| Feb 18th, 1999 I saw this poster in O'Hare Airport when I was home last time. Guess I am not the only one playing the mileage game |
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Old News 1999 |
NOV 4th, 1999
Keeping pretty busy these days, but not
really getting much done. Seems like I spend so much time just updating
software. After over a year of just betas, Quicknet
came out with a final release (ver. 3.1) of their ISB (Internet Switchboard)
Software. I had heard that the quality of Net2Phone
calls was really improved. It's true. But with international phone rates from
Japan so cheap and still dropping, I can't really recommend that you run out and
buy an Internet PhoneJACK and install the latest software.
The card is $159 plus shipping and you'd have to be making quite a few calls to
justify it. But if you also do any PC to PC calling then you might want to give
it a try. They have announced a PC Card version called the Internet PhoneCARD
($175). I'll probably get one for my ThinkPad. I know there will be some time
that I will be in China and want to make some international phone calls, but not
want to pay the high rates.
Darn! Just got started, but I think I ought to get some sleep.
OCT 29th, 1999
Listening to Stuart
Wilde on the Art Bell show. Didn't
catch it live. Got from the archive
at Broadcast.com. [Listen
to the RealAudio file] (About 1hr.12 min into to the show.) Didn't try. I guess I could have and tried to call in to talk to Stuart.
Had I called in I would have said that I can't believe that Art had never heard
of Stuart until someone told him that they both had a book with the same name:
(The) Quickening. Titles are actually a bit different. Stuart's is just called The
Quickening (1995) and Art's is Quickening
: Today's Trends, Tomorrow's World (1998).
I've only listened to Art's show a few times and probably won't listen too much
in the future. It's full of commercials. Now that I think about it, I heard
about Art's show from one of Stuart's newsletters, Wilde
Wizdom. I have been subscribed since October 1996. I think it is the only
emailing that I have ever paid for.
I highly recommend anything Stuart has written. But his Infinite Self tapes are
a must-listen. I've searched the Powersourse,
Hay House and even
Amazon.com for these tapes, but they don't seem to exist. I got mine from
Nightingale Conant. I do know that Paul Arroyo at Achievement.com
carries them, too. And the prices are great. 10-20% off, I think. He also rents
them, but I just buy as the shipping back and forth to Japan would be too much.
While you're there, check out the Brian
Tracy tapes. His Psychology
of Achievement is my number one favorite audio program, followed by Stuart's
Infinite Self and then Deepak Chopra's The
Higher Self.
On the show they are spending a lot of time talking about UFOs, greys, near
death experiences and government conspiracies. The stuff Stuart talks/writes
about now has changed a bit. Art asked him which of his 20 books is his
favorite. He said Infinite Self. I'd think so.
I think it's time to give it another listen. I've lost count of how many times
I've heard it.
OCT 28th, 1999
Wow it really has been a while. Did some
upgrading. Installed Win98 Second Edition in August and I guess everything is
working well enough to work on this once in a while.
I've been getting a lot of email about bad links and old content. I am tempted
to just wipe everything out, but won't do so just yet. Better try and fix some
of those links now.
"Byte is Back!" We all miss the print magazine and it will probably
never come back, but check out Byte.com. I
think they are doing a great job. My favorite column
is Jon Udell's. It's called Tangled
in the Threads.
I know that when I do get around to updating this site it usually means that I
am procrastinating on something. Just remembered what it is. I'd better get to
work now.
I am listening to the Art Bell show now. I
think that one of my favorite writers Stuart
Wilde will be on the show in a day or so. I am looking forward to that. His 6-cassette
audiobook called Infinite Self that I bought from Nightingale
Conant a few years ago is awesome.
I listen to streaming audio all day long. I like sites like this one called Listentothenews.com.
July 1st, 1999
I found my dongle (for my network card)
today. Great, as I was about to buy another network card. That's all for now.
:-)
June 16th, 1999
Five days seems like a long time not to
touch this now. Thought I would let everyone know - or at least anyone that
cares that there are a few additions to the home page over the past few days. Theresa
Carey, our main speaker in June, sent us her notes from the meeting and we
have them up. Called Theresa
Carey's Online Investing Web Tour.
And Austin Hicks has yet another video
clip from the meeting. It is of Peter McMartin
winning the Gateway
machine. Congratulations Peter and thanks again to Gateway
Japan for coming and the giveaway. Heard that they have sold at least two
Profiles as a result. It's a nice looking machine.
I'm heading to NYC this Friday for PC Expo. Really looking forward to it, but I
have very little time to prepare. My ThinkPad is having some problems and to
make things worse I lost my dongle. I found a replacement in Akihabara,
but it was almost the same price of a new card w/dongle. Losing your dongle is
no joking matter!
Since this may be the last time for a few weeks that I get up here, I feel like
I ought to say more. Hmmmm? Maybe not.
I did start a hardware page. I just
want to keep track of all the crap I have.
June 11th, 1999
Just heard from Austin
that he finished the Gateway segment of our meeting. It's about 9 minutes long. Check
it out if you get a chance. It is in RealFormat. Uh oh!! He may have to move
it somewhere else. Might not be there for long. Could be exceeding some
bandwidth limitations.
Yesterday I downloaded a program called MemTurbo
that supposedly Gives your system that "Just Booted" feel with a
single keystroke! Seems pretty good so far. I really need to keep an eye on
the system resources or I get crashes.
June 8th, 1999
I should be on the phone making hotel
reservations for PC Expo in NYC. I'll be
attending some seminars put on by the APCUG
before the show.
I have done very little work up here, but I did finally get around to making a DejaNews
search page for my site. I got the idea originally from Todd Boyle, but then
today copied another person. That's about it for now.
TPC member Austin Hicks took some
video of the June meeting and some of it is done. Check
it out. It's in Real format.
June 7th, 1999
Not sure what I am going to get done up
here today. I still have to close a few applications just to do some work. I
thought it was just me, but I have heard from a lot of people that are also
having similar problems.
And two other people have written to tell me about similar problems with McAfee
Office. I did reinstall and update VirusScan and was very impressed when it
notified me of the Happy99.exe virus/trojan that came attached to an email. I
might not have noticed it for a while as the message was from a mailing list
that I filter into a folder.
June 4th, 1999
Yeah, yeah, yeah... I know. It's been a
long time. Sorry, I just can't seem to run too many apps at once before I bump
into problems. Things have to get better.
Mar 9th, 1999
Looks like I am not the only one that likes Copernic 99. It got a good review in PC
Magazine's First Looks. The Plus version might
just be worth the $29.95 to get rid of the ads and ad and get "more
than 100 additional engines, 18 new categories with specialized engines, access to
unlimited additional engines as they are available and a customizable category bar."
Mar 8th, 1999
Not sure if this is the place to put it, but I did
want to share my experience with McAfee Office over the past week. I had read some recent
reviews saying that the included apps could do with a little bit more integration like Norton SystemWorks.
I had a bit of a problem after installing Nuts & Bolts and am wondering how
this came about. It was a known problem and the solution was to disable McAfee VScan,
another program in the suite.
Mar 5th, 1999
Boy was I wrong about the search tool Copernic (3/2). Glad I decided to
give it a try and not judge it by the screenshots. It's awesome!
It was pretty good timing. I get up to speed on these tools every few months and finally there is
something worth sticking with. Or at least it seems that way so
far. Might take a few days to see if it does anything weird - like crash. If
anyone reading knows of something that beats this at this point in time PLEASE
let me know.
Funny as I had started working on my own personal portal page last
week. I called it MyPortal - maybe this is
a Japan thing - and really found myself using it a lot. It's really meant to be
used on my own machine where I have a huge monitor and a high resolution, but I
think that I will also get some use out of it when browsing from another
machine. Been thinking about it for a while, but finally decided to get going
with it after seeing that my Win98 setup is just stable enough to have enough
apps open at the same time to do some browsing, editing and uploading at the
same time.
It's still not super stable and I have to keep an eye on things with the Windows
Resource Menu - C:\WINDOWS\RSRCMTR.EXE - that I added to my
startup folder and constantly keep my eye on. I am drifting here, but I did want
to say thanks to the maker of WebDrive
as the latest version works beautifully, even with PowerDesk.
I stopped by John Dvorak's site the other
day after listening to him on the weekend edition [listen] of TechTalk He's got his own Personal Portal and recommends that
others do the same and even teaches you how to suck down his page and set it as
your own default browser start page or home page. I think he wrote about it a
while back in PC Computing or PC
Magazine. Found
it! Mine isn't as copy-friendly as his, as it is best viewed at a higher resolution, is all frames and all the external sites purposely open within my
bottom frame. But it works for me.
In a PC Mag column
he says "It's actually easier to do your own page than to
"customize" one of the portal pages. Most of the so-called customization just
leads you to suggestions from the portal companies, which are bought and paid for. Worse,
they're boring." He should be mentioning this in
every other column. The first thing that I do when I work on someone's machine -
after installing TweakUI and changing some folder/file settings - is change
their browser start page to something useful. (No, not my homepage, but I've
been tempted.
The exciting thing about the Internet is that slowly but surely, people that
want to educate themselves are going to do so with a lot of help from all the
nice people that are just a few mouse clicks away. Good ideas are going to
spread fast. Just look at ICQ. Have you ever seen an ad for it. I haven't. If I
knew something about programming I would create some software for creating these
personal portals and give it away. It should be just a matter of time and I am
sure we can count on people like John Dvorak to point the stuff out to us as it
appears. It's a new game and there are new rules.
Before I hit the hay - it's 7:30am - I'd like to thank the other people that
gave me ideas for MyPortal. One is NetPad.
I set out looking for something to take notes in that kept URLs live - not MS
Turd - but something with just RTF plus some hierarchy. I use
the little MiniPad app to dump notes and URLs into NetPad and then get to them
when I can. Very easy to work with. It would almost due as a personal portal;
You can choose to browse within it. But I think I need the browser in a
different window. (Getting a 2nd monitor soon.)
I decided that simple was okay after bumping into some dude named Steve's now
very outdated, but still existent, Pilot
Tech. Page. I bookmarked it about a year and half ago knowing that I might
use his design
someday. Of course I used to like Yahoo, but it really sucks now. They may be
getting stickier for some people, but
not me. And hopefully not you...
Mar 2nd, 1999
I was checking some links and noticed that Copernic99 has been released. Since I spent all that
time last week working on a long ago promised page
on searching, I guess I should check it out. But from looking at the
screenshots it doesn't seem to be what I am looking for.
Feb 24th, 1999
I ought to put somewhere that the Tokyo PC Users Group made the Japan Times last month. Thanks John. It was good
timing and we had a large turnout for our presentation
on Linux. John attended the January meeting, but we
missed him in February. We should remember not to charge him at the door at the next
meeting.
Feb 23rd, 1999
Did a little work on my page on Searching the Net that I started a few
days ago. Like most everything here it is mostly just some note so that I can easily jump
around and get up to speed.
Feb 21/22, 1999
Downloaded the latest release of WebFerret Pro, a program that I registered sometime
last year. I can't see any improvements. I'd like to spend some more time with programs
like it. I haven't really played with anything since last year when I showed some at a TPC
meeting. I haven't forgotten my promise to put my notes from the meeting online.
<g>
Feb 21st, 1999
Did nothing much. Just testing WebDrive. And I am finally getting started on a
page of Internet telephony links.
Not sure why, but I seem to be getting interviewed a lot lately. Something like
4 times in the past 6 months.
| Feb 18th, 1999 I saw this poster in O'Hare Airport when I was home last time. Guess I am not the only one playing the mileage game |
|
Feb 17th, 1999
This is kind of another test. I am trying out WebDrive version 2.0. So far so good.
The Tokyo PC Users Group is doing really well these days. Last month was Linux and you can find the presentation online. We will be moving to a new URL soon, tokyopc.org. It's a lot easier to remember. I wrote something for the March newsletter. I will try to put it up.