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

Election In addition to our party, we will elect officers for 2004. At present only the current officers are on the ballot.

They are:

Articles The newsletter needs your articles. We have a small newsletter, so we should be able to fill it with material from our members--but not without your help. Tell us about your computer triumphs and failures.

Amazon Purchases at Amazon.com through our web site like have fallen drastically. Either people are not purchasing from Amazon or, as I suspect, they are forgetting to get there via the link at our web site. If you fit that profile, please remember the TPCUG when you intend to visit Amazon.

Viruses The viruses and junk mail are still filling my inbox. It is down somewhat from previous months, but it is still always between 100 and 200 such messages per day.

1993 I hope you get some value from the reprinting of the articles from 10 years back. Personally, I enjoy recalling how things were in PCs then. Usually I run the minutes of the meetings since that recalls the meetings. This month, though, I went with a very long President’s Message where then-president Harvey Bruneau describes his trip to COMDEX, which back then was a much more important event than now, and offers his predictions for the future. Did they come true? Read the article to see what they were.

Send an email card Continuing with my investigation of things .Net I have come up with an example of sending those ubiquitous email greeting cards. If you go to the Visual Studio .Net link on my http://www.lamartin.com, you will now see an option to “Create a Card.” There you will be able to combine your brief text into an HTML type email message with a photo selected from a few of the “tourist-type” photos that I have taken over the years and then send it to whomever you choose.

If I could find a free spell-checking web service, I could also run your text through a spell check before the card is sent. I hadn’t really thought about one until now. A quick check in Google Groups for the items: spell check “web service” produced a message in a Usenet newsgroup that said Google itself had such a free service in Beta that would allow up to 1000 free Google searches per day, and it included a spelling check.

I just signed up for a Google account and already figured out their web service. It is a very simple service that returns what it considers the correct spelling for a phrase that you submit to it. Right now I don’t know how long of a phrase you can submit, since it appears that for more than just a sentence or so, the last part of the phrase doesn’t get corrected. So, perhaps, soon I will find time to incorporate spell checking into the card.

Google has to be one of the great resources of the web. Most of you know about using Google for the web to locate information on the WWW. But, I think few of you realize that, when doing a Google search, if you select the Groups tab instead of the Web tab you will be accessing the many years of Usenet newsgoups where people have been discussing any topic imaginable.

I use the Groups section almost like a Help file when I am programming in any of the languages. If I am looking for an example of how to do something in Delphi, Visual Basic, or one of the new Visual Studio .Net languages, I can often find it faster in Google than in the particular program's own Help file. As they say, "Google is your friend." u