Demon.Service FAQ : The Culture Revision 2.0.3 ------------------------------- Changes are marked with a # 1.0 People, Places and a little history 1.1 The faces 1.1.1 Ron Chew 1.1.2 Malcolm Muir 1.1.3 {R} (aka Richard Ashton) 1.1.4 aDe Lovett 1.1.5 Jim Segrave 1.1.6 Clive Feather 1.1.7 Dave Williams 1.1.8 The JKO-bot 1.1.9 Richard Clayton 1.1.10 Thomas Lee 1.1.11.a Keegan 1.1.11.b Keegan 1.1.12 Brian {Hamilton Kelly} 1.1.13 Baby Eaters 1.1.14 Mark Lowes 1.1.15 The Noid (Doug Bollen) 1.1.16 Paul L. Allen (PLA) 1.2 Demon Supporters Club 1.2.1 The forming 1.2.2 The disbanding ===== This FAQ has been put together, as an attempt to make sense of some of the history and recurring themes in demon.service which don't relate directly to Demon Internet. It is worth noting that some people are in disagreement with parts of this document. However until they substantiate their claims no changes will be made. please repeat any claims to faqer@corixia.demon.co.uk Disclaimer This FAQ is provided as is without any express or implied warranties. While every effort has been taken to ensure the accuracy of the information contained in this article, the authors assume no responsibility for errors or omissions, or for damages resulting from the use of the information contained herein. ===== 1.0 People, Places and a little history --------------------------------------- 1.1 The faces Now for the final bit a little bit of background on the in-jokes, the regulars and anything else that occurs to me. This section will get bigger, it just might take sometime before I get it finished. Thanks to everyone who's mailed my bits for this section, all flame on this section will be redirected to /dev/null or maybe back to d.s. It should be noted that most of this section is the opinion of the author or of those who contributed to the section. The full story is of course available from those directly involved, assuming they can be found.... demon.service was created by Giles Todd a.k.a the Baby Eater in a desperate and largely sucessful attempt to put demon.ip.support back on topic after a particularly strong round of demon bashing. One Robert Nickleson aka "Steffie" after his nodename steffie.demon.co.uk began complaining vociferously about the failures he perceived in the service he was getting from demon. As this was the "good old days' of Usenet before fuckwits were defined and everybody was polite, when one regular told "Steffie" to "Fuck Off" the Baby Eater got cross and demanded, and got, a public apology. Demon.service was created as a "moan zone" with no support promised. The DSC led at that time by Malcolm Muir then hassled Steffie until he left, the DSC did the hassling Malcolm was then, as now, the essence of politeness in the face of adversity. 1.1.1 Ron Chew Once upon a time Demon created a new account for a Mr R. Chew for a dial-up account with the name of "gsdr.demon.co.uk" and Ron and his aliases began to post. Sadly Demon did not reach his high standards and the entity known as either "Ron" or "Anthony" began to post to demon.service. Pity they had not discovered the principle of trimming articles. Such posts were easily spotted the entire article was always quoted, with one disparaging line added if we were (un)lucky.... After months of ranting Ron began to post from a nice shiny new u-net address claiming how the grass was a much nicer shade from over there. Into the fray did step one Neil J. McRae and he did offer a wager of one year's subscription that he would be back at Demon within a year. "No way will I ever rejoin Demon", came the response. Silence reigned for a short period and relative calm did resume. Electrons did soon flash across the ether - an article from "postmaster@gw2000.demon.co.uk" did appear on demon.service. The style was unique there was a gnashing of teeth. Thus began the saga of one line follow-up posts to Ron's articles, "Bugger off Ron. Oh and pay Neil McRae what you owe him" 1.1.2 Malcolm Muir Malcolm is one of the most patient and polite people I've had the good fortune to meet on any of the demon.* groups. Despite the baiting and flaming he takes, it is a rare day that he posts anything other than helpful information. 1.1.3 {R} (aka Richard Ashton) A knowledgeable individual with strong biases against off topic posts and over-long sigs. Tends to call a fuckwit a fuckwit, typically correctly. Has a pathological hatred of Microsoft software, but knows a lot about OS/2 where his advice is especially useful. Generally benign, unless provoked (or bored). Richard is also the power behind nospam.demon.co.uk, a free service to Demon customers, more on this can be found at http://www.nospam.demon.co.uk. He also keeps a copy of Peter McDermot's Fuckwit FAQ on http://www.fuckwit.tm 1.1.4 aDe Lovett aDe once Demon's newsmaster, now has a new set of responsibilities, one of which is the development of the newsborg (the scalable news system). He posts infrequently but is helpful more often than not, however some readers may find his manner a little abrasive for their tastes. 1.1.5 Jim Segrave A highly knowledgeable Demon staffer, his main area of expertise is in diagnosing low level connectivity problems. If you have problems physically connecting and have read, followed and followed up all the advice in the FAQ's, Jim's your man. He posts only occasionally and his posts are always accurate, helpful and technically spot on. 1.1.6 Clive Feather A well know Demon managment person with an interest in software. Very very heavily edited a tale of past woe. When I was young, I had a summer job at East Worcestershire Waterworks Company... The relevant parts of the water system are: (1) Sugarbrook boreholes. (2) Sugarbrook reservoir, (3) Sugarbrook High Lift pumps.(4) Sugarbrook-Evesham main. (5) Evesham reservoir The software I was working on had three major components... Note that the software didn't control anything directly. It simply generated a list of instructions for the TeleControl Room staff to carry out. After fine-tuning the software, it was decided that we would go live at 0001 on 1980-08-01. So the machine was booted and the daily analysis run, and the instructions were printed out. They contained a feature that we'd noticed before but thought nothing of - after all, it made sense. So at 1 am the duty controller hit the "start" buttons for all 6 HL pumps, and seconds later selected full speed. As near as we could judge afterwards, a pressure wave ran down the 26 km of pipe, bounced off the far end, and hit a following wave. The resulting surge literally blasted a piece of concrete pipe out of the ground, followed by a fountain of water. As the Water Research Council later said: "we didn't know you could *do* that to concrete mains". And for the next two hours, until the controller became alarmed at the discrepencies in the level of Evesham reservoir, the HL pumps proceeded to dump about a million litres of water over the Worcestershire countryside. 1.1.7 Dave Williams Demon newsmaster (now you know who to blame), often see posting as dave@clues.com when not in his official role. Generally helpful but quite happy to call a spade a spade when provoked, and there's enough willing candidates out there to act as targets. 1.1.8 The JKO-bot A new bot, being produced by Bots'R Us. Sadly, the JKO-bot has suffered from a chronic lack of investment and development skills. The basics of the bot are in place, but the logic, understanding, grammar, posting, and knowledge modules are sadly lacking. Mr A. N. Droid, Chief Bot Designer is appealing for help on (yet another) redesign of this bot - watch for the web page appearing soon. 1.1.9 Richard Clayton An extremely knowledgeable person, part of the team responsible for the Turnpike Internet client that is now Demon's standard offering. What Richard does not know about News, Mail and general internet things is not worth knowing. With a very dry sense of humour, his posts often tend toward the brief side. If you don't understand them, that's your problem, not his. His advice is almost always worth listening to. 1.1.10 Thomas Lee Highly opinionated, but knowldegable individual, partly responsible for Demon's demon.ip.support.win95 and demon.ip.support.nt groups. Knows his stuff on NT and 95, but tends to go on, and on. Good sense of humour (most of the time [ed: and responsible for most of the text in this section]) and does have useful contacts. His advice is usually worth listening to. Thomas is now in the USA contracted to Microsoft. 1.1.11.a Keegan The entity known as Keegan is a regular annoyance in demon.service (and demon.local). He pops up on a semi-regular basis, usually something like a couple of times a year, bringing his followers and flamers from the depths of alt.flame and talk.abortion. His normal rant is about "forgery" from Demon staff, it has been impossible to get the concept of "customers" and "staff" through to this particularly dense lifeform. In Keegan's universe everyone posting from *@*.demon.co.uk is an employee of Demon Internet. How best to deal with this net.kook? Either ignore him, killfile him (best to deep six anything cross posted to talk.abortion) or join in making fun of him. 1.1.11.b Keegan Keegan is the manager of Fulham FC, a team which Demon just sponsored to the tune of 1.5 million over three years. Not to be confused with the other Keegan. 1.1.12 Brian {Hamilton Kelly} Brian is the fount of all knowledge regarding BT. Unlike most within BT (particularly operators and their supervisors) he knows *exactly* what defines local/regional/national calls and assisted Demon by supplying them with, and confirming information about which of their regional dial-up numbers were local calls from which charging areas. He has the full BT price list (the one that is about a foot thick) and can give accurate cost details when BT's operators usually get it wrong. You may like to know that the foot-thick paper version of the BT Price List is now available on the World Wide Wait; the paper version is still the definitive version, in case of any discrepancies. The front page is at: The principal table of contents is to be found at: Whilst there is apparently a search engine at: This remains untested. The way he chooses to indicate his unhyphenated double-barrelled name will indicate (to some) which typesetting package he uses (and has written DVI drivers for). As with many of the clued-up posters to demon.service, he rarely posts unless he's sure he knows what he's talking about, apologises for his rare mistakes, hates Microsoft and calls a fuckwit a fuckwit. 1.1.13 Baby Eater also known as Giles Todd Giles was one off the technical people behind Demon Internet when it first started, he is not now a director of Demon Internet, he still haunts demon.service. He posted exactly one message with the .sig "We also eat babies" in response to a post accusing Demon Internet of responsibility for everything from the extinction of the dinosaurs to the Holocaust. Quite how or why many people remember just one post is a mystery. 1.1.14 Mark Lowes Mark started the demon.service FAQ now in two bits. Ex-civil engineer, Mark finally submitted to his geekhood when he got a job at Frontier Internet with fellow lspacer Rob Collier, exercising his skills at running around like a headless chicken. He now has a job title to go with his pointy hair and recently a wife (fellow lspacer Lady Kayla). Known to his friends as the Flying Hamster [Why ? {R}] and to fellow lspacer Tony Finch as "that bastard who keeps taking the piss in demon.service". 1.1.15 The Noid (Doug Bollen) Another of Demon's home-grown net-loons, the Noid is a prolific poster of complete gibberish to many diverse newsgroups and shows only a tenuous grasp of logic or reality. He has previously posted as par@noid.d.c.u. He has an uncanny ability to sniff out cabals, which he vigorously opposes. The only problem being that his ability operates in reverse - he sees cabals everywhere *except* where they actually exist. On the one hand, he is irresistably drawn into participating in the cross-posted trolls instigated by the uk.miscreants but denies that there is any organized group behind the trolls. On the other hand, in his latest outburst of inanity, he identified all those names listed in section 1 of this very FAQ (fuckwits and anti-fuckwits alike) as being the "demon.service cabal". Opinion is divided as to whether he is a paranoid schizophrenic with no firm hold on reality or merely somebody who enjoys, and is good at, trolling. Many suspect that both opinions are true. 1.1.16 Paul L. Allen (PLA) His technical competence is exceeded only by his ugliness (this says more about his ugliness than his technical competence). 1.2 The Demon Supporters Club 1.2.1 The forming The DSC didn't form it "comprised", it appeared first in demon.ip.support. The first I knew of its existence was when some disgruntled punter accused one of the "club" of being a member. On reflection there was present in demon.ip.support and then demon.service a group of regulars who defended demons systems and explained how demons systems worked, their mantra was often "It's your setup" As the DSC comprised some of the more clueful users the mantra was often correct. The halcyon days of the DSC were before Windows 95 and the WWW polluted the Internet. 1.2.2 The disbanding The DCS fell apart when many users who may or may not have acknowledged their membership announced their resignation. In my view the defining moment was the TGNSNAFU [Third Great News SANFU] according to one poster to demon.service this is the unofficial history of the SGNSNAFU and TGNSNAFU. The Second Great News SNAFU The NewsBorg was born, conceived, birthed and undocumented by Ade Lovett. This was to be *the* scalable solution, gestation was long and painful, the birth was difficult. Eventually the string broke. News died. Horribly. Due to a number of administrative an other cockups Demon were without an *effective* news server for 14 days. This was due to the inability of someone to copy a 28GB database from drive X to drive Y in less than 14 days. A post mortem was *promised* by a Demon representative but this promise was broken. News became an unsupported service, (not that it ever was supported, just not unsupported). The Third Great News SNAFU The Newsborg was being transformed [redesigned because the first design was unworkable]. The problem, inherent in the original design was that when one of the customer facing machines failed, the feed to all the customer facing machines was halted and news dried up. This lead to the farcical situation where customers were receiving NO news, for hours at a time, and Demons representative, Mr Muir insisted that because he could get some news off some groups the news system had not "stalled", it was during this period that the DSC lost all remaining faith in the veracity of the statements from Demons Newsgroup Representative and fell by the wayside. 1.2.3 The last member Currently Peter Ceresole has this privilege Credits ------- (Or I'm not taking all the flak :) Neil Barker for the basis of the Ron Chew text. Thomas Lee for his text and suggestions for the "People" section Everyone who mailed me after the first posting with comments and suggestions for improvements, many thanks. ===== Written by Mark Lowes . Maintained by Richard Ashton <{R}@sunshine.tm> who has authored some content. Any comments or suggestions about this FAQ or information contained within should be sent to faqer@corixia.demon.co.uk. Comments made to the newsgroup may or may not be noticed, any requests for changes to any section should be at least copied to the contact address. ===== Copyright 1998 by Mark Lowes This file may be freely distributed provided that it remains unedited from its current form. It may be printed for personal use only. Sections may be quoted for reference providing its source is given. The latest version is posted regularly to the newsgroup demon.service