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Sunday,
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Monday,
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Tuesday, September
5, 2000
Labor day is celebrated here in the United States
on first Monday in September and it traditionally signals the end
of summer. Memorial Day, the last Monday in May, likewise
signals the start of summer, weather wise anyway. Many
Americans use this holiday as one last summer fling before cooler
weather starts to set in, A last outdoor barbeque, a last
trip to the pool, a last trip to the beach, etc. This year's
Labor day greeted us around here with rainy weather and therefore
put a damper on these All-American celebrations. In the part
of North Carolina that I enjoy these two holidays also signal the
change in weather. This year was no different as the high
today may have reached 70 in Winston-Salem. Yep, Summer is
over.
My education continues. Suzy and I
were in Cleveland, Ohio over the weekend, partially for me to
attend a Camel event and partially to attend the wedding of a
former co-worker. Nice how it worked out that I was going to
be in town on business. This was the first Jewish wedding I
had ever attended and in doing so helped to continue to broaden my
horizons. Of course the ceremony, which was steeped in
tradition, only brought me to ask more questions. Now I have
to search out some of my Jewish associates to continue my
education. I definitely have more question about the Jewish
religion now than I did before the wedding ceremony.
Winston-Salem may be losing debate
fever. One of the US Presidential debates was scheduled to
take place on the campus of Wake Forest University here in Winston-Salem.
I say was, because if the Republican candidate George Bush gets
his way, Winston-Salem will lose its opportunity. Bush wants
to use two of the three debate opportunities as a television
opportunity, picking CNN and NBC. Democratic candidate,
Vice-President Al Gore has said no thanks to Bush's plan.
The ensuing wrangling is going to be fun to watch.
I'm always amazed at the tactics folks will go to
sell you something...or in this case, get you to link to their
site. At first I thought it would be a gimmick to get their
page count up as an attempt to raise advertising revenues, but I
didn't see any advertising on the page when I visited.
Here's the message. Give it a try and see what you think.
I came across your Wakeolda site
recently and thought it was excellent - very comprehensive! I
noticed that your link to Network Solutions' WHOIS tool
currently and thought our free service might be of interest to
you and your web site visitors.
As you know, domains are now being
registered by many different registrars. Each registrar
maintains its own separate WHOIS database which does not include
domains registered by competing registrars. As a result, basic
WHOIS domain searches are often inaccurate, failing to reflect
names registered by others. Names appear to be available when
they are not.
Our free service, BetterWhois.com,
enables users to do a 'universal search' for a name, retrieving
data from whichever registrar registered that name. We also
provide links to all approved registrars and allow users
to receive detailed domain reports via e-mail.
I wonder if you would be interested
in linking to us, or offering your visitors the ability to
conduct domain searches directly from your site. I would also be
interested in any comments or suggestions you might have about
our service.
Best Regards.
Amy Rice
BetterWhois.com
http://www.betterwhois.com
[Sunday] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday]
[Friday] [Saturday]
Wednesday,
[Sunday] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday]
[Friday] [Saturday]
Thursday, September
7, 2000
I have just returned from Nashville where I have
been for the past couple of days. I had to go there to
testify for a supplier and naturally, I won't get into the case
here.
I was on the stand for about 30 minutes, but it
consumed more than 24 hours out of my life. I left the
office at lunch yesterday and returned to Winston-Salem late this
afternoon.
I was surprised when I took the oath to tell the
truth that I was only asked to raise my right hand. I guess
I have been watching too much television, but I thought they
always asked you to place the other hand on the bible? Is
our Federal Court system gone politically correct on us? I
was especially surprised there was no bible since, being in Nashville,
I was smack dab in the middle of the bible belt. The other
thing that surprised me was a placard in the men's room where it
suggested that you could smoke only is designated areas.
Now, I didn't go in search of a smoking area, so for all I know
the designated smoking area might be outside on the
sidewalk. I thought that Mr. Clinton had made all Federal
buildings smoke free. Maybe the folks there in Nashville are
just defiant and if that's the case, hooray for them.
Andrew's third grade teacher is leading a
pilot program by developing a web page for her class. The
school hopes to eventually have a web page for each teacher where
they can post daily homework assignments, class updates,
newsletters and the like. Andrew attends Vienna
Elementary School here in Winston-Salem and his teacher is Mrs.
Paula Warlick. Vienna is designated a communications school
and the kids have their own television station within the school
where they serve as news anchors relaying the school's news each
day at the beginning of the school day. They're fortunate to have
a computer lab and there is a computer in almost every
classroom. The school has been on the MAC platform, but have
seen the light and are switching over to PC platform. You can
check out Mrs.
Warlick's page here.
The third graders in Mrs. Warlick's class are pen
pals with third graders down under in Australia. They
communicate with these kids via the internet mail system and thus
call their friends "keypals." It just so happens
the third graders here study Australia as their social studies
unit. I'll bet they will be having a fun time when the
Olympics kick off in a couple of weeks.
There's
a beta version of WinProxy available if you think you want
to check this utility out. I currently use WinGate here and
hage no plans at changing over at anytime in the near
future. WinProxy claims as a selling features like
support for SOCKS 5, an unlimited number of concurrent users,
reverse proxies on dial-up connections, support for Windows 2000,
improved network support, improved firewall settings, AOL5
support, and automatic updates. It's a hefty 11 meg
download.
There's been some backlash to Amazon.com's
new privacy policy. In case you missed it, here's
a link to their privacy policy. And a computer
glitch at the bookseller exposed user's email addresses to
another Amazon associate.
I thought I would compare prices on Tom Clancy's
newest book, The Bear and the Dragon, between Amazon and FatBrain.
Actually, reading a
note on Bob Thompson's page today where he submits that Amazon
may be charging returning customers more for a book than new
customers led me to do this price comparison.
When I did the test Amazon
was asking $23.16 (20% off the cover) for the new Clancy while
FatBrian's
asking price was just $20.25 or 30% discount to the cover
price. This makes me wonder if the same difference applies
to most everything the two sites sell so I checked on the pricing
for Bob's upcoming book, PC
Hardware in a Nutshell, and once again FatBrian was less
expensive. Amazon wants $23.96 for the same book that's
selling for $19.95 at Fatbrain. There was also a price discrepancy
on the two sites.
While these tests aren't very scientific, it leans
me towards FatBrian, although I have never ordered anything from
them. I am participating in the Amazon Associates program,
but you need to sell a bunch of books each quarter for them to
even think about sharing anything with you.
At the end of the day, Amazon may have just spread
itself too thin. FatBrain seems to just be concentrating on
selling books, for the moment, at least.
I had gotten a couple
notices from my web hosting service, pair.com,
that I had exceeded my 60 meg storage limit and was pondering what
I should delete. Then suddenly pair has decided to increase
its allotted storage, so I guess I will keep filling their hard
drive. I have an advanced account which now gives me 100
megs of storage space and am allotted 200 megs of traffic on their
system each day. pair.com is currently running 197
machines on their network, hosting more than 101,000 different
websites from 156 different countries. When I signed on
about 18 months ago I was placed on machine no. 103.
[Sunday] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday]
[Friday] [Saturday]
Friday, September 8,
2000
Today was a big day for Katie. Suzy picked
her up at school this morning for a 10:30 appointment with the orthodontist.
This was the big appointment. About two hours later she
walked out with a full set of braces. She had the chance to
choose the bands that are placed on the "appliances", so
she chose a Carolina Blue and "glow in the dark."
Although she says they haven't been exposed to enough light yet to
glow in the dark. All-in-all she seems rather exited about
the outcome the braces will produce. That must mean there
has been no pain yet.
Each year about this time our company
schedules extortion sessions, thinly veiled as United Way
solicitations. I have been known to take the easy way out,
give them the money and run. However, this year there is an
interesting situation brewing. The local United Way
organization supports the Boy Scouts and is threatening to
withhold their funds because of the policy of the national Boy
Scout organization on homosexual scouts and leaders. A
policy, I might add, that was upheld by the Supreme Court of the
United States. It appears the local wisdoms of the United
Way went and changed their policies, including stronger language
on discrimination, before the Supremes banged the gavel on the Boy
Scout case and now find themselves in an interesting dilemma.
Will folks such as myself withhold payments to the United Way and
give money directly to the Scouts? Sounds like a good idea
to me. Katie has been in scouting since she was in
kindergarten and Andrew has joined a Cub Scout Pack this
year. Here's
a story from today's Winston-Salem Journal on this
issue.
American Express may have come up with an aspirin
for people who worry about keying their credit card number into a
web shopping form. It seems AMEX
plans to come out with a card number for you that is good for a
one-time use only. Here's a press
release on the same subject. The timing of this is very
interesting. I was just reading a note from a reader on Bob
Thompson's Day Notes page today where the writer mentioned
that credit card numbers may be shipped outside of the country for
processing. If such a maneuver is happening, it's a prefect
opportunity for theft and a system, such as the one offered by
American Express, could put some safety back in the credit card
business.
The latest version (3.25) of Irfan
View is available here. The powerful (and free for
personal use) image viewer for Win9x/NT and
Windows 2000. supports JPEG, GIF, BMP, DIB, RLE, PCX, PNG, TIFF, TGA,
RAS/SUN, ICO, AVI, WMF, EMF, PBM, PGM, PPM, IFF/LBM and Photo-CD
[Sunday] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday]
[Friday] [Saturday]
Saturday, September
9, 2000
Always on the lookout for photo related software I
ran across the free Photo Wizard. This looks like a image
product you can have some fun with. I have played with it
for just a few minutes and it looks like something I might keep on
my hard drive. While the cropping function is not as
flexible as a suite such as PhotoShop it has several other
features that will allow you to become quite the pain with your
digital shots. You can add captions, frames,
manipulate the photos and even attempt to clear away that dreaded
red eye. However, the one shortfall is after you make your
changes and save the new photo, there isn't a way to go in an blow
away changes without starting over. Hey, what to you want
for free. I think I'll play with this one for a while.
I found Photo
Wizard at the Windows Users Group Network site.
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