Please add your location to your forum profile

[ubu]

I've made it a required field for new registrations, with a comment indicating that having at least the country helps us know their TV standard etc - which will hopefully discourage people from entering some random garbage.

My hero!

[bgowland]

The location of 'Dark Side of the Moon'??? In the record/CD collection of every old hippie.

I agree it's useful to at least see the country of someone who's posting. I try to help with UK DVB-T queries if I can but if there's no location in the user profile and they don't mention where they are in the message, sometimes I just don't bother.

BTW - Officially Middlesex doesn't exist (although it was once an official county). The Royal Mail and the train companies still recognise it though which means I get my mail and the trains can always get me home.

Cheers,
Brian

[zed]

Clearly, the location-less folks don't read the "General Discussion" forum ...

Yeah, they do...

[ubu]

The location of 'Dark Side of the Moon'??? In the record/CD collection of every old hippie.

And reminiscent of many an all-night session under the influence of, ahem, aspirin.

BTW - Officially Middlesex doesn't exist (although it was once an official county). The Royal Mail and the train companies still recognise it though which means I get my mail and the trains can always get me home.

What? They got rid of Middlesex? Don't worry. It may come back. When I lived in the UK they invented a county called "Avon" which pissed off a lot of people who thought they lived in Somerset. But now I gather that Avon is no more and Somerset residents are rightfully reinstated. Didn't bother me at the time, in any case, because I'd always regarded myself as living in Wessex! (For non-UK readers, Wessex was a separate country when England was under Saxon rule. It encompassed much of the western part of England).

The Royal Mail are pretty amazing. My parents have got letters with just their name and the name of the village they live in written on the envelope (no street address, no county, no postal code). It got delivered just fine.

[zehd]

I tend to keep my wording simple and avoid vernacular "slang" if I'm responding to someone for whom English is a second language (or lives in New Jersey ).

LOL

[bgowland]

And reminiscent of many an all-night session under the influence of, ahem, aspirin.

Under the influence of what? I'm not sure what you mean.

What? They got rid of Middlesex?......But now I gather that Avon is no more...

They got rid of Avon and they also re-instated Rutland (another county that had been 'dissolved'). It was possibly at that time that they informally started to recognise Middlesex again. I'm not Middlesex 'born and bred' but it's kinda fun to support the mavericks who refuse to admit it doesn't exist.

...I'd always regarded myself as living in Wessex!

Ah...Wessex, Mercia and Northumbria. The three kingdoms that came together under Alfred the Great to form England. Therein lies a very deep history lesson (one that I'm not qualified to teach).

The Royal Mail are pretty amazing. My parents have got letters with just their name and the name of the village they live in written on the envelope (no street address, no county, no postal code). It got delivered just fine.

Yep - I have similar stories to that. A mate of mine received a postcard from a friend on holiday in Spain - it was addressed simply to his firstname, village, England. His firstname was actually a nickname and one of the postmen recognised it. I've known a few people that have worked 'on the post' - give them a house number and street name and they'd tell you the colour of the front door and what breed of dog lives there .

Cheers,
Brian

[zehd]

I guess I took it for granted that each post has a little computer icon in the right top that tells the IP. Then I noticed it's just in my ZProcess forum of which I'm a moderator.

It was helpful a couple of days ago, as someone's speech was harsh, and abrupt, and I wanted to see where they were from. Yes, they could have spoofed. Turns out it was a certain polytech in Cal, perhaps specializing in Aspirin deployment...

Anyway, could have been a foreign / ESL student, or just an impatient rude person...

(had to take a couple of deep breaths and remember the overall spirit of this forum)

Wonder how often you guys have to take a deep breath before posting a reply...

[jksmurf]

Anyway, could have been a foreign / ESL student...

no offence zehd, I know how hard you work on your plugins and to accomodate everyone, but maybe that's why some folks don't choose to put their location . I understand sub's reasons and they are to be lauded. I understand ubu's reasons and they are logical. (Although I still want an answer in <<12mins .. )

I'm a native of one country, living in another, married to a person from yet another. I'm sure there are lots of them on the forum. I sometimes muse though, if I put a location towards which there may be an underlying bias, real, perceived or imaginary, whether I would unwittingly become the subject of that bias, reflected in responses ( brevity / lack of / attitude) .

So far, this forum has truly been excellent, one of the best I've ever been involved in, with the focus on the topic. I truly hope it stays that way.

Wonder how often you guys have to take a deep breath before posting a reply...

Well I have to take a deep breath before posting a new thread ... petrified I've missed a previous answer :-)

k.

[ubu]

and they also re-instated Rutland (another county that had been 'dissolved').

Kinda takes the joke out of "Rutland Weekend Television" (which was, I think, made right around the time they abolished it as a county).

Wonder how often you guys have to take a deep breath before posting a reply...

It's remembering to exhale that I find difficult.

I'm a native of one country, living in another, married to a person from yet another. I'm sure there are lots of them on the forum. I sometimes muse though, if I put a location towards which there may be an underlying bias, real, perceived or imaginary, whether I would unwittingly become the subject of that bias, reflected in responses ( brevity / lack of / attitude) .

Well there's always that risk, I suppose, but sometimes you can be subject to bias because of something you didn't reveal too. I had a long dialogue back and forth with one forum user, convinced all the time that they were female (something they said early on in the conversation gave me that impression). Then they made some remark that made it clear that they were male (the WAF jokes are a dead giveaway ) and I had to wonder if my earlier responses to them would have been any different if I hadn't been under that misapprehension. I'm still not sure, honestly.

I know what you mean though (being a Brit, married to a French-American and living in California with two small German dogs). I do wonder sometimes, when people see my location as being California, whether they conjure up an image of someone living in a high-rise apartment surrounded by the freeways of the Los Angeles concrete jungle or living in a mansion in Beverly Hills and hanging out with the stars on Rodeo Drive, when, in fact, I live in a small cottage amongst the Redwood trees in the lee of a mountain a few miles from the Pacific Ocean.

The bottom line for me is that 99% of users of the GB-PVR forums seem pretty helpful, fair and polite. When people share a common, fairly obsessional interest, then race, credo and gender tend to fade into the background. Once in a while I'll encounter a jerk: Junior Member, Posts:2 - "Hey, why doesn't your plugin work. I just get errors. That sucks." (sound familiar?). This is actually OK. It frees me up to unleash all my pent-up sarcasm (for which us Brits are so well known) into a humbling response, thus saving me from kicking my dog, yelling at my wife or seeking therapy.

[jksmurf]

Nice response... :-)

I do wonder sometimes, when people see my location as being California, whether they conjure up an image of someone living in a high-rise apartment surrounded by the freeways of the Los Angeles

Actually I had visions of you rollerblading down past Venice Beach in a Star-Spangled Bikini...no wait, you're a guy....

k.