This mornings meeting started at 10:00 am and was well attended. One unexpected attendee was Geoff who had a problem, happened to turn up at 10:00 am for other reasons and took the opportunity to ask a question that had him tossed for months concerning Netscape news, got the answer and paid his dues and left. Hope he is happy now :-) Aranda Paul Free gave a rundown on what was going on in Aranda. There appears to be a "large green box" for every 50 houses, then a smaller green box on the poles and then a another box on your house that then allows Internet, telephone, subscriber TV and anything else that can extract money out of you. It's not working too well, Paul said he could get e-mail, but not send it and there was some kind of bandwidth problem with web browsing. One impression was that it was one gigantic stuff up, and the two uni students doing all the work were leaderless and out of their depth. Impressions can be wrong though and should you find yourself lost in Aranda, it is recommended you visit the shops and get a first hand impression of what it is all about, a pretty good display we hear. Sorting Mail Most mail programs have this same facility, a header bar above the message list that tabulates Subject, Author and Date/Time. Now to sort your messages by any of these categories, just click the category on the header bar, now click again and the sorting is done in reverse order. Great when you are trying to find something. The same normally applies to News. Elizabeth, hope it works for you. Programs and Anti Programs. If you, like Mike, had gone to one of Jim Fogg's Wanna sites, http://www.terraserver.com and found a space shot of your favourite city, then tried to print it you might be a bit disappointed. It appears that the detail leaves something to be desired Emil advised of a mosaic program that could take a number of these smaller GIFs and combine them into one big picture. It is a fairly routine procedure. The melissa virus also got airing, The CNN site, http://www.cnn.com broke the news last Saturday. This is a good page to visit from time to time to keep up with the latest news. You can also get a recipe for the day, but better, still, you can rummage through your fridge and feed the inventory of your food holdings into CNN, an Lo! a possible meal and appropriate cooking instructions will be suggested for you. Thank you Emil, now I will have nothing to put in the compost bin. Perhaps IE5 is a virus? All 26 megs of it has to be downloaded every time there is a change, definitely buggy and costly on download time. maybe waiting for the CD off a magazine would be the way to go. TIP Newsgroups. The proposal was made that "TIP News groups be made available to PCUG members irrespective of where they log in from." A number of people log onto say Dynamite and would love to get the TIP Newsgroups without having to dial into TIP. Mind you, this is possible by telnetting to Supreme, but that's not what is wanted. What is wanted is the ability to download into your own News Reader, for perusal later, the TIP Ngs. Admittedly, the news is available as a digest, but again, this is not what is wanted It appears that the break with AUUG is nearing finality, the TIP machine will become the "PCUG" machine. We are all members of the PCUG We are entitled to look at the TIP Ngs This should be independent of which ISP we are connected to. A lot of discussion followed, Allan Mikkelsen advising that the present policy did not allow for this. Furthermore, it introduced the Limited/Full Access questions. Another member suggested that the best way to go was to formally request the PCUG Ctte to do it, but no doubt there would need to be some technical feasibility/cost analysis first. Freebies If you are a subscriber to Communique, do not renew your subscription. In two months time, you will be sent encarta99 as an inducement to re-subscribe to it. Chess has a great collection MS gifts by using this technique. Your hours. There still is and probably will be forever, some incomprehensibility in the accounting of your TIP payments, your PCUG membership and your hours used. It really is straight forward (I think). You go into the nether land when; Your PCUG Membership expires Your TIP year(or 6 months or 3 months) expires Your 300 hours (or 150 0r 75) is consumed. Now there are people, worried to death that they will run out of hours, so put $120 "waiting to be applied", then forget to pay their PCUG dues,, as someone said, life aint meant to be easy. And that was it I shant mention the address book saga that continues, other than to say that an answer may soon be forth coming. And of course, there was a demo in the training room afterwards. These demos will cease shortly due to a good hiring contract. Next Internet SIG will be 12 April , so feel free to come along and ask your questions. Again, thanks to Allan for running the show. -- ****************************************************** Coffee & Chat Page, inluding archives of past meetings http://www.pcug.org.au/pcug/candc/c&c.htm These Archives are now searchable, and also include some minutes of the Internet SIG, run on alternate Mondays *****************************************************************
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