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Version 5.0 This is the Frequently Asked Questions for the USENET group
alt.good.morning, aka AGM. It is maintained by Alexis Rosoff
Last revision: 17th November 1996
Contents:
I. Basics
1. What is AGM?
2. Rules :)
II. Posting
1. Newbies
2. Subject headings
3. Topics
4. USPs
5. Bricks and Shapes
6. Follow-ups
7. No news
8. No replies
III. Beyond USENET
1. Talkers
2. T-shirts
3. Snail-mail list
4. WWW
5. IRL meetings
IV. AGM Trivia
1. Origins of nicknames
a. Chris mL
b. Phil Plasma
c. Showa-koi
d. Aouali
e. Chris/NumberSix
2. Number of AGMers
3. AGM Library
4. FATA
5. AGM Challenge
V. AGM Dictionary
1. TLAs
2. Slang
3. Punctuation symbols
VI. History of this FAQ & Credits
I. Basics
I. Basics 1. What is AGM? AGM, which stands for alt.good.morning, is a newsgroup (obviously). Unlike many other USENET groups, however, we don't have a pre-defined topic. Over time, AGM has come to represent a peculiarity on the net: a newsgroup whose sole purpose is friendship a nd support, combined with a great deal of silliness and a strong international presence. Furthermore, `AGM' is not restricted to the particular forum of the news-net. We chat regularly via E-mail and real-time chat facilities, snail-mail and telephone, an d increasingly frequent in-real-life meetings. AGM has resulted in friendships, love, and even marriage, so you can see why we think it's special :) 2. Our rules There aren't many and they're pretty easy to follow: II. Posting (its ins and outs!) 1. Newbies Post once, and you're an AGM newbie (various people will send you notes of welcome). Keep posting and you're an AGMer :-) 2. Subject headings It's been said that nothing in the morning makes sense, so your subject headers don't have to either! You'll probably see some strange subject lines in AGM .... 3. Topics Or, in other words, what the heck do we talk about? The answer is, for the most part, `anything and everything'. Silly things, good news, bad news, random tidbits ... many people develop a sort of posting style that suits them. The only topics we seem to avoid, in public anyway, are debates about politics and religion, because those are guaranteed flame bait. 4. USPs This stands for User Specific Posts, which are sometimes done to avoid sending tonnes of little messages to AGM. Basically it consists of a list of names, with a message for each one. If you do USPs, put `USP's' in the Subject: line so people will know t o look :) 5. Bricks and Shapes A brick is a post (usually shortish) with each line exactly the same length; Phil Plasma is master of this form, but don't expect to understand most of his! Shapes are a variant of the brick genre: they're posts designed to appear as a certain shape. Not e: you must be using a fixed-width font, such as Courier, to view/compose bricks and shapes properly. 6. Follow-ups Some time ago on AGM there was a debate about `excessive' follow ups. That seems to have died now, but the general rule should be this: if it's of general interest, post it. If it's more personal, possibly controversial, or of interest only to the poster , use E-mail reply instead. The other points about follow-ups are more technical: first of all, try and keep your line length reasonable; about 72 is good for an original post. This allows room for several layers of quoting (prefaced by something like > ) without resulting in annoy ingly wrapped text. Secondly, snip irrelevant portions of the quote. Some people make a habit of including the full text of the included article at the end for the benefit of those who may not have seen the original, which is alright, but please don't quo te an entire post and just add a line at the end :-/ 7. I can't read or post! Occasionally people's news feeds or servers will go flaky... here's some alternate ways of reading and posting: Posting:
8. I'm not getting any replies or follow-ups to my posts! If you don't get any to a given post, don't worry about it. People don't always have the time to follow up; it's almost certainly nothing against you personally. However if you never get ANY replies or follow-ups in AGM, post a message with the word `Te st' somewhere in the subject and ask people to reply or follow-up if they see it. If noone sees THIS post, it's likely that your newsserver isn't sending your posts and you should try another posting method. III. Beyond USENET 1. What are talkers? How do I access them? A talker is a real-time chat facility, similar to IRC in that respect, but accessed via telnet (like a MUD or similar game). Many AGMers use the talkers to communicate in a more immediate way than news or e-mail allows. In order to access the talkers, yo u must have a real network connection, either SLIP/ PPP or via a UNIX shell on your ISP or university server. Some online services (that is, services like America OnLine, rather than Internet Service Providers) now provide telnet as well, I believe, Firew alls, which are found at some corporate and university sites, may interfere with your ability to telnet; it depends on your local system configuration. Some firewalls are designed primarily to limit incoming services; others for outgoing. If you have a p roxy set up in Netscape (under Network Preferences, your proxies are set to manual or automatic), you're firewalled, and you may or may not be able to reach outside sites. Contact your systems administrator for details (but remember, if your boss thinks y ou're playing games with your net connection, you may not have a job for long). Also, since it requires you to actually be online, you may want to limit your talker use if you pay a timed rate for telephone or Internet usage. If both of these are down try: Ancient Realms at falcon2.umeais.maine.edu 5150 or Addicted at mudhole.ehche.ac.uk 4444. Connecting: For COLD, your telnet MUST work in line mode. This is true of UNIX and the default settings in NCSA Telnet for the Macintosh. However many Windows telnets do not. There are two possible solutions to this: One, download a copy of Winworlds, w hich along with installation instructions, can be found at http://www.li.net/~alexis/talkers.html; or two, use NetTerm, a shareware telnet client found at many FTP sites. In order to make NetTerm work, you will have to force line mode. After setting up a phonebook entry for COLD, and having it open (the window title will read `morphine.tcm.hut.fi') go to options -> settings -> desktop -> global, and select `Use linemode for local input'. This will force NetTerm to use line mode for COLD :) Neither client is better, but NetTerm may be preferable if you're connecting from work, since a multipurpose telnet client shouldn't raise any eyebrows, whereas a MUD client might. 2. What are AGM T-shirts? Chris 43 Lansdowne has designed and produces shirts with the AGM logo and motto on them. Contact him at eh01@dial.pipex.com for details. 3. What is the snail-mail list/AGM Address book? Laura Baker (baker@servtech.com) keeps a list of AGMers snail addresses. Contact her for a copy. 4. Where is AGM on the WWW? The AGM Web is slowly growing. Richard `le cricket' Grillenbeck maintains the official home page of AGM at: http://faui30t.informatik.uni-erlangen.de:1200/Staff/rdgrille, which includes a list of AGMers home pages. SueDL maintains the AGM photo galleries at http://www.galactic.co.uk/dixielan, which contains individual and group photos of lots of AGMers, and ChrisTina has clickable maps showing our locations at http://www.inx.de/~clewin. Finally, Duz keeps the AGM Review, a newsletter, at http://www.gate.net /~lcox. All of these are good starting points to finding us on the web -- hopefully, it will keep growing! 5. IRL meetings IRL stands for `in real life', and in a way it's a misnomer, because the net certainly is real. However, in this context, it means an in-person meeting of AGMers. They've grown ever larger and more frequent over the years, and the past two summers we've had major world-wide gatherings of AGMers. In 1995, about 40 of us spent a week near Prescott, Arizona, and in 1996, almost 70 spent a week in St Briavels, Gloucestershire (near the Welsh border). We're organising next summer's trip as we speak, and the l ocation has been set for Domaine Panorama, an hour's drive north of Montreal, Canada in the Laurentian Mountains. Phil has set up a webpage at http://www.generation.net/~mweb/caagm.html. IV. AGM Trivia 1. How did so-and-so get his/her nickname? a. Chris mL mL has nothing to do with me, personally. It all started when I began using CChris, short for Carleton Chris, which is the name Phil gave me when I joined. Avra and Laura immediately decided that I was having trouble spelling, so I shortened it to "CC" to avoid any further "flaming". Anyway, as a joke, I signed myself as "mL" in one of Laura's "flame" posts. (You may know that a cc, cubic centimetre, and a mL, millilitre, are equivalent volumes...) After that, I realised that mL was fairly distinct, and definitely easy to use, so I started signing all my posts with just mL. A habit I haven't completely discontinued yet. :) With all the new faces, however, I figured it would be more polite to revert to my name, so everyone would know who I am. Thus born "Chris mL". b. Phil Plasma In high school, Phil was in a class with five other people who had the same name as himself. So, in order to differentiate himself, he changed his name to Fred Blood. However, once he graduated, Phil decided that because the Fred Blood name was created in high school, it should also remain there. Now being nameless again, his friends encouraged him to get a new name thus came Phil Plasma. A natural evolution from the original. As you may have noticed, Phil is also the AGM philosopher, but decided to wa ste his time in an engineering degree. c. Showa-Koi Showa-koi is actually two words. Koi is the other name for Japanese carp. Actually, the original koi were a black fish known as Mogoi. The koi has been around for about 2500 years but breeding them and cross- breeding has only been done around 200 year s. Koi-keeping did not become a hobby until the 20th century. Koi is associated with Japan, but the early koi came from China. A showa is one type of the koi family. There are several showas, by the way. My favourite is the Taisho Sanke which is a white koi with red and black markings. You no doubt have seen koi at plant stores or in fancy ponds. They are the fish that have barbels (whiskers like a catfish only shorter) that are coloured such as solid yellow, showas, solid black, etc. Sorry if this turned into a lecture, I get carried away explaining about koi and showas. I raise koi as a hobby and for exhibits and judging. I am the treasurer of the Tucson Koi Society; also the local representative for the Associated Koi Clubs of Ame rica (I am on their delegate board); also am the local coordinator of the Internet connection between American, Canadian, and English Koi clubs. Hope this explains a little. I love growing koi and especially showas, hence the name showa-koi. d. Aouali Aouali is her real name, not a nickname... and since she's now married, the question of her full name is now moot. However, I've included her name so all can see the proper spelling :-) Alternate spellings for Aouali include `Ms Silly', `the docteur', an d her favourite, `Louisa'. e. NumberSix Here's a question I suppose many have privately asked but haven't.... "Why do I call myself NumberSix" Well I can now exclusively reveal to AGM this name...
Yes? No? Couldn't care less? Well that is the conversation type thing at the start of every episode of The Prisoner... (no...NOT Prisoner cell block H - which comes under the heading of avoid like the plague). The idea behind the prisoner is that Patrick McGoohan (who played Number 6) was in a high security job (MI5, MI6 maybe? we don't know) and for some reason he resigned. He gets into his Caterham Super 7 (nice car :) shoots home, starts packing his bags, and then suddenly turns to find gas coming in through the keyhole. He passes out, and is kidnapped and taken to....The Village (no not the talker ;) - it was actaully set in Portmieron, Noth Wales, a village in an italinate design). In the Village, he meets several people, the Rover security guard (in reality a weather balloon), and several Number 2's...everyone is known as a number. He has two aims while in the village, to find out who Number 1 is, and to escape from The Village, whilst Number 2 (they had a different one every week) is trying to find out why he resigned. Confused? No? Then watch it...then you will be very confused. It isn't an average TV series - it tried a different approach, and succeeded (mind you, there are lots of people, probably the vast majority, who thought it was rubbish. You have to watch and make of it what you will....). For more information: "Be seeing you!" Chris. "Number 6 - The Prisoner" 2. How many AGMers are there? No-one is sure. There are too many lurkers, people who pop in and out, et cetera, for any accurate count to be made. 3. What is the AGM Library? Originally, this was a book (Skallagrigg, not sure who the author is) that Chris43 started circulating amongst AGMers. Emma later added a second volume (Douglas Coupeland's Microserfs). Post on AGM asking about them, if you're interested. 4. What is the FATA? 'From AGMers to AGMers', written by Aouali.
see, it is all from AGMers to AGMers..... We are all in all such a big family in which each member does care about the other A LOT..I haven't experienced this family love in my own family, and I am happy (with tears in my eyes) to feel it here in AGM....you are now all my family.....and I for th is will love you to eternity..... 5. What was the AGM Challenge? The AGM Challenge was a post by NumberSix to see what we could make alt.good.morning an acronym for; that is, to make a phrase out of the letters in alt.good.morning, in that order. Several people followed up, but Kari's (kari.hamnes@fou.telenor.no) was so good we decided to put it in the FAQ. So here it is:
6. What is Calvinball? It's a sort of game... that seems to make no sense except possibly to the people involved. It gets its name from the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip. V. AGM Dictionary 1. TLA's TLA stands for three letter acronym, but not all of them are three letters. Capitalisation varies depending on the person, and different people may have different favourites. afk - away from keyboard | |
Go back to.... Beginning Introduction Cha. 1: An introduction to ALT.GOOD.MORNING Cha. 2: The Philosophy of AGM Cha. 3: "No flaming" rule on AGM Cha. 4: Firefighting - a description of the flamers Cha. 5: Putting out the fire - How AGMers fought back Cha. 6: Soothing the burn - Self healing on AGM Concluding remarks Continue to... Conventions for citing E-messages | |
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