Dear 93lt1:
An apology ...
Judging from one of your earlier posts, it seems that you might have misinterpreted my “no rack” comment as having been directed toward you personally. That was certainly not the way I intended it. Looking at the stats on this thread, I see that there have been (at present) 15 replies – and (a much larger number of) 182 views. That means that there are many people reading over our shoulders as we write these posts. I assume that at least some of these people are there trying to learn. Yesterday it occurred to me that some of these “learners” might have absolutely no experience with the relatively new MicroLogix1200 platform. To make the situation a little more understandable to them, I went to the trouble of posting a link to a diagram of the hardware and tried to draw their attention to the fact that there is no “rack” involved in this system. I certainly didn’t mean to imply that I was “correcting” something that you had said in your earlier post. (I did, in fact, pick up on your parenthetical notation). If you did interpret the intent of my comment as a “correction”, then I apologize for not having been more careful with the way I expressed myself. In hind-sight I now realize that I should have addressed the post in question expressly to the “newcomers” in the “audience” rather than simply to “Friends and neighbors”.
In my opinion, one major disadvantage of communicating through this type of forum is the inability to convey the many verbal and visual cues which are available to us in face-to-face conversations. Personally, I tend to write much more verbiage than most people do – in many cases I do this in a conscientious effort to minimize misunderstandings and misinterpretations of the “tone” of my “voice”. I am always afraid that a “concise” statement, one which would be perfectly appropriate in a face-to-face conversation, might be taken as vindictive or sarcastic when placed in writing. That having been said, it is entirely possible that I have inadvertently misjudged the tone of YOUR "offended" post – and that this well-intentioned apology will do nothing but truly offend you. If that is the case, then I am indeed sorry.
Finally, I thought long and hard about sending this to you in a private message – but decided to make this a public apology instead. Hopefully others can learn something from it. This forum should be a cooperative effort – not a competition. We should all try to ensure that what we write encourages and builds-up others. I myself have conscientiously been trying to do that – apparently I need to try harder.
Sincerely,
Ron
P.S. It seems that David got his problem fixed while I was typing this. Congratulations.