Greetings All,

     I am a few days behind on the end of month list stuff - Amber and I spent ten days being under the weather. March was fairly active month -  we had 8 people join. Lets welcome Denise Sampson, Claire Gesalman, Megan Sherlock, Angela Neises, Teresa Riesco Prieto, Exceptional Mama, Russ White and Sandy Goodwich. If you haven't already introducted yourself please do.  If you have - Thank-You!! We hope you will enjoy the list and feel comfy posting . Regular features of the list are a Monthly posting of some sort of CP related Care - with links, Parental articles, general informational articles and Disability activist and political items, questions from list folk, reports of little or big triumphs and /or trials, jokes, and banter. The list has a chat space available for prolonged, personal or multiperson interaction - in real time. Your list adminstrators are: 

Betty Alfred [log in to unmask] , 
Trisha Cummings [log in to unmask] or [log in to unmask] , 
Deri James [log in to unmask] , and 
Dan ( Our Oscar Winner!!) Keplinger  [log in to unmask]

   We are to help you if you need - just e-mail us with concerns or questions. There are historical (hysterical too) archives for looking up perviously discussed topics.

    A quick review of Netiquette for all ( had a larger number than usual drop of the list in March - 14 people). Please do remember people are expressing things from their point of view - and it is okay to disagree - as long as it is done politely. This is a multi-national list as well as a multi-religion list. While a majority may be from one country or one religion - it is important to remember we are all a minority in some fashion and wish to be accepted and treated kindly - therefore it would polite to extend this to other minorities be they religious or geogragphical boundaries. We are free to discuss anything on the list - as long as we remember the humans behind the e-mail address, all of us can feel threatened, unwanted and get our feeling hurt - lets make this safe space for all of us. Also we might keep in mind we have a few teen agers on the list when we discuss "adult" topics. 

Netiquette - Introduction
by Virginia Shea 

What is Netiquette? Simply stated, it's network etiquette -- that is, the etiquette of cyberspace. And "etiquette" means "the forms required by good breeding or prescribed by authority to be required in social or official life." In other words, Netiquette is a set of rules for behaving properly online. 

When you enter any new culture -- and cyberspace has its own culture -- you're liable to commit a few social blunders. You might offend people without meaning to. Or you might misunderstand what others say and take offense when it's not intended. To make matters worse, something about cyberspace makes it easy to forget that you're interacting with other real people -- not just ASCII characters on a screen, but live human characters. 

So, partly as a result of forgetting that people online are still real, and partly because they don't know the conventions, well-meaning cybernauts, especially new ones, make all kinds of mistakes. 

The book Netiquette has a dual purpose: to help net newbies minimize their mistakes, and to help experienced cyberspace travelers help the newbies. The premise of the book is that most people would rather make friends than enemies, and that if you follow a few basic rules, you're less likely to make the kind of mistakes that will prevent you from making friends. 

The list of core rules below, and the explanations that follow, are excerpted from the book. They are offered here as a set of general guidelines for cyberspace behavior. They won't answer all your Netiquette questions. But they should give you some basic principles to use in solving your own Netiquette dilemmas. 

Rule 1: Remember the Human 

Rule 2: Adhere to the same standards of behavior online that you follow in real life 

Rule 3: Know where you are in cyberspace 

Rule 4: Respect other people's time and bandwidth 

Rule 5: Make yourself look good online 

Rule 6: Share expert knowledge 

Rule 7: Help keep flame wars under control 

Rule 8: Respect other people's privacy 

Rule 9: Don't abuse your power 

Rule 10: Be forgiving of other people's mistakes 

  This wonderful information came from http://www.albion.com/netiquette/

                                      Brightest Blessings - Trisha

A loving person lives in a loving world. A hostile person 
lives in a hostile world: everyone you meet is your mirror.
- Ken Keyes, Jr