
Editorial - Online Chat: For the Birds?
by Dave Bealer

I'm hardly the most efficient person in the world.  Greg Borek has
commented that most RAH readers would flip if they saw the stunningly
messy conditions under which RAH is produced and distributed.  The
utter chaos that reigns in my little loft office (and, indeed, the
rest of my home) serves to cancel out any innate sense of efficiency
I might possess.  The fact that I'm a natural born slob doesn't help
matters. 

Despite all this, there are a few things even I consider too time-
wasting and inefficient.  Online chat is one of them.  Don't get me
wrong, I don't object to anyone engaging in online chat so long as
I'm not expected to participate.

I've never been a big conversationalist on the telephone, either.  I
don't have a problem using the telephone, which is good since it's
tough to live in modern society without using the silly things.  But
I've always preferred talking to a person face to face or engaging in
written communication.  OTOH, when you need to talk to someone who is
hundreds or thousands of miles away, using the telephone is much more
efficient that travelling to where the other person is located.

What's the difference between hardcopy or e-mail communication and
online chat, you may ask?  The difference is that with the first two,
I'm not forced to sit at my computer watching my correspondent type
the message.  Many people fail to realize that watching someone write
is about the most boring activity in the world.  No matter how vivid
or exciting the end product will be, observing the actual writing
process is tedium personified.

Another bonus with online chat is that I've often made a long
distance call to dial into the system where the chat is taking place.
Thus I get to fill up the idle seconds when the other person is
writing a thoughtful reply to worry about how large my phone bill will
be next month.  (Did I mention that I'm a *cheap* slob?)

These factors may help explain why I turned off the "page sysop"
function on my BBS over a year ago.  They also serve to explain why I
never answer pages from other users on systems I call.  When the
sysop breaks in for a chat, there's little I can do about it short of
hanging up.  Since even I'm not usually that rude, I simply beg out
of the conversation as quickly as possible.

So if you ever see me logged on a BBS or online system don't page me.
If you do page me and there is no response, please don't take it
personally.  I don't do online chat.
                            - - -
It recently came to my attention that there's at least one person in
Palmetto, Florida with *way* too much time on his hands.  Wayne
Downing uploaded a couple of RAH-related programs he wrote.  

TAGS.EXE contains all the taglines published in RAH from 09/92 thru
03/94 and will display a randomly selected group of them on request.
The user gets to determine how many taglines will be displayed.  The
only drawback is that you have to enter the desired number of
taglines in response to a prompt - there's no way to supply the
number as a command-line parameter.  This limits the usefulness of
the program in a batch file environment.

INDEX.EXE contains an index of all RAH articles from 09/92 thru
03/94 (a promised future version have a self-expanding index).  If
you place the ASCII text edition of all the RAH issues in the same
directory with INDEX, the program will allow you to read the articles
as well.  

Both programs are available for download/file request from The
Puffin's Nest BBS (1:261/1129) in file area RAH.  Filename:
WDUTIL10.ZIP.  These programs require MS-DOS.  This goes to prove
that at least some of you out there take RAH much more seriously than
I do.                                                           {RAH}
