Monthly Programs: We’ve had a couple of "program emergencies" in recent months, and I’d like to thank Brian Lance and William LaMartin for stepping in there and making a success of the evening. The Windows SIG discussion at 6:00 prior to the meeting is going very well, too. Thanks to Mary Sheridan for conducting these. The Windows SIG is a discussion forum for anyone to discuss their current computer problems and successes. Please don’t think you don’t know enough to participate. Make use of this, just one more reason that the club works for you, the membership.

Please come to the meeting this month. It’s the month for officer nominations, the election itself being in December.

I’d decided to mess around with setting up voicemail on one of my computers, the intention being to use it as an intelligent screening tool for the useless and annoying calls I get. First I’d like to state that I’ve failed but have not given up hope. I removed the trial software I had and intend to try again later, perhaps early next year.

If I’d been successful, it would make a good article, but since it failed, I want to make a short mention of the product in case anyone else is interested. I couldn’t get the tech support for the product to help because it wasn’t tested on Win 98 SE, so I’ve given up for now.

Anyway, the product is called Cognitel, made by NovCom, a company in Minsk, Belarus. It has some very intriguing features. First, it uses caller-id to identify the caller. If the caller-id is not in its database it asks for the caller’s last name and then asks for the first name. It uses voice recognition then to decide who the caller is! You can program specific actions depending on who it is. The actions you can take are: Play a specific message for a specific person, take a message in any number of voicemail boxes, send a message to your pager or forward the call to your cell phone – or any other phone. You can set up the initial voice recognition part yourself by saying the names yourself, and when that person calls, it will update to the person’s actual voice. And it’s only $50. The downside is that you must have some specific type of modem that meets the TAPI standard. There are increasingly more modems being built for that standard, but, sorry, you can’t use the old Zoom or Hays turkey. Let me know if you decide to try it. I’m still very much interested. u