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The Hobie Mailing List Behind the scenes By Dave Aronson Six years ago, I bought my Hobie 16 used from the college that I attended, California State University Northridge (CSUN). After three years of trial and error learning how to sail and repair a catamaran, I decided to try to get more infomation from other Hobie owners. I had been reading the Hobie Hotline, getting some information from that so I pressed on. Then I tried my local Fleet, but they were only interested in racing, which at the time which didn't interest me, so I again moved on. Finally I started looking for Hobie information on the Internet. First, I tried asking questions on the usenet newsgroups for sailing and found that I would either get no response or get flamed for asking a stupid question. After a while, I decided that a mailing list for Hobie owners was needed. I grabbed some e-mail addresses from usenet and posted a message anouncing the list on the sailing newsgroup. I ran the list by hand for a year and a half with just a big mail alias run on a Sun SPARC station. At this time the mailing list had very little volume and only about 50 members. Then my sysadmin, Richard Stokotelny, and I started running a version of majordomo, a list server. This made life much easier for both of us and many e-mail problems stopped appearing. The big increase in volume started after I sent in a letter to the Hobie Hotline. They published the letter in the Q&A section. The list now includes 215 members on just about every continent. We are still trying to improve the list server to add things like digest mode (where subscribers receive a number of messages compressed into one message). This would reduce the number of messages that people receive but not the amount of information. The list appears to have good traffic (approximately 30 messages a day) and we have a very good range of questions, from novices to experts. My idea finally appears to be coming into fruition. We Hobie owners now have an easy-to-use, friendly forum to discuss the love of sailing and anything pertaining to that. If you want to join the list send e-mail to: hobie-request@nichimen.com Include a body of "subscribe hobie". About the People who Run the Hobie List |
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Dave Aronson:
That's me. I'm the one who came up with the idea for the list and run the list from a general point of view. I try to do my best to solve disputes and help people with subscribing and unsubscribing from the list. I began sailing in 1988 on C15s in college. CSUN has a sailing club with six C15s and free sailing classes. | 
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Once I started sailing I was
sailing every weekend for the next two years. Then, I unfortunately
graduated and had to get a real job, so I bought an H16 from the
school's sailing class at Castaic Lake and spent my weekends repairing
the boat and making it sailable. I still feel that I am a novice
sailer on the H16 but I can sail decently and have a lot of fun. That's
the point right? I still have problems flying a hull on a consistent
basis. But that a story of too little time on the boat.
| I work at Nichimen Graphics, Inc. designing game content development tools for 3D games. |
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Richard Stokotelny: Richard is the system administrator here at Nichimen Graphics. I've known Richard since we were teenagers and we learned to sail together. He is the gatekeeper for this list. He maintains the list server which crashes and removes people from the list when they are unable to remove themselves from it. He deserves all of the acclaim that we can give him. |
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Nichimen Graphics: Nichimen Graphics designs and sells tools for 3D modeling, painting, animating, and exporting 3D game content to various platforms, including the Nintendo64, Sony PlayStation, Sega Saturn, VRML, and PC. The software runs on low-end Silicon Graphics workstations and has been used to create games like Mario 64 (all of the characters in Mario 64 were created with Nichimen's N-World). Nichimen Graphics supplies the network and computers that make the hobie list possible. For more information about Nichimen Graphics see our web page at http://www.nichimen.com. Dave Aronson dave@nichimen.com Back to Features |