DEC 26th, 1998

It's been a while. I'll admit that. And it's 2am so I don't plan to to do much. Just wanted to see if I even remembered how to get in here and edit things. So far, so go. I've got lots to talk about, but it may take a few days before I get back at this.

You want the real reason that I don't update this page much? It's simple. My present Windows 98 setup just isn't stable enough. If I get too many apps going at once I get memory resource errors. Sometimes it crashes... I've considered switching to NT, but I have a list of things to do before that. Like backing up and making sure that everything that I really need works under NT.

See you later. Bye the way, Jack in my photo below, isn't my father. He's a friend that lives in New York. We met in Taiwan 10+ years ago. I visited him in September. He is a Chinese painter. But, no he's not Chinese. I just called him and he said that he's got a show starting in some SOHO gallery on January 2nd. It will last a month. Unfortunately, I won't be able to make it.

09/15/98 At Jack's in Brooklyn Heights now. I took some photos yesterday, but not sure if I will be able to get them up there right now. Don't do that too often.

09/13/98

On the road now. In Rockford, Illinois at my dad's. Been a pretty good trip so far. We installed a 3COM OfficeConnect ISDN LAN modem at his office and it really took less than 15 minutes as it said on the box.

Heading down to Chicago tomorrow. I'm going to attend a free seminar by Shad Helmstetter. I've read a few of his books, including What to Say When You Talk to Yourself and am looking forward to hearing what he's up to these days.

Brought my digital camera with me this trip and have only taken a few shots. I think it would be fun to upload a few here later today, but that may take some time.

Testing WebDrive on the notebook here and it seems to be working beautifully. Not sure why I had problems on my home machine. It seems to do everything I wanted out of an ftp program and that's basically just have ftp locations appear as if they were local and that's it.

09/02/98

Getting ready for the TPC meeting and need to start taking notes. My Internet PhoneJACK demo machine is all set up with Net2Phone and NetMeeting. Not sure if I will get around to installing and test Vocaltec's Internet Phone or the Kodak DVC 323 USB camera that I bought. Would be nice, but will take time and means more things could go wrong.

I noticed that the Net2Phone rates keep dropping. USA is still 10-15 cents per minute and 800 numbers are still free. I noticed that Taipei is just 20 cents a minute, but the rest of Taiwan is 35. That's not bad. I've been gone for so long that I wouldn't know who to call. I'm sure the need will arise eventually. It's good to have choices. I'm curious in seeing what the quality is like. Don't expect the same that I get for the states, but I imagine it will be good enough.  The neat thing about this is that it is still getting better.

Let's look at some other rates. Australia 10 cents, New Zealand 15, and UK 10. China is down to 58 cents a minute which is cheaper than it was just one month ago when I was calling there to plan a trip. I ended up using 0061 or something. Not next time.

I can see that I'm procrasting. I should finish up and start getting some organized notes together for the meeting.

I bought a couple of 2-line phones from the states and they are great. One is a Sony and the other is by Lucent Technologies. For some reason these phones are hard to find in Japan and expensive. The Lucent 1872 has a built in answering machine and can be used for conference calls. I tried that last night by calling my sister in the States and then my girlfriend here. The biggest problem wasn't the connection, but the fact that my girlfriend kept speaking Japanese, which of course my sister doesn't understand.

I bought the phones from Teledynamics. You ought to get there catalog. They carry a lot of stuff. But always check Phonezone.com as they only talk about great stuff there. If you order a Quicknet Internet PhoneJACK or LineJACK Phonezone.com is where they are shipped from. Sent DHL and arrive in about 2 days.

Speaking of Internet LineJACK, unfortunately I wasn't able to get one for this upcoming demo. Its sells for $295 but offers more features than the PhoneJACK that sells for $159. Mainly you can use just one phone for both regular calls and Internet calls and can create a gateway so that you could call into your house from somewhere outside and use your computer to make international calls via the Net. This assumes you have two phone lines. But in Japan we all have those anyway, don't we?

I do want to get a LineJACK for the gateway feature and whatever other improvements it has, but I did some thinking and concluded that a 2-line phone combined with a Internet PhoneJACK is a good way to go. So I ordered two more of them. I want one in every machine I have. I'm going home in a few weeks to install one in my Dad's work machine so we can talk PC to PC with NetMeeting and save him a few bucks as I always call his 800 number and he foots the bill.

If you don't have a decent PC and/or Net connection maybe the phone to phone solutions offered by AT&T and others are good enough, but I saw in the paper today that the rates are 33 Yen per minute and of course they will charge you that for 800 numbers, too. Ouch! My guess is that once people start talking advantage of the application sharing and videoconferencing features of programs like NetMeeting the PC to PC stuff will take off.

However I am looking for a good phone to phone solution that I can fall back on and use when I'm not at home. Last year there was a service called KCOM, but the link I had is dead. Telematrix is one that a TPC member is involved with. I should talk to him. But I only see callback stuff on his pages.

I'm trying out TweakDUN on my notebook and one machine at home as I read that it can improve the speed of your connection by messing with some settings. If anyone has suggesting on settings for ISDN and providers in Japan I'd be interested in hearing.

Yuck. Time to get to work. I think I'll install the camera first. That's more fun.

08/28/98

Still trying to get caught up around here. Too much going on to talk about.

08/13/98

Still cleaning things up around here.

08/12/98

Actually may get around to updating this a bit more often. Found a few neat apps recently. WebDrive does just what I've been looking for from an ftp application  to do. It sets up an ftp connection and then allows you to work with that directory as if it were a drive on your machine. I have had a few crashes when it is running on my otherwise stable Win98 setup here. I think I will register and then send my comments to the author. I had heard that one other ftp application was planning a plugin to do this, but I'm not sure if they have it out yet or not

I am also trying another application that does something that I've needed for a while. It's called NetSwitcher and it let's you configure all of your network settings (DNS server, IP addresses, etc.) in one swoop and only asks you to reboot when it's actually necessary - unlike Win9x. Here's a screenshot. This is great for someone that connects to different networks and hates messing with the network settings. Cost: $9.00

08/11/98

Making some changes around here. Tried NetObjects Fusion 2 and 3 for a while, but couldn't really figure it out. I'm going back to using FrontPage, this time FrontPage98

Don't bother stopping back for a while as I think is going to take a while.

In the meantime, why not check out the TPC homepage.

07/16/98

Where does all the time go? I haven't given this address out to too many people, but some are emailing me telling me it needs updating. One of these days.

I have been trying NetObjects Fusion 3.0, but I honestly can't figure it out that easily. I had better luck with FrontPage97 and may try 98.

03/21/98

I've been looking around for a replacement for my PIM EccoPro 4.0. I love the program, but they (NetManage) have stopped development on it. I just read that there is a new version of ACT!, 4.0. I will give it a try as soon as they have a trial version. It seems to have some neat features, but some of the people in their newsgroups are calling some of them bug fixes.

03/19/98

Noticed in the paper the other day that Toshiba-Direct here in Japan has introduced some new models and updated there page. The prices there are good; about the same as buying from a mailorder shop in the states. That's pretty rare for us in Japan. And they sell English language models.

Last week at Internet World in LA on the floor of the show I saw a guy with a name that I regocgonized. It was Paul Arroyo of  The Achievement Tape Library. He sells self-improvement audio cassette programs from Nightingale-Conant and other companies and you 20% if you become a member. That's 30 dollars a year. I've bought lots of these over the years and most of them are well worth the 48 dollars that you pay after the discount. Shipping to Japan is the real killer so I try to order 3 at a time. Within the states one program is only $6 and two is $8. They make great gifts. Trust me.

Speaking of Nightingale-Conant, I highly recommend that you go to their site and check it out. They usually have 3 specials a month for $39.95 each, which is hard to beat. Fortunately Paul was willing to match that for me. This month's specials are: 12 Life Secrets by Robert Stuberg, Unlimited Power by Tony Robbins, and Accelerated Learning Techniques by Brian Tracy and Colin Rose. I have the last two and ordered the first one last night.

Brian Tracy was the one that I discovered about 3 years ago when I bought his Psychology of Achievement and my life has never been the same. This guy has done his homework and anything by him is worth many times what you pay for it. All these tapes have a 30-day money back guarantee, so you really can't go wrong. I doubt you would want to return them, though. At some point I'll try to create a page listing my favorites, but I've said that before. Bug me if you are interested.

I see that Attain Corp. is advertising KanjiKit97 for 34,800 Yen. As I've said said before this is really just the Japanese part of UnionWay's AsianSuite97, so you may want to consider buying that and getting Chinese and Korean, too. There are trial versions of all of these.

03/16/98

Do I have to go on apologizing for what a mess this is? I'm not intending it to be much of anything, but wanted to have something here as it is the address that I give out to people. Other than it being on my name card I don't publicize it. If I have have anything worth looking at I'll send people here.

I met a lot of nice people in LA last week and if you are stopping by, please do say hello via email.

One of the neatest things I saw and bought there was Internet PhoneJACK which lets me dial the states from a regular phone connected to my computer running IDT's Net2Phone. 800 numbers are free, others are 10-15 cents per minute depending on the time of day and the quality is much better than before PhoneJACK. What else can I say? Oh, yeah it improves the quality of voice to what I think is better than a cellular phone, but there is still some delay.

03/14/98

Just got back from the Internet World Show in LA. I doubt I will get a chance to write much about it right now. All I can say is it was great.

01/21/98

Going to slowly take things off here. I think I'll get a new hobby.

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