By William LaMartin, Editor, Tampa PC Users Group
lamartin@tampabay.rr.com

First, I thank all those members who sent me articles for the newsletter after my email request for material. It was good to see that I wasn't doing this all alone.

I also want to thank John Witmer for bringing his company's computer projector to our meetings. It really helps in that it is so superior to the older MOSI one we had been using.

RoadRunner On a recent trip to New York City, my RoadRunner connection with my laptop at an apartment in Manhattan was 1236.4 kbps. This is essentially a T-1 line. Right now in Tampa it is 401.2 kbps, which is a bit faster than usual for my home. We need to ask RR in Tampa why we are connecting at 1/3 the speed of New York City. Could it be that there are some Time Warner executives living near where I connected in Manhattan? I determined the speeds using the site http://computingcentral.msn.com/topics/bandwidth/speedtest500.asp.

TPCUG.ORG Our domain name TPCUG.ORG as been renewed with Network Solutions for another year. Speaking of the web site, in June we had an average of 162 user sessions each day with the average visitor staying at the site for 10 minutes and 17 seconds. Most of the visitors come to the site due to a search engine sending them there. AltaVista was the top referring engine to our site.

E-stamp I wrote sometime back about using e-stamp for postage. The program is a bit slow—at least on my computer. I think the reason is that for each mailing it needs to communicate with the "vault", the device that attaches to your parallel port and stores all your postage data—and this is not a very fast procedure. Additionally, I have not had good results printing postage on envelopes from Microsoft Word, so I now stick to printing from the e-stamp program. With some help from their support, I installed Windows Messaging, and this gave me an address book that the program would work with. On my last use, the program went to the e-stamp web site and downloaded an upgrade, so perhaps things will go a little smoother now. The software is now on version 1.1 SP2. I believe I started with just version 1.1. As I use it more, things seem to go more smoothly, and the other day I printed out two Priority Mail labels with postage and address for $3.20 each. That was convenient—printing Priority Mail postage and not having to visit the post office. It is the future, I am sure, but there are still a few kinks to work out.u