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Sunday, October 3, 1999
If you woke up in a bad mood this morning and can't figure out why, then this little tid-bit may shed a little light on the situation. Today is the day, way back in 1913 that the wise leaders of the United States of America decided we needed a income tax. Well, actually the decision was made before today, but today is the day President Woodrow Wilson signed the bill into law. Wilson wrangled three major pieces of legislation through congress. The first was a lower tariff, the Underwood Act, which attached a graduated Federal income tax. The passage of the Federal Reserve Act provided the Nation with the more elastic money supply it badly needed and in 1914 antitrust legislation established a Federal Trade Commission to prohibit unfair business practices.
We've come a long way baby...the original income tax was just 1% percent. Using the resource of the inflation calculator at Johnson Space Center, if you paid $1,000 in taxes back in 1913, your tax bill in 1998 would have been $16,645.
THE NASTY MESSAGE Front Page returns when I have been publishing to my web hosting site may be causing more trouble than I thought. I have to admit that my recent visits to the site have been through saved links and I have not been to my "front page" recently. It appears that my navigation buttons have disappeared. When I post this update I am going to publish ALL of my pages. Normally I just publish the pages with changes. If this doesn't correct the problem then it's another attempt at pair.com's support service. I have already had them reinstall the Front Page extensions, which didn't seem to help.
Gary Berg [Gary_Berg@ibm.net] sends this suggestion after he noticed that I was installing a fax service.
Have you taken a look at the FAX4Free service (www.fax4free.com)?
You prepare a document in Word or WordPerfect and then upload it to them. No long distance charges. You might take a look before you spend money on a software package...
I took a peek after reading your message and it looks interesting okay. I didn't see that much on how the process works, i.e., how you upload your document, etc. I saw a button that indicates this service will assign your own personal telephone number for people to fax to. Have you been pleased with the service? I assume you have used this fax service.
4:00 PM -- No joy in Mudville today. I did a complete publish to my web host. It took quite a while and I was sitting here with hope. Unfortunately I still got the same nagging message, so I guess I'll have to fire off another help message to the tech support gurus at pair.com.
The details provide a little additional information:
If there was any joy, at least the borders, navagation bars and buttons seemed to have come back.
Monday, October 4, 1999
Everyone has to get in on the Y2K act don't they? I received a mailing from our Congressman, Richard Burr, R-NC [www.house.gov/burr]. He goes on to attempt to explain the bug, caution constituents not to get caught in scams and even provide a checklist to make sure your are prepared for the big day and a section on where to fond out more information on Y2K. I propose the real reason for the mailing was just to stay in touch with the voters, give them a chance to grade the congressman and let him list the different ways to get in touch with the him and let him know what you think the hot buttons are. I think of the elected officials this way. They are our employees and if we don't evaluate them and let them know how we think they are doing their job, then we are not doing our job. OF course the best way to let them know what you think of them is at the voting booth.
BOB THOMPSON suggested that I try Microsoft's Personal Fax for NT Workstation since I wanted to install a fax service. The Microsoft product has one advantage it's free. Well, let's say it used to be. As Microsoft often does it puts a product on its web site for no charge and then later takes it away, or at least the link to download it for free. I ran into this twice over the weekend. The first was with Outlook 98 and then I ran into the same when I went looking for the Personal Fax software. In both cases, luckily I had an archived copy on my hard drive.
The one thing I liked about EltraSoft's FaxMail was that it was a fax server. The evaluation version allowed you to install it on two workstations and it was fairly easy to set up to use your network for faxing. The second thing I liked about FaxMail was it's fax preview button. The Microsoft Personal Fax is for one workstation only and has no fax preview, but it has advantages. First, it was free for a short time and second you can fax right from other Microsoft suite programs. I liked being able to take one last look at the fax before the modem started pinging, but at FaxMail's pricey shareware cost ($60 for two workstations and $30 for each additional workstation) I can live without the preview.
I received this follow-up message from Gary Berg Gary M. Berg [Gary_Berg@ibm.net] on Fax4Free capabilities:
Actually, I ignored the part about receiving faxes, but it seems to work quite well to transmit them. Using IE5 I just told it to send a document and was prompted to send the file. You can then preview the results before sending. A very highly formatted document (I think it was the MS Word sample newsletter I tried) had a slight amount of trouble, but anything one might normally send seems to work well.
I haven't checked out Fax4Free yet, but it seems to be a good deal if you need to send a long distance fax. In my case I have a workstation that I can hang a fax modem on with no sweat. The modem is spare and I have a workstation with no modem attached. I currently use an ISDN router and will move to either xDSL or cable modem when it becomes available, so having an available com port is not a problem here...at least not yet. Seems like whenever I say something like this I regret it within a few days.
Thanks for taking the time to send me the information on Fax4Free and for reading the notes page.
I MAY HAVE GOTTEN lucky. I received a message from pair.com support today that I may be able to get my August logs back.
The raw logs are still available on the server, so at this time I am back-generating the requested logs. In general it’s not actually possible to restore files from backup, but web logs can be back-generated from source logs.
7:00 PM -- BOB THOMPSON TOLD ME I should be expecting the latest message I received from pair.com regarding the problems I am having with Front Page. He said it would be a problem of my web being too large, which I found as odd. I didn't think I had a very large web, but Microsoft strikes again and it seems that Front Page is really designed for very small (and in my opinion) personal webs. My web takes up only 19.2 megabytes, which I don't consider very large. I must have been right at the brink of disaster. My problem started the other day when I decided to move the archived notes pages into a separate directory. As you will see pair suggests breaking Wakeolda into several sub-webs. Bob suggested that I get rid of two hogs: 1) Front Page extensions and 2) Microsoft Themes. I could easily lose the themes and in fact might give that a try tonight, but I think I want to keep the extensions for now. Extensions give me the flexibility to use my notebook to update the web easily on the road. Without FP Extensions I would have to FTP each page that I want to edit and then upload it back to the web site. I would like to be able to do it the easy way. Maybe I can break the kids' pages into sub-webs. I will have to read more about sub-webs before jumping in with both feet. Here's a novel concept for me. Maybe I will try one of them first (before making sweeping changes) to see how it works, etc. Here's the message from pair.com tech support:
Ok, it appears to be the old timeout problem. Basically, you have too many files in your web, and FrontPage can’t handle it. It takes a very long time to calculate your site because of this, and the webserver times it out as a dead connection. This is actually a fairly common problem with FrontPage. The program is not able to handle webs of any moderately large size or complexity.
The solution is to break your site up into sub-webs. Define each subdirectory as a separate subweb, and then publish to that subdirectory directly. This will avoid FrontPage having to recalculate your entire site for each update, and will help make smaller updates a lot faster.
Tuesday, October 5, 1999
Well, I tried making a sub-web tonight and I think it might be a little more complicated than I originally thought. Maybe it is because I don't know enough to accomplish this task.
I thought I would use Suzy's directory because there are only a couple of files there. I screwed things up royally. I had her homepage coming up as the home page for Wakeolda. I hope this is now fixed. For some stupid reason I published this to the root instead of the sub-web http://www.wakeolda.com/suzy/ . I sure am glad I select one of the larger directories.
I don't want to chance this yet, but I bet one of the best directories to make into a sub-web would be this notes directory. This directory probably has the most files and the most links. I'll bet that would take some of the pressure off FrontPage when it didn't have to calculate all of the links in the notes sub-web. I'll be soliciting some opinions on this before I jump off the cliff.
Saturday, October 9, 1999
My web site has tripped 100,000 in total number of requests for pages. I realize this is not a large number for websites, but Wakeolda is really not much more than a personal web site, so for me it's kind of a milestone. Jerry Pournelle probably gets this many hits on one day, but then he is in the business, so to speak.
LOWES MOTOR SPEEDWAY is taking the threats they have received as the result of the bombs at several Lowe's Home Improvement stores very seriously. Hopefully the only thing you hear is disgruntled race fans being inconvenienced by having their cars and motorhomes searched as they try to enter the infield. The entry process into the grandstands has been slowed as well. It's better to err on the side of caution and ashamed that one kook could cause so much trouble for so many people.
IT SEEMS THERE is a new MP3 ripper being release daily. Here is a link to three of the newest MP3 offerings courtesy of c|net's download area.
MICROSOFT IS HITTING the streets with a 40-city tour of its new Windows operating system. Brother Bill's boys claim this is in response to the overwhelming consumer enthusiasm over the new product, but I'll bet it's more in attempt to get us to shell out our bucks to become their beta testers. I'll bet we should wait until at least the first service release before taking the plunge. The tour is coming to North Carolina as well. The Windows 2000 and Office 2000 Migration Strategies session will be at the Four Seasons/Joseph Koury Convention Center in October 19
And here you can check out what Microsoft has to say about preparing your home computer for the dreaded Y2K.
Email Steve Tucker