installed in the new shop running off the new power cable.

Boy howdy! Yeah a few little nuisances shouldn’t get in the way of all the positive directions our projects are taking.

Happy happy