Another interesting morning with Alf purporting to be
Gloria for the morning get together of about 20 of us. First an
announcement;
The PCUG is looking for volunteers 18 Mar 96 to man a stall at
the ACT Alive show. Only a couple of hours time is required, and
if you can help, contact Lis Shelley on 248 6607 (ah), or e-mail
her at pcug.editor@pcug.org.au
Jim Hume gave a run down on the IRC, in fact he has an
article Februarys Sixteen Bits. IRC, particularly with MIRC is
suffering at the hands of hackers, and while there have been some
fight backs, the solution appears to be in a new IRC program
called PIRCH.
It has an easier to use interface than MIRC2, and
supports most of the MIRC2 functions or commands. It requires
Windows 3.1 (or was that win3.11) up to Win 95, 4 Mb of RAM, and
a winsock. It's a 16 bit application, and shareware with a
registration cost of $10.
For further information, visit
http://www.bcpl.lib.md.us/~frappa/pirch.html
and if that doesn't work, e-mail jhume@pcug.org.au
Nick had a problem that he has been trying to solve for a
number of months. He has 3HDs and a CD ROM on the one machine
running Win 95. His third HD is running off a secondary IDE and
he continues to get and IRQ conflict with the video card. Win 95
seemed to be the culprit, MS couldn't help and endless other
approaches got nowhere. Over to C&C !
The problem was a bit beyond us, though some suggestions
included going back to Win 3.11 and DOS, and trying to get rid of
the IRQ conflict that way, and apparently there is a page on the
WWW known as Frank's Page that lists details of every know driver
for Win 95, perhaps an e-mail to Frank might elicit a solution.
(The URL for Franks Page was not known)
Alf had a cheapy CD ROM which wouldn't work on his
machine, a double speed, whereas it would work on Emil's 4 speed,
why this was so is unknown, and remains a mystery. Alf also noted
he was having difficulty getting on the Internet using basic
access. He was advised to read all the Internet articles in
Sixteen Bits, especially Nhan Tran's article on using terminal.
Ken Meadows is now happily on the Net with thanks to Emil
and John Allen's paper, dropout.txt or .faq. Ken reported that by
going through John's paper, he has (hopefully) overcome his
dropout problem or problems. One of which was an old T200
touchfone, one of three devices he has in parallel on the his
phone line !
Gordon Urquhart gave a run down of how he was having
trouble converting from the Beta version of Win 95 to the full
blown Win 95 on his 40 Mhz 386 with 8 meg of RAM. Last heard he
was mumbling something about getting a Pentium and 16 Mbs of RAM.
Good luck Gordon.
The Stuffing on Monday night was interesting as there
were only two magazines left over, and Peter Verstappen reports
that he has another 150 new member disks to do. It was not sure
how many PCUG members there were , but it now seems to be about
3300, and half of these have internet access. Some discussion
followed on the workload of the committee servicing this
membership number and it was agreed that the committee must be a
preety competent and hard working bunch to be able to cope.
The meeting finished at about 11.30 and broke into
general chatter. Next meeting will be 5 Mar 96, all going well.
As a follow up to the last meetings rave on lightening, here is
something from aus.comms
Reply-To: Anthony_g._Spierings@ieaust.org.au
Newsgroups: aus.comms
Distribution: world
Subject: Electric Shocks from Telephones
Date: 11 Feb 1996 01:47:54 GMT
Message-ID: <1070399454.521447023@ieaust.org.au >
Organization: Institution of Engineers, Australia
Lines: 68
As a follow up to some postings reqarding modem being fried
during thunderstorms;
Article on page 3 of The Couier Mail date 10/2/96,
titled "Shock for phone users", part of:
"TWO people were taken to hospital yesterday after getting an
electric shock when lighting hit telephone lines"
[SNIP]
"A Caboolture woman and a child form Kippa Ring were taken
to hospital suffering electric shocks from telephones in
different incidents"
~~~~~~~~~~~~
[SNIP]
In my opinion it would be unlikely that the lighting actually
struck the telephone lines, more likely it was difference in
earth mat potential. The phone lines in Kippa Ring are all
underground and most of Caboolture are as well.
Some lessions;
1.The storm was not that bad. I looked at the lighting
tracker before I left work and I have seen much worse.
The only point of interest was the colour radar on the
Channel 10 news was the storm front was the best
defined one seen in a while. Normally storms are a
series of single cells which have a life of there own.
This storm front was about 200 km's long.
2.The storm season in South East Queensland has returned
back to normal. It has been quiet for over 10 years and
ten years ago modems in the household wern't exactly
common. Another thing which was not common is telephones
in the kitchen. Most new houses have an outlet where
you can talk on the phone, look out the window and lean
on the kitchen sink (which is connected to earth)
3. Modems are not usually covered by lighting damage
by most insurance policies.
4. From memory; on average S.E.Qld has 3 lighting
strikes per square kilometre per year. It is only a
matter of time before there is one near you.
5. Use the telephone only if absolutely necessary
during a storm and don't touch anything which is
earthed.
6. (I know I'm nagging but) disconnect the modem
from the wall.
7. It is highly unlikely that you can sue Telstra or Optus
for damage. Remember they have warned you in the
Telephone directory of the dangers.
Keep your head down.
Regards,
Anthony Spierings
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