Coffee and Chat Meeting on Tues Mar 7th 2000 41 members were present. Ted in the Chair. Apologies received from John Wicken who is in hospital. 1) New members None. 2) Charlie Treasurer : Current balance is $945. Purchase of a microphone/speaker system to counteract the acoustics of the room was discussed. Several people contributed and the general consensus was to try for a more disciplined approach with speakers standing to address the group and private conversations to be conducted in the computer room or kitchen. 07/00 3) Esther/Kryn Hoax e-mails. Involving Jesus and Wobble. And not very good ones at that as the wording was almost identical. At this point the discussion was temporarily suspended by the telling of a hoary old joke by hoary old Ken. (Perhaps we should include the odd joke in the minutes. A topic for the next meeting?) The correct procedure with these hoax e-mails is :- a) Reply to sender informing him/her of the true nature of the message. b) If in doubt check at one of the following sites ??????????????? JOHN to supply c) Inform your Webmaster, etc 07/00 4) ? A general discussion mainly concerned with the proposed cabling of all Canberra by ACTEW. Doubts were expressed about the economics of the project and the lack of content for distribution. It was noted that the TPG contract at $19.95/month included free cable TV but involved approx $600 hardware cost. 07/00 5) Ted In a refreshing change of subject the chairman applied his forensic skills to the well known self portrait of Leonardo da Vinci pointing out the presence of a scar (cicatrise?) which might be the result of a laboratory experiment that went wrong. Next week are we to hear about M's broken nose? 07/00 6) Bob Problem with e-mail spell checker. The system in use was Outlook Explorer with Word 97 which share a common dictionary. Consequently there should be no problem. The best advice was to go to Add/Remove ask for Remove and then select Repair when this option is presented. 07/00 7) Ann Unable to locate a particular file. This was concerned with a Win 3.11 operating system and an upgrade to a faster CD. It seems likely that the newer CD unit no longer sets up/needs this file/directory and the solution is to remove the call for the file in the CONFIG.SYS file. 07/00 8) John a) Teaching. Looking for someone to teach the use of the Internet. Lecture notes available. Four 2 hour periods with payment of $30/hr. Location Phillip. b) How to get a Watermark using Word 97. For a pile of people this was so easy they had forgotten how they did it. Practical help came from Charlie with the loan of the book 'Running Office 97'. 07/00 9) Charlie Problem with dropouts while dialling with Maestro modem. After much tooing and froing Maestro admitted a hardware fault which they will repair for $10. It is suggested that if you have a similar problem you ask Maestro if there was anything faulty with the money you spent. 07/00 10) Charlie? Free ISPs 1) TPG as noted at the last meeting. From am to am. TPG is at the address http://www.tpg.com.au/ 2) GlobalFreeway.com.au A 6 week delay before receiving a disk. Similar to AOL it takes over your system. It is also slow and downloads frequently fail. In Charlies' case he was able to remove the advertisements and other aspects of this set up. If you don't possess the same level of expertise - be careful. 3) Another Canberra one.??? Charlie to supply 07/00 11) Trevor 1) GEN in site addresses. Like .org, .com, .Gov etc what does .gen stand for. Somewhere in here John was unwise enough to comment adversely on the Pommy propensity to use co rather than com and to muck about with the established order of the parts to the extent that things such as .co appeared after .uk. It would seem that lost causes are alive and well everywhere. 2) How to turn off modem sound. a) There is usually a volume control either by software or by rotary switch. b) Option is usually switch off sound after connection made. c) an AT M command ?????????????? 07/00 12) Adele Would like the files associated with the book issued at the PCUG Word 97 course. Mike thought that these were ones associated with Word 97 and would be on the CD or installed already. 07/00 13) Alan Has a tiny floppy type disk which is probably holding photo data wants advice re reading same. 07/00 14) Joan Cleaners used with audio CDs. OK for digital CDs. General view was yes but most technicians avoided cleaners and new versions of CDs had self cleaning built in. 07/00 15) Chris Need to read discs written by old Classic Mac. Solution: TRANSMAC Version 4.0 from www.asy.com or www.tucows.com 07/00 General Microsoft Outlook Express for Diary/Calendar. General feeling was that this software is for use in offices and is vastly overdesigned for individual use. There are better simpler products. 07/00 PIM: Ted is trying to corner the market in PIM's and reported further progress. Some expensive ones such as Sharp do not offer full two way communication between PIM and PC and they also need extra software at a cost of approx $100. 07/00 Next meeting Mar 21st 2000 Notes by John Armstrong ****************************************************** Recent Coffee & Chat pages are available on the Internet news group tip.coffee-chat. Archives of past meetings are available at the web site: http://www.pcug.org.au/pcug/candc/c&c.htm These Archives are searchable, and also include some minutes of the Internet SIG, run on alternate Mondays *******************************************************
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