The message is going to be short this week. Work, and other obligations interfere with lingering over the e-letter. Also, fractured ribs from a fall last week make it difficult to sit in one place for too long, much less cough or laugh. Thankfully, one car in the family has power steering and an automatic transmission, but it appears that motorcycles will remain in the garage for at least a few more days.

It is evident that something needs to be said about the links that are posted in the e-letter. Links, those blue things in articles that should let you click on them and then be automatically transferred to a different web page or to someone’s e-mail. For Harry Potter fans, it's probably the closest thing we muggles have to a port key. Sometimes these links work in the TERA e-letter and sometimes they do not. We’ve tried to find some consistent reason why sometimes they work and sometimes they do not, but have been unsuccessful to date. It's not the weird little spaces that sometimes appear, as some have speculated. We’ll keep working on it.

In the meantime, if you click on a link and it doesn’t work, try copying and pasting it or typing it into your browser. If that doesn’t work, try a Google search. That’s part of the excitement and adventure of playing on the web; there are lots of ways of getting there. If nothing works, bear with us and maybe we’ll have it figured out in the near future. If all else fails, ask somebody under the age of 19 to do it for you. Don’t bother asking them how to do it; if you have to ask, you’re probably too old for them to be interested in talking to you.

The e-letter compiles submissions that are in many different formats. The program we use requires converting everything into a common format. It’s not a simple cut and paste operation and with each key stroke taken, there’s always some risk of an error. I mention this because John Acevedo, who helps edit the e-letter, has had to put up with some public criticism recently and I, ever the sensitive and delicate soul, have been accused of deliberately sabotaging some submissions. It’s enough to give a person heartburn.

In fact, as I’m sure is evident to most sane souls, the TERA e-letter is an all-volunteer effort which attempts to keep people informed about what is currently going on in the community. When I have an opinion, I state it in this section and we try to share other peoples’ opinions, whether or not we agree with them, either as an article or in the Letters section. There is not the time, much less the intent, to fool with someone's submission. If that were so, I simply wouldn't run it at all.

If you have something to say, or an announcement to make, please send it directly to the e-letter. If you have a graphic, it’s better to send it as a separate attachment. Graphics are still a little problematic but we’re getting better at them. Also, we don’t want to send out files that are so large that they jam up the lines of those who use dial-up. HTML formats are easiest to deal with, but we try to accommodate all formats, as long as we can open it. John got chewed out by one of the ungrateful, who submitted something in a totally incompatible format, because he took the time to retype everything and made a few typos. No pleasing some people, I guess. But then TERA has never been about pleasing everybody; just about reaching everybody.