I'm back

I've been "off the air" for a while. I had some health problems which resulted in early February with a minor heart attack. I was lucky, while it happed at 3am, I was able to wake up my wife who called for paramedics. At no time did I loose consciousness, and I was in the hospital for less than a week. More about that later.

It was brought on by my weight which at the time was 185 kilo. (405 pounds). I'm doing much better now. I'm following the South Beach Diet. Since I don't have a scale that can weigh me, nor does my doctor, I have no idea if I lost any weight. I think so, but can't say for certain.

I'm eating more healthy food now, sleeping more and am able to move around more. So far, I've been on the diet for
a month and a half, hopefully I'll stick with it.

I was not blogging because I did not want the stress involved with it. Most of my readers were helpful, friendly and supportive, some where not. Just thinking about them bothers me, but I think I can go beyond them and start over.

I have a question though. I'm still into getting my old Macintosh computers going and I found a mailing list that I thought would be useful to me. It's a low volume, members only list, provided by a large organization. The list is not actively moderated (you post and if the owner does not like it, he complains or removes you) and he pays the organization nothing for the use of their computers, bandwidth etc.

I joined the list, which you need to do to see the archives. I went back and read all the messages from the beginning of the year. One of the threads was about donations. The "owner" of the list was soliciting donations to "keep the list going".

I simply don't "get it". Their only expense is their personal internet connection and computer and few minutes a week to read the postings. There is no real management time, no administrative work, no mainframe to support. If there is, then the organization running the list incurs them and he is not passing the donations on to them. I assume since the list is just a few emails a day, he spends most of his time online doing something else. Since he is a "computer geek", he would have the computer and internet access anyway.

So what are the donations supporting?

It's not this list alone, I see it on many lists, including Yahoo lists. Yahoo lists allow donations to the list "owners", but they do not allow charging membership fees or selling advertising. I can see from the lists that I am on that they don't police them very well and if someone is found to be reselling the lists (by selling their own advertising), they are told to stop, but never checked again. One list I am on had the advertising disappear for a few weeks and now it is back again.

It's interesting to note that the most active list I am on is moderated and is trying to make a business out of itself. The second most active list I am on is run by two people who contribute several times a day. At no time have they solicited donations, sold advertising, etc.

Then there are some lists, which the organization that runs the list itself charges nothing for their services, does not solicit donations and the moderator is not paid for their services. I guess like the rest of the world, it takes all types.

Geoff.