Hello Everyone

Depends - you might be required to buy us all a round of drinks ( a relatively new protocol that was added to the newsgroup charter in your absence ). On the other hand you're at least on planet Earth, which is more than can be said of some of the punters we've seen on here.

Regards,

...Actually, I believe the protocol calls for more than one round of drinks in the case of peole that use Google groups rather than a proper news reader...

Regards, Tony

Nice to hear from you Kevin, I heard that you had moved across to NZ.

I spent a couple of months working there about 4 years ago, with a view to emigrating, but decided in the end that I still preferred the UK.

Whereabouts are you over there?

Peter

I'm in Waiuku, about 45km South of Auckland. Close enought to get into the city easily, but out in the country. My wife teaches in South Auckland, and I still work for the same company in the UK doing design work. So although I'm in NZ I'm still affected by the state of UK manufacturing. I left the uk at the start of December, just before the propper cold weather -so at least I timed something right. Just unpacking the workshop now, the container arrived last week.

Regards Kevin

Sorry Tony, but it wasn't worth paying for my news server as this was the only newsgroup I was still using. Everyone seems to be going onto Yahoo groups now.

regards Kevin

Blimey, she is a brave woman to face South Auckland on a daily basis, I know I wouldn't fancy that!

I'm assuming that your e-mail is valid, and have sent a mail with some potentially useful contact info for you over there. Keep in touch and let us know how it's all going.

Peter

Hi Kevin, Good to here your machines all made it :) THe 540 in installed, but not wired up yet... seems to be its fate to wait a while.

Dave

Except real men with machines...:)

Most ISPs provide free UseNet access in their packages or at least they used to.

Cool place to live ,i have spent alot of time up at clarkes beach in the past ,bet you dont miss the Uk much !!!! Hoping to get back over in 2010

On or around Fri, 20 Feb 2009 16:47:03 -0800 (PST), snipped-for-privacy@nzsteele.com enlightened us thusly:

Yahoogroups suck. more to the point, they probably harvest yer information and steal yer content.

I had this argument with the now-defunct smartgroups, they were offering for sale beermats etc based on my (copyright) pictures. Their TOS had them claiming rights on anything put on their system, or somesuch.

and I see that facebook are up to something similar, or trying to be.

and then there's phorm, which BT seem to be into, and look who now owns yahoo.

On or around Sat, 21 Feb 2009 19:59:34 -0000, "Steve" enlightened us thusly:

increasingly few. However, there are still free access servers about. try news.gazeta.pl (I think), but you need to be able to read polish to sign up to it.