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2001 Meeting NotesMeeting Minutes and NotesDecember 2001 Meeting: Annual Christmas PartyThe Estes Park Internet Computer User Group (EPICUG) held their annual Christmas Holiday Party on Tuesday, December 18th, in the Hondius Room in the Estes Park Public Library. FrontDesk, Inc, whose two principals are Mike Molloy and Lee Lasson, once again persuaded Lee’s wife, Sandy, to act as the official caterer of the goodies for the party. And, they were great! We had excellent varieties of pizza, veggies, and cold sandwich materials and no one went hungry. Being that we’re a first-class operation, Sandy even supplied themed tablecloths so we were very upscale! Once again, Sandy took away the coveted 5-spoon award for the vittles. Thanks, Sandy, Lee, and Mike!
After everyone was sated sufficiently, Mike called the group to order for a short business report from the Secretary/Treasurer. The Treasurer reported that the club’s treasury, as of 30 November, stood at $1,539.66, an increase of $0.39 from the previous month’s report. This astonishing gain is based on the bank’s offering the remarkable amount of 0.31% annual interest on our account. Since Microsoft stock has been going up lately, it seems hard to figure out how this interest rate is going to achieve our goal of buying out Microsoft! The meeting then got down to the evening’s main event. As is our custom, we opened the floor for the members to direct us to a funny and/or interesting website. Folks came prepared this year and a total of about 22 websites were offered for our viewing pleasure. (The URLs for these websites is recorded below) Talk about planning ahead, Yvonne brought along a floppy of the "Stinky Monkey" movie she had noticed a year earlier and saved for just this occasion. After viewing these websites, most of the members had the same thought, "There are a LOT of people out there with WAY too much time on their hands." Lee then acted as a living "applause meter" to let the audience pick the winning website. The winner was Terry Patterson who submitted the "Windows RG" website. As a result of this important victory, Terry got to have first pick of the prizes collected for the evening. He chose a brand new Windows XP upgrade package.
We then concluded the evening by drawing member names out of a hat to select winners of the other prizes. The prizes were mainly purchased out of the club’s funds (with a few generous donations to help out) and included:
But wait! There’s more! Ray and Pat Cushing worked diligently to supply us with 2002 wallet-sized calendars complete with EPICUG meeting dates highlighted. These have always been much appreciated in past years and we’re thankful that Ray & Pat came through for the 2002 meetings. The calendars were distributed to those present. The meeting adjourned at 9:10pm. Respectfully submitted, Websites visited during the festivities:
November 2001 Meeting: Excel Functions and FormulasThe Estes Park Internet Computer User Group (EPICUG) met Tuesday, November 20th, in the Hondius Room in the Estes Park Public Library. Mike Molloy opened the meeting at 7:04pm. We had a fair number of visitors so Mike did our usual round of introductions of the officers and attendees. The Treasurer reported that the club’s treasury, as of 31 October, stood at $1,539.27 and that includes the princely accumulated interest sum of $15.24 for the year to date. The Treasurer (grudgingly) accepted several dues payments for next year and promised not to forget to post them when the new year arrived! The Treasurer also reminded everyone of the upcoming EPICUG Christmas Party next month. We need ideas for presents and door prizes. Please forward ideas to any of the club officers. The meeting then got down to the evening’s presentation. Don Widrig presented a split-screen talk on the wonders of Excel spreadsheet formulas and functions. He prefaced the presentation by telling the audience that the presentation was WAY more material than could be absorbed in one brief two-hour session so the members should not try to frantically copy down every pearl of wisdom. Rather, the presentation was intended to cover the ground extremely rapidly and allow the audience to digest the material later at their leisure. To that end, Don posted both the presentation (all 50! pages of it) and the accompanying spreadsheet on the EPICUG website so that the audience could browse the topics later. Click here to view the presentation. Click here to view/save the accompanying spreadsheet. There were many astonishing tricks that Don showed. His personal favorite was a simple formula that will tell you the date of Easter for any given year. By the way, the definition of Easter is very complex so Don included a website URL that gives you way more than you ever wanted to know about Easter. The URL is included in the presentation. At one point in the presentation, Don mentioned that a potential source of calculation bugs was the problem of inexact representations of numbers due to the way computers work. There wasn’t time to go into the topic in detail so you can click here to view a fuller explanation of this issue. Due to the enormous amount of information, it was agreed that the meeting would run over our usual ending time. By the end of the presentation, everyone, including Don, felt like they’d been drinking from a fire hose and it was time to go. It was a really informative meeting. Everyone present at the meeting agreed that they had been exposed to many useful things and now had a better appreciation of the wonders of Excel. The meeting adjourned at 9:22pm. Respectfully submitted, Because of the length of the presentation, there were no websites visited during the presentation. Several websites were discussed and they are captured in the presentation and these notes.
October 2001 Meeting: Overview of Windows XPThe Estes Park Internet Computer User Group (EPICUG) met Tuesday, October 16th, in the Hondius Room in the Estes Park Public Library. Mike Molloy opened the meeting at 7:01pm. Because we had a very tight time schedule, we dispensed with our usual round of introductions of members. The Treasurer reported that the club’s treasury, as of 28 September, stood at $1,526.53 and that includes the princely accumulated interest sum of $14.50 for the year to date. The meeting began with a short status report from Charter Pipeline regarding the conversion of the Estes Park cable TV/Internet system to fiber optic carriers throughout the town. Miki Wollet and Glenn Smith from Charter discussed Charter’s efforts to upgrade the service and expedite repairs in the case of outages or other problems. Miki also reviewed various billing plans for Internet (only) service, including a yearly contract for the low, low price of $29.95 per month. The meeting then got down to the evening’s presentation. Hugo Ehret presented a short show regarding the introduction and development history of the latest Microsoft operating system, Windows XP. Click here to review Hugo’s presentation. Hugo mentioned that XP does NOT stand for "Xtra Profit" but was part of the new Microsoft "XPerience" theme. Hugo discussed the pricing of XP. The Home version appears to be initially selling for about $100 and the Pro version should sell for about $200. Extra licenses for the same version appear to sell for about $30 per copy. Just to have the full "xperience", Lee Lasson then attempted to install XP on a sacrificial computer he had brought along. Yvonne Cocchi said it best. "It gives me great pleasure to see the experts having such trouble on this user installation!" About everything that could go wrong during the installation of XP was graphically displayed as the skeptical audience watched. Finally, Lee determined that a major stumbling block was his prior installation of 512MB of cheapo memory in order to make the machine work better. It didn’t. So, Lee took the machine apart, removed the cheapo RAM, re-installed the 96MB of RAM that came with the machine, and tried again. Things got better. After some fumbling to find the CD-ROM key code (not the "activation code"), Lee finally got the machine to boot up under XP. Much cheering and applause. Since time was short and we absolutely had to leave on time, we were not able to do more than a few simple kicks of the tires. What few things we saw looked very encouraging. There appears to be a noticeable speed increase in the few tests we performed. More experimentation will be the order for the future. It was a really informative meeting. Everyone present at the meeting agreed that they had learned many useful things about the perils of installing a brand new operating system on top of marginal RAM chips. The meeting adjourned at 9:00pm. Respectfully submitted, During the meeting, the following websites were visited or mentioned:
September 2001 Meeting: Email Tips & TechniquesThe Estes Park Internet Computer User Group (EPICUG) met Tuesday, September 18th, in the Hondius Room in the Estes Park Public Library. Mike Molloy opened the meeting at 7:06pm. We had our usual round of introductions of the club’s officers and members. The Treasurer reported that the club’s treasury, as of 31 August, stood at $1,501.50 and that includes the princely accumulated interest sum of $13.47 for the year to date. The meeting then got down to the evening’s presentation. Due to requests from members, the evening’s topic was a free-wheeling discussion of tips and techniques for using various email applications. A poll of the members showed that we had 3 AOL email users, 6 Outlook Express users, 2 Outlook users, no Netscape email users, 3 Eudora email users, and 4 users that partook of various web-based email facilities such as Hotmail, Juno, etc. Mike acted as the head lion tamer in a spirited discussion of email. We started by discussing the idea of using email folders as an organizing technique. Mike went through the use of a Rules Assistant to automatically file email in selected folders based on the Subject, Sender, topics, key words, etc. The idea of a Rule is to expedite filing of mail based on user-selected criteria. Another question from the audience centered on having email create specified sounds to announce the arrival of new mail. Mike explored the various Control Panel magic to attach a user-specified sound to such events. Users were interested in an easy method to quickly switch between an email window and some other window. This could happen while reading an email and the reader wishes to switch to some other email or look up something on the Internet while the original email is retained. Not to worry, Mike showed various shift-clicking and right-clicking techniques to bring up a new window while retaining the old window. Thus, for example, the user could shift-click a URL in an email and bring up the target website in a new window while retaining the original email window. Several techniques were explored to quickly add an email sender’s address to the reader’s address book. This avoids the necessity for the reader to laboriously copy a sender’s name and email address from an incoming email. A discussion of bcc: (Blind Courtesy Copy) led to a more wide-ranging discussion regarding email etiquette. The users were interested in the method of emptying an email application’s Trash. It was pointed out that holding down the Shift key while deleting and entry bypasses the email’s Trash basket and permanently deletes the item directly. In Outlook and Outlook Express, the user has considerable control over the appearance of a folder’s list of email contents. Many options exist to select items such as the Creation Date, Size, etc, for display in the column headers of the contents list. Moreover, these columns can be arranged in any order to suit the user’s particular retrieval needs. Thus, for example, it becomes easy to create a column that identifies the Date Received and sort the entire folder by that date. Then, for example, the email user could select a "chunk" of date-sorted email to delete. This led Don Widrig to pop up and pontificate on the common Windows metaphor for selecting things. Don pointed out that practically every part of Windows (and Macs too!) uses the same techniques of Selecting, Shift-selecting, and Ctrl-selecting to collect things. Most email applications have a "signature" mechanism to automatically append a user-defined set of material (that can be graphical as well as text) to outgoing emails. In other words, the user can create an unlimited series of "rubber stamps" to sign outgoing letters on an automatic basis. The email applications can be set to automatically append a default signature or the user can select from the existing user-defined signatures using an Insert Signature action/button. Richard Junghans was interested in the techniques for moving an existing email address book from an application such as Outlook Express to Outlook. Mike demonstrated a simple Import/Export mechanism that allows an easy migration from one email application to another. It’s an entirely different matter as to why a user would want to do this on a regular basis. This appears to be a one-shot deal for when a user finally makes the big leap. A confusing discussion ensued regarding the difference between email clients and servers. Don popped up (again!) and sketched a quick diagram of how the servers and clients relate on the Internet. Several of the club members travel occasionally. Thus, they were interested in picking up their email on a portable laptop computer while on the road and later picking up the same email on their home computer. After digging around in the menus a bit, we found a feature that allows an email reader to indicate that emails were to be left on the server after they were downloaded to a computer. This is exactly the tool needed to support traveling users that use two computers and don’t want to split their email files between them. There was not enough time to do a good job on the subject of Encryption and Digital Signatures. This topic was postponed to some future EPICUG meeting. Since the NIMDA virus was prevalent on the day of the meeting, the group then had a quick discussion of the worm/virus and what to do about it. This virus (apparently) could pose a hazard simply by appearing in Outlook’s Preview Pane. This led to a discussion of the role of the Preview Pane and the members were urged to avoid using it wherever possible. One nice tool after another falls off the wagon due to these virus thugs. Grumble, grumble. It was a really informative meeting. Everyone present at the meeting agreed that they had learned many useful things about email. The meeting adjourned at about 9:15pm. Respectfully submitted, During the meeting, the following websites were visited:
Supplemental sites:
August 2001 Meeting: Using PowerPoint To Make Effective PresentationsThe Estes Park Internet Computer User Group (EPICUG) met Tuesday, August 21st, in the Hondius Room in the Estes Park Public Library. The President, Mike Molloy, opened the meeting at 7:03pm. We had the usual introductions around the room and new members were greeted. Among the new members, Mary Scott brought her nephew, Alec Jenner, who seemed to fit right into the club. The Treasurer reported that the club’s treasury, as of 31 July, stood at $1,488.11 and that includes the princely accumulated interest sum of $12.08 for the year to date. Since Mike was feeling puny from a summer cold, he excused himself and went home to nurse a hot toddy (or something). Since he took his computer with him (and, hence, our Internet connection), we spent the entire evening doing without our web surfing activities. Talk about cold turkey! By chance, Don Widrig happened to have his computer with him so we were able to use a floppy from Al Howard that contained the evening’s presentation. After the business was disposed of, we settled back for an interesting discussion by Al Howard regarding the use of Microsoft PowerPoint to make presentations. Talk about practicing what you preach, yes, Al used PowerPoint to give his presentation! Click here to view Al's presentation. Al’s presentation was very short (intentionally). After he preached the gospel of PowerPoint, he then ended his presentation and opened up the floor to demonstrations and questions about PowerPoint. The group peppered him with lots of questions and Al showed off several of the PowerPoint features such as Slide Transitions, Special Effect, etc. It was an interesting presentation. Several members began to see how this type of presentation technique would be of use to them in their endeavors. The meeting was then adjourned. Respectfully submitted, Because of a lack of an Internet connection, no websites were visited or discussed during the course of the evening. July 2001 Meeting: How to Create Your Own Web PagesThe Estes Park Internet Computer User Group (EPICUG) met Tuesday, July 17th, in the Hondius Room in the Estes Park Public Library. Unfortunately, the Secretary/Treasurer was absent so these meeting notes represent a compilation of people’s memories of the meeting. It’s so hard to get good help these days! J The President, Mike Molloy, opened the meeting at about 7pm. We had the usual introductions around the room and new members were greeted. In lieu of a Treasurer’s Report, Mike told the group that the club’s bank balance was about $1,400. (Actually it was exactly $1,486.68 as of 6/29/2001.) After the business was disposed of, we settled back for an interesting discussion by Lee Lasson regarding some tips and techniques for creating your own web pages. Al Howard was supposed to present the program but he was absent as well. See above remarks about getting good help! Thanks, Lee, for filling in. Lee presented tips and techniques in the form of a PowerPoint presentation created by Al Howard. Click here to review the presentation. After the PowerPoint presentation, Lee covered the basics of HTML code using Notepad. Lee moved on to using Front Page 2002 to demonstrate the easiest way to build a web page.
There was a lot of demonstration of the techniques mixed in with Lee’s tutorial and many websites were visited to get ideas. It was an interesting presentation. Several members began to see how this type of construction technique would be of use to them in their endeavors. After the presentation, we had a few minutes left so a "Stump the Group" session worked on some problems that Sue Bruell was having. Happily, it appears that her problems were resolved by the group. There was still some time left so the group explored the image search capabilities of Google. This feature is a rough beginning for the vexing problem of searching for images on the Internet. The meeting was then adjourned. Respectfully submitted, Don Widrig, EPICUG Secretary/Treasurer (in absentia) The following websites were visited or discussed during the course of the evening:
June 2001 Meeting: Linking Databases To Excel and Creating Awesome PresentationsThe Estes Park Internet Computer User Group (EPICUG) met Tuesday, June 19th, in the Hondius Room in the Estes Park Public Library. The President, Mike Molloy, opened the meeting at 7:05pm. We had the usual introductions around the room and new members were greeted. The Treasurer reported that the club’s treasury, as of 31 May, stood at $1,485.39 and that includes the princely accumulated interest sum of $9.36 for the year to date. The increase in the club’s treasury was entirely due to collection of membership fees for the year 2001 and represents the highest balance in the club’s history. There was a brief discussion regarding spending a small portion of our largess on door prizes to be given out at the annual Christmas party. The members thought this was a good idea and everyone is encouraged to submit prize suggestions before the party. It was agreed that the prizes would be awarded to the person who brings the best website URL to the club’s attention at the party. In the past, this has always yielded some hilarious websites and we expect this party to follow the great tradition. (Note: we also agreed that the "Exploding Whale" and "Flight 405" movies are exempted from this contest since they are the club’s all-time favorites.) During a review of the EPICUG Membership page, the membership expressed an interest in allowing each paid-up member the option of suggesting a website URL that is related to the member. This page could either be a home page for the member, a work page of the member’s company, or just some interesting page that the member would like to call attention to. The Secretary agreed to revise the Membership page to include this feature. An initial list of URLs was posted on the revised page and members are encouraged to send in revisions and additions to the Secretary. Speaking of websites, Al Howard announced that the Estes Park Noon Rotary Club won the district’s highest award for creative web design of the Rotary’s website. Al is the webmaster for the site. Way to go, Al! You can view the website at www.RotaryClubOfEstesPark.org. Al then put on his EPICUG Program Director hat and previewed the future programs for the club. Check out these programs on the EPICUG Meeting page (above). After the business was disposed of, we settled back for an interesting discussion by Dennis Minard regarding some tips and techniques for linking databases of information to Excel for fancy displays of the recorded information. Dennis started the presentation by relating his experiences in the real world that forced him to separate the recording of data (in a database, for example) versus the processing and display of the data (using Excel). Dennis became frustrated with the limited display capabilities and data processing tools of the Access database (even though it was mighty powerful for recording the data). He wanted to use the power of Excel to do statistical analysis, make fancy graphs, etc, but the data was kept in Access, not in Excel. The question was "How do I get the data from Access (or other database) into a form that I can process in Excel?" Dennis, through painful experimentation, discovered that there are a bunch of powerful tools in Access and Excel that allowed him to link the live data in Access into Excel and process it quite nicely. It’s more than just importing the data since Dennis discovered ways to automatically refresh the Excel data every time something changed in Access. Thus, when new or revised data was entered into Access, it became quite straightforward to update the Excel side of the house and re-display the new information. Of course, Dennis had to set up a bunch of mechanisms down in the engine room to facilitate this linking. That setup was the main topic of Dennis’ presentation. Click here to review his PowerPoint presentation. Dennis walked us through the basic steps in linking Access and Excel together. He brought a real example based on his work with the Quality Assurance testing that took place on a new HP digital camera. In addition, he also walked us through a sample Access/Excel model he had constructed for the presentation. This sample setup was for a fictitious camping supply store. The database had tables representing some camping products and some representative purchases of those products. After linking the database tables to Excel, Dennis astounded us by quickly using the linked database information to create some charts of sales by date, etc. Click here to examine the sample Excel spreadsheet. After the presentation, Dennis prepared a summary of the basic steps required for linking Excel to a database. Click here to review Dennis’ summary. It was an interesting presentation. Several members began to see how this type of linkage technique would be of use to them in their endeavors. And, Lee Lasson was really obsessing on some of the array formulas that Dennis used in his presentation! Expect to hear more on this subject in a future meeting. After the presentation, we had a few minutes left so Wes Pixler showed off his latest gadget. It was one of the new "digital picture frames." Essentially, it is an LCD display device that allows you to store and display hundreds of digital pictures in a frame-like device. It is especially good for displaying grandchildren’s pictures since it doesn’t fill up your wallet so badly. On the other hand, you do have to remember to carry it around when you are anticipating a "bragging scenario!" The meeting was then adjourned. Respectfully submitted, The following websites were visited or discussed during the course of the evening:
May 2001 Meeting: Web Browser Add-onsThe Estes Park Internet Computer User Group (EPICUG) met Tuesday, May 15th, in the Hondius Room in the Estes Park Public Library. The President, Mike Molloy, opened the meeting at 7:07pm. We had the usual introductions around the room and new members were greeted. The Treasurer reported that the club’s treasury, as of 30 April, stood at $1,471.68 and that includes the princely accumulated interest sum of $1.94. The increase in the club’s treasury was entirely due to collection of membership fees for the year 2001 and represents the highest balance in the club’s history. Mike presented a website originated by the North American Center for Emergency Communications (NACEC). This group is a volunteer organization set up to use the Internet to help with communications in time of disaster. The idea is that the site could act as a clearinghouse for names of victims, instructions for relief, etc. In a sense, it is the Internet equivalent of the ham radio operations during fires, flood, tornados, etc. Click here to visit their website. Click here to see the letter we received from them in which they ask for volunteers. After the business was disposed of, we settled back for an interesting discussion by Mike Molloy regarding the features and add-ons that are of interest for an Internet browser. This presentation was focused specifically on recent versions of Internet Explorer (IE). Hopefully, we can some day have a similar presentation for Netscape Navigator. Mike started the presentation by recapping some of the common built-in features of IE. These include:
Some other tips included:
Mike then moved into the various add-ons that you can use to augment the features of the standard IE browser. The big player here was the Google search engine. Mike went to the Google website and installed the search engine on his computer and then proceeded to use the engine to do all sorts of interesting searches. Google is extremely fast and seems to try to understand what kinds of things you are searching for. We spent quite a bit of time exploring the features of Google, including the establishment of a new Google toolbar within your existing IE browser. Google is definitely worth checking out. In passing, Mike also quickly demonstrated an old friend, Robotype. This application is similar to AutoCorrect in Word except that it works throughout the Windows system and allows you to create typing "macros" to speed up repetitive data entry chores. Mike loaded and demonstrated another browser add-on, QuickClick. This application blends into your IE toolbar and offers interesting links to sites that may be related to a word you select on a current web page. For example, selecting the word "Idaho" on the Estes Park On-line page gives you links to all sorts of things related to Idaho. Dick Webb wanted to see how these add-ons worked for a website he was interested in so we visited the "Restelli" website. This website is managed by a person in Vermont and contains all sorts of interesting pictures of the early days of TV and its inventors. Dick is writing a history of the early days of TV and this site was of considerable historical interest to Dick and to us. Keep us informed when your book gets published, Dick! After that side trip, Mike tried to load and use another browser add-on, Alexa. The net of that effort was a series of machine crashes so we abandoned the effort and moved on. Mike will re-visit this for a future demo. One last add-on, Atomica, was loaded and demonstrated. This is an interesting add-on that points you to lots of reference material for words you may select on a web page. For example, selecting the word "Russia" and invoking Atomica leads to web sites the give dictionary entries for the word, encyclopedia entries, maps, etc. It’s an entire built-in reference kit for words you may inquire about. Mike closed out the add-ons by pointing to several websites that give more information about add-ons. Click here to see a recap of Mike’s presentation notes. Everybody was pretty well dazzled by these add-ons. Amazing tools and scope. Since everybody was exhausted by then, we adjourned the meeting at 9:04pm. Thanks for a very informative evening, Mike. Respectfully submitted, The following websites were visited during the course of the evening:
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 | · http://www.sexiestgeekalive.com/ (just for fun) |
| · http://www.dslreports.com/stest (a comprehensive Internet connection speed tester) |
| · http://www.airbits.com/ (the airbits site) |
The Estes Park Internet Computer User Group (EPICUG) met Tuesday, March 20th, in the Hondius Room in the Estes Park Public Library.
The President, Mike Molloy, opened the meeting at 7:04pm. We had the usual introductions around the room and new members were greeted.
The Treasurer reported that the club’s treasury, as of 28 February, stood at $1,311.68 and that includes the magazine contributions and the princely accumulated interest sum of $1.70. The increase in the club’s treasury was entirely due to collection of membership fees for the year 2001.
After the business was disposed of, we then settled in for Lee Lasson’s presentation on computer viruses.
The first thing we did is talk about what viruses are. Simply put, a virus is a piece of software that infiltrates your computer without your permission and (usually) does something malicious to your computer. The technical folks have a lot of distinctions about the types of viruses and they use words like "virus," "worm," "Trojan Horse," and "wild" viruses. For our purposes, there is no need to refine our understanding to that level so we just referred to the whole batch of them as viruses.
Lee used Symantec’s Norton Anti-virus 2001 as the demonstration software. He pointed out that Symantec and McAfee are the "big two" anti-virus software vendors although you can obtain several nice anti-virus packages for free on the Internet. We quickly visited a free anti-virus site that offers a package called InoculateIT.
Most software packages are about equally effective in detecting and eradicating viruses and it turns out that there are a LOT of viruses to watch out for. Lee used the Symantec package to show that there are currently about 48,800 viruses that the package is watching out for.
The anti-virus packages typically offer two modes of operation. In the "scan" mode, the package can be instructed to examine the entire contents of a disk drive and seek out any viruses that may be present. This can take quite a long time if there are lots of files to scan (and there usually a BUNCH of files). In the "protect" mode, the virus software runs continually as a background task and watches all of your email downloads, program file executions, etc, and protects against viruses being introduced into your system.
The group discussed performance penalties inflicted as a result of continually monitoring and protecting files. Lee reported that anecdotal evidence suggests that continual protection may degrade machine performance by 8% to 20%. Don Widrig pointed out that such performance degradations were absolutely trivial compared to the aggravation and effort incurred by turning the protection off and then acquiring a virus because you are unprotected.
Lee used the Symantec package to demonstrate the various protection options. It turns out that there are a variety of options that the user may elect to control the scope and depth of the protection for general file usage, email usage, etc. One of the members, "paranoid Don", announced that he was more than happy to invoke the most serious protections, even at the expense of some processor performance degradation, simply to avoid even the remotest possibility of catching a virus.
Unfortunately, viruses are not a static phenomenon. New viruses are appearing every day so it behooves computer users to continually make sure they can detect and repair the latest viruses. The vendors offer comprehensive update mechanisms to allow the user to quickly and easily update their anti-virus software with the latest virus definitions. The Symantec package calls this feature Live Update. Lee demonstrated the simple one-click technique to invoke the Live Update feature. Once activated, Live Update automatically queries the Symantec anti-virus website and downloads any new anti-virus definitions that have been developed by Symantec. These updates are then automatically integrated into the Symantec utility on your computer with the net result that your computer now can detect and/or repair the latest viruses unleashed on an unsuspecting world.
The anti-virus software allows the user to automate the update process by providing a method of regularly scheduling updates on an automatic basis. Lee demonstrated the scheduling feature. "Paranoid Don" suggested that the scheduling feature should be used EVERY DAY, probably in the wee hours of the morning, so that your computer would always be able to respond to new viruses. To paraphrase an old military maxim, "The price of a virus-free world is eternal virus updates."
But, what happens if you already have a virus? Lee moved to Symantec’s anti-virus website and showed that there are a variety of packages offered as free downloads and these packages are designed to remove a specific virus that may already be infecting your machine.
There is another perspective here. Lee pointed out that the anti-virus vendors may have slightly suspect motivations. After all, their business feeds off of the fear and concerns of the computer-using public. For a different view, Lee visited several websites that try to put the whole virus issue into perspective. Of course, these sites do not deny the existence of viruses but they do try to calm the rhetoric. For example, they are quick to point out that the end of the Internet world is not at hand. In additions, some of their articles give a more balanced view of the alleged costs of a virus attack. In addition, these sites also discuss the whole issue of virus hoaxes. (The anti-virus vendors discuss hoaxes as well.)
Lee completed his virus presentation early (now THERE’S a first!) so we had a fine time discussing other computer matters. Yvonne Cocchi discussed her problems with her cable TV modem (it rarely works) and the group offered several suggestions. We’ll hear from Yvonne at the next meeting.
Lee discussed his experiences with the new high-speed satellite Internet connection known as Starband. This is a service offered by Echostar/Dish Network. He’s already voided the warranty and has hooked the interface box to his computer based on some suggestions offered by the Starband user’s group. So far, Lee reports that download speeds are awesome (up to 1Mbps) but the upload speeds are only mediocre (usually less than 70kbps). Lee hasn’t had the system up long enough to get a feel for reliability, update, etc.
As a final death-defying act, Lee attempted to use a new Windows Me feature called System Rollback to remove all of the indignities done to the demonstration computer during the presentation. System Rollback theoretically allows you to save snapshots of the entire operating system state at any point and then later roll the machine back to that point by undoing all the changes that have been made to the machine. After walking us through the feature, Lee then applied it to the machine. The machine hung up and died and the group agreed that this would be a good time to adjourn!
Respectfully submitted,
Don Widrig, EPICUG Secretary/Treasurer
The following websites were visited during the course of the evening:
| http://www3.ca.com/Solutions/ProductFamily.asp?id=128 - InoculateIT (free anti-virus program) |
|
http://antivirus.cai.com/
(another way to get to InoculateIT)
|
| http://www.mcafee.com/ - McAfee.com – Homepage (anti-virus vendor) |
| http://www.symantec.com/ - Symantec Worldwide Homepage (anti-virus vendor) |
| http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/ - Symantec Security Updates (anti-virus home page> |
| http://www.snopes2.com/ - Urban Legends Reference Pages (myth debunking) |
| http://www.vmyths.com/ - Vmyths.com- Truth About Computer Virus Myths & Hoaxes (non-vendor view of viruses and virus hoaxes |
| http://www.cert.org/ - CERT (Computer Emergency Response Team) Coordination Cente> |
| http://www.hsacorp.net/ - High Speed Access (Internet provider in Estes for cable TV modem> |
| http://www.starband.com/ - StarBand (satellite high-speed access connection) |
| http://www.starbandusers.com/index2.shtml - StarbandUsers.com (Starband users group> |
The Estes Park Internet Computer User Group (EPICUG) met
Tuesday, February 20th, in the Hondius Room in the Estes Park Public Library.
The President, Mike Molloy opened the meeting at 7:00pm. We had the usual introductions around the room and new members were greeted.
The Treasurer reported that the club had given a contribution to the Estes Park Public Library to buy computer-oriented magazine subscriptions as agreed upon at the January meeting. The magazines are already ordered and some have arrived. In recognition of the club’s contributions, the Library affixes a note to each of the magazines indicating our support of the Library. The Treasurer also reported that the club’s postal box (#404) has been renewed for the coming year. The Treasurer reported that the club’s treasury, as of 31 January, stood at $1,081.98 and that includes the magazine contributions and the princely accumulated interest sum of $1.95.
Wearing the Internet Access Task Force (IATF) hat, Don Widrig reported that the IATF was seeking volunteers for some data entry work to be performed at the Library at 5:00pm on Sunday, 25 February. No signup is needed, just show up!
Don also reported on a special recycling roundup of old computers that will be conducted at the Twin Peaks Mall in Longmont on Saturday, 24 February. This is a good chance to get rid of your old computer doorstops. Speaking of recycled computers, a new attendee at the meeting, Mark Lorenz, reported that Boy Scout Troop 8 is in serious need of a working laptop computer and a printer. Anyone interested in following up on seeing if they can help the troop should email their willingness to Mike Aldrich at mjaldrich@charter.net.
We then got down to business with Lee Lasson’s presentation of the wonders of computer networking. As Lee had announced earlier:
“The Internet is based on networking technologies. We connect computers
worldwide through the Internet using TCP/IP networking protocols that are nearly
transparent as we use the Internet in our daily lives. Wherever you have more
than one computer, you’ll want to consider networking them together to share
resources like applications, files, printers, and even to share the Internet.
Networking makes efficient use of resources. For example, if you network your
computers together, you can share a single Internet connection saving phone
lines and perhaps saving on your ISP charges. And why have multiple printers (or
juggle printers) when you can share your printer on your network? In order to
network computers whether at home or at work, you will need to learn the basics
of networking using TCP/IP.”
The slides for Lee’s presentation can be viewed by clicking here. Lee was ably assisted by Mike Molloy. Between the two of them, they had set up more computer boxes and processing power than existed for the Apollo moon shot! Lots of interesting boxes and software were demonstrated.
Of particular interest was a Linksys router that Mike demonstrated. This box allows a user to fairly easily set up a home network and connect all their computers through the box. At about $160, the box is a real wonder. After Lee and Mike demonstrated a networking setup between their computers on the “demo table,” the act was followed by another demonstration of printer sharing and file sharing via the network.
There is no doubt that networking is becoming more accessible to the ordinary user. Still, our two super-nerds had their fair share of setup and startup problems so the process is still not completely a simple process.
All in all, an impressive tour de force. The meeting ran way late so there was little time for audience questions and the meeting adjourned.
Respectfully submitted,
Don Widrig, EPICUG Secretary/Treasurer
There were no web sites of note that were visited during this meeting.
The Estes Park Internet Computer User Group (EPICUG) met Tuesday, January 16th, at 7:00pm in the Hondius Room in the Estes Park Public Library.
EPICUG President Mike Molloy called the meeting to order at just after 7pm. After making customary introductions of members and new visitors the meeting started with electing new officers.
The floor was opened up to nominations for President, but no one present was able to accept a nomination for the office. Mike Molloy agreed to stay on as acting President until a new one can be found and elected at a future time. Members motioned and voted to approve this.
The floor was opened for nominations for Vice President. Gary Dempsey agreed to run for this office. Members motioned and voted him to the office.
Mike announced that Don Widrig, who was not present at this meeting (he was in California taking delivery of a new granddaughter; congrats, Don!) had previously agreed to stay on as the Secretary/Treasurer. In the absence of other nominations, members motioned and voted him to the office.
The floor was opened for nominations for Program Director. After some discussion, Al Howard agreed to remain in this office. Other officers agreed to help Al more with programs. Members motioned and voted him to the office.
Mike thanked the slate of officers for their service in 2000 and urged members to consider contributing to the group by serving in a leadership role. He pointed out that no special technical expertise is required to lead the group, just a willingness to help and some organizational skills.
Soon, we will get updated photos and info for the officers on the officers page.
After electing new officers, the group discussed the old business of a "members only" interactive email list, separate and different from the announcement only list we currently use. There was discussion about the purpose of the list, the initial "population" of the list (all current members), and list etiquette. Lee Lasson of Estes Park On-Line generously provides mailing list services for the new list (and free web hosting for the EPICUG site as well), as well as the announcement list and other Estes Park related lists. The EPICUG members email list should become operational in the next few weeks.
Al Howard brought up new business regarding our group supporting a few magazine subscriptions for the Estes Park Public Library. The Library has had budget cuts which have severely impacted their ability to retain subscriptions and if they don't have help with this, they won't be able to keep these subscriptions. Group members motioned, discussed and voted to supply the Library with up to $150 for magazine subscriptions. The group officers agreed to discuss and advise on suggestions for the best magazines to provide.
The group then went on to collectively answer several member questions in a wide-ranging and enjoyable "Stump the Group" session. We fielded and answered several questions from members and visited a number of websites pertinent to these questions.
Topics included: surge surpressors and UPS systems; the new Apple PowerBook; Business 2.0 magazine, TechTV (channel 57 on Estes Park Charter Communications cable); TechTV ScreenSavers; TechTV Call For Help; using newsgroup search engines like Deja.com to research questions; using the Microsoft support Knowledge Base for tech help with Microsoft products; Sony memory stick storage technology; CompactFlash storage technology and the Sandisk reader; researching viruses using Symantec's AntiVirus Center and Virus Encyclopedia.
Sites visited and discussed during Stump-the-Group:
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