Old Photographs My main project last month was creating an online, searchable index for the Tampa-Hillsborough County Library System's collection of old Tampa photographs in their Burgert Bothers Photographic Archive. To access this collection on the Internet you have to use Telnet instead of the World Wide Web (like DOS as compared to Windows). Then use key strokes to move about the different Telnet screens and enter keywords to do a search. Doing a search results in a new Telnet screen with at most seven entries, where you have to enter some more key strokes until you get to a screen that lists the URL for a particular photo. Finally, you have to copy this URL and paste it into your web browser before you can finally view the photograph.

This was like the Dark Ages compared to what we have become used to on the WWW. So, I wrote a Visual Basic program that connected to the library's Telnet site and captured the approximately 4,500 titles listed under Burgert Brothers along with their descriptions and URL's. I then did more programming to provide two ways of viewing these photographs.

In the first way, I created five web pages at my web site, since the photographs are stored on the library's server in five different archives. On each of the five pages are listed the titles in that archive with descriptions and hyperlinks that you simply click on to view a particular photograph. Some of these pages may contain as many as 1,100 links.

In the second method of viewing the photographs, I created a searchable database of the titles and URL's, then using the Active Server Page (ASP) technology and Visual Basic Scripting, I placed this database online at my lamartin.com web site. Note that after you have done a search, you can click on the word Date at the top of the Date field and the search results will be ordered by date. This is one more example of the usefulness of ASP. To try this out, go to http://lamartin.com and click on the Hypertext Index to the Burgert Brothers Online Photography Collection of Tampa Photos link.

New Computer There is a new Gateway 600 MHz Pentium III computer in our house. I am just amazed at what you can get on these machines now: 128 MB RAM, 20 GB hard drive, DVD/CD drive and a flat screen monitor. That monitor is what really sets this machine apart. The 15 inch flat screen has as much viewable area as a regular 17 inch monitor--and takes up less than 1/10 of the space. Of course, it costs a bit more than a standard 17 inch monitor. Gateway was also basically giving away a color printer, an Intel PC Camera and some software. By paying $100 more, we upgraded the printer to an HP 832 C DeskJet. I didn't really need another printer in the house, but since this machine will be residing in my daughter's room, I thought having her own, newer printer would be nice.

You read correctly, the new computer is for my daughter. I am still working away happily on my Gateway 166 machine. However, I will be able to use the new machine, and it will be networked into our home network. Right now it is networked with a temporary cable running through the house that can be rolled up when not in use, but I have plans to run a permanent network cable to it under the house and through the attic.

The only problem I have discovered with the new computer is with the DVD drive. As with most new computers bought from major retailers, there is no DVD decoder card. All the decoding is done with software, Software CeniMaster99 in my case. Not having a decoder card is good since it is not taking up an expansion slot in the computer; however, it is also bad, since there are going to be some DVD's that the software will not decode. And wouldn't you know it, the first DVD we purchased, October Sky, could not be played on our system. It played fine on fellow member, Wade Herman's, computer, and all of his DVD's played fine on our computer. But apparently October Sky is not going to play on our machine until CeniMaster puts out a patch to their software to cover those titles for which there is a problem.

I had no problem getting through to Gateway's toll free support, but after several calls, I realized that the technicians I was speaking with really had no solution to the problem--probably didn't even understand the problem. That is when I brought the computer into the local Gateway store and the technician there said that everything was fine with my system. It played each of the 15 DVD's they had for testing, but there would always be some DVD's that would not play on a software decoded setup. Anyway, for the 95% or more of DVD‘s we can view, the quality and sharpness of that 15 inch flat screen LCD monitor makes it quite easy to watch a DVD movie.

Online Purchases With the closing of 1999, you probably have heard all you want to hear about e-commerce, but since I have a little more space to fill, I will relate how I found a difficult item to find, saved a lot of money and received everything in a very timely fashion.

My mother needed new transmitters for two garage door openers made by Pulsar. Pulsar no longer exists. As you might expect, if you don’t own a Genie opener, you are not going to easily find a transmitter at Home Depot, Scotties or anywhere else. Furthermore, those "universal" transmitters are not all that universal. However, a search on Yahoo yielded two California companies that could supply a replacement for a Pulsar transmitter of the frequency I needed. The cost was $20 per transmitter plus about $6 in shipping.

My next foray into e-commerce was to Buy.com to purchase some additional ribbons, both photographic and regular, for my ALPS printer. I purchase a lot when I order, and the price came to a total of $95. However, if I had made the purchase locally, the price would have been $160. Quite a savings, and they arrived in two days with regular shipping.

I buy most things locally. The new computer came from the local Gateway store, and most of my books come from the local Inkwood bookstore; however, technical books I usually order from our User Group’s link to Amazon.com, as I did with the DVD above. However, on comparing Amazon.com’s price of $50 to Borders.com’s price of $35, I was forced to deny the TPCUG their 5% commission and order from Borders. So it pays to compare—something the Internet makes easy. Finally, my daughter made some last minute gift purchases from Nordstrom—and they arrived for Christmas with no special handling. So our e-commerce experiences were all positive.

2000 January 1, 2000 has come, and my computers seem to be fine. The four newer computers seem OK, but not everything has been checked. And on the three older machines, two 486's and a 386—all of whose batteries are dead, thus requiring me to set their clocks to make it 1/1/2000—only the 386 exhibits a problem. Something seems to be wrong with the Microsoft Office Suite. In Note Pad, I could copy and paste for example, but this could not be done in the Office Suite. I also could not insert or format anything in Word. I think this most likely has nothing to do with Y2K. Somehow the Office setup on this machine got corrupted. I am going to relegate this machine to the garage anyway. It is really too old to test anything on. I keep these older machines around to test Visual Basic programs on different platforms, but since no one uses a 386 anymore, it doesn't make sense to take time testing on such a machine anyway. u