Regular Meeting

Wednesday, 

Caseyville Township Bldg. 
10001 Bunkum Rd.
Fairview Heights, IL

Directions:      Map:

Board 
Meeting

Wednesday, 

Ryan's Steakhouse
Fairview Heights, IL
Meals starts about 6:00. Meeting starts at 7:00

Everyone is welcome

This
Meeting

19

A PC Buyers Guide

Next
Meeting

17

Sorry.....No computer. This is our one meeting a year where we get together, converse, and talk. No computers repaired.

Hello From The Pres...
Mike Taphorn

ELECTIONS

 We are going to have Elections at our November Meeting.  Please make sure you attend the meeting and cast your votes. Unlike the past few years, this year we actually have a few new people running for office. Unfortunately for you, I’m the only one running for President…

The other nominees are as follows:

VP                                           -           Jim Tomlinson

Secretary                               -            Carlos Mariles

Treasurer                               -            Don Wold

Membership Chairman            -        J.C. Spelce

Web Master                           -            Chuck Hill

Newsletter Editor              -                 Chuck White

Librarian                                 -            Charles Wallace, Diane White, and Keith Hurst

 See the Secretary's report for the official list with photos.

There are four Member at Large positions to fill at the discretion of the board. We may use one of those slots to assign an assistant librarian to help out at the meetings. Another position we were looking at giving to a MAL was the “Prize purchaser” position. We are still discussing the MAL’s so let me know if you are interested in getting free dues for one year…

NOVEMBER DEMO

Since the computer show is going to be taking place the first weekend in December and everyone is going to be getting their toys for the holidays, we figured we might as well try to help you get the most for your money. Jim Tomlinson is putting together a PC buyers guide and due to his bronchitis, I’m going to be reading / explaining it to everyone. We may also have a guest speaker from a  local retailer, but I haven’t finalized the plans yet so I don’t want to promise anything. If you have any websites that are a good place to shop, please print out the URL and I’ll share them with everyone when I’m giving the demo…

COMPUTER SHOW

As I mentioned above, the computer show will be here soon (Dec. 5^th -7^th), and we will have the sign up sheets at the meeting. Please look at your calendars and see if you can work the booth for an hour or two on Friday, Saturday or Sunday. If you do, you’ll get into the show free, and you’ll get the joy of helping others…

HOLIDAY PARTY

The Holiday Party (Christmas Party for the non-politically correct) will be held on the Third Wednesday of December (December 17th). We’ll have the sign up sheets at the November meeting, so start thinking about what kinds of treats you want to bring to the party. I’m sure you’ll come up with something great, and if you can’t cook, pizza or chicken is always nice…

See you at the meeting …

 Mike

Web page update

The Website's main page (body.html) has been updated to include additional "keywords" in the meta tag fields. This should improve search engine hits for words like St. Louis, Illinois, Clubs, computers, membership, etc. This change was made based on a members suggestion during the September meeting. While we added some additional 15 keywords to the main page, you will not see any difference in what is displayed. These keywords are only available if you select the "view source" option in your browser, and look at the meta name fields. If you do this you will see the following"

<meta name="keywords" content="Computer Club, Club, Metroeast, metro east, Gateway, St.Louis, St. Louis, Illinois, IL, MO ,Missouri, Bluestar, Computershow, Computer Show">
<meta name="descripton" content="Caseyville, Collinsville, Fairview Heights, computers, meeting, free, membership, member">

The ones shown in this color are new.

Miscellaneous
 Things Of Interest And Importance To Someone 

emailSTRIPPER

emailStripper is a free program for cleaning the ">" and other formatting characters out of your emails. It will restore "forwarded" or "replied" emails back to their original state so they're easier to read.

It's simple to use, and best of all it's FREE!  Note: Before you can us it you must save the file on your hard-drive in an easy to remember location.

StripMail

StripMail is a FREEWARE utility that: Strips the characters ">" and "|" from forwarded e-mails. it also formats the text into paragraphs, making it easier to read. You can also changes the text's right margin. It can be used with any email client. 

StripMail is also FREE.

Here Is A BASIC TUTORIAL ON SEARCHING THE WEB

Here is a 7 lesson tutorial on how to search the internet. It is FREE.  The lessons are easy to use and are designed to get you started in the right direction with a minimum of time and effort. You can zip through these lessons in no time, any time you want. They are very short and succinct; each can be read in a few minutes. Feel free to jump in wherever you like, skip what you don't want to read, and come back whenever you need to.

If you just want some quick SEARCH TIPS, skip everything else and go directly to Lesson 7.

 Wikipedia, the free multilingual, open content, collaboratively developed encyclopedia (with supporting almanac-like and gazetteer-like information) that is managed and operated by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. As of September 2003, it covers a wide range of subjects and has 160,000 articles in English (by its own count). It also has over 150,000 articles in other languages. It covers many different topics. 

You can even submit your own information on a subject.  Definitely worth a visit. 

WordWeb is a quick and powerful English thesaurus and dictionary for Windows. It can be used to lookup words from almost any Windows program, showing definitions, synonyms and related words. You can search for words matching a pattern, find and solve anagrams, and optionally search a large number of extra word lists.

Unlike any paper dictionary or thesaurus WordWeb is truly a Word Web - each set of synonyms is linked to other related sets. Lookup "tree", click on the "Types" tab and you'll have a list of different types of tree. Click on "Part of" and WordWeb will tell you that a tree can be part of a "forest" or "wood". 

I would highly recommend this to several of our members. It would make putting the
news letter  newsletter together much easier.

If you have a high speed internet connection, the correct spelling or correct word is only a few clicks away. If you have dialup, you will just have to wait a bit longer. It is still probably faster than finding that old "dead tree archive" and looking up the word. Download HERE. The file is 5.2 megs. 

There everywhere!  Did someone leave their Windows open, or is this another Windows security flaw?

Ladybugs are shipped around the world as a biological control agent for garden and tree pests. You can buy ladybugs by mail, and have them shipped to you as adults, in cotton bags mixed with wood shavings ( Who would want to!). A gallon of ladybugs (72,000 to 80,000 adults) will cost you about US$67.00, and you can release them in your garden in small bunches, preferably in the evening after watering the garden down. There are even ladybug houses you can build or buy, and ladybug food to sustain them while they are getting established in your garden.

I learned that the ladybug invasion we're experiencing is not from our native ladybugs, but from a Japanese import! Since native ladybugs were not as aggressive against pests as other varieties, the US Department of Agriculture released a multicolored Asian ladybug in the eastern US beginning in 1979 (Louisiana) and 1980 (Mississippi), and continuing until at least 1982 when there were some test releases from the Beltsville, Maryland Experiment Station.  If you look closely at these little critters, you will see that they have physical differences from our typical ladybugs. They have a white segment with black blotches that form the letter "m" (or "w" depending on your perspective) in the area immediately behind the head. They also differ in color and number of spots from our usual ladybugs. Instead of the deep red color, these newcomers range in hues from red to orange to tan. Orange is the most common color. They can have up to 20 spots -- or none at all. 

The good news is there are 350 species of ladybugs in the US. Somehow it figures the government was involved in this some way. If you really like these little smelly creatures, you can buy a house for them from HERE. Sorry VA or FMHA loans are available for their homes. 

Linux News

The LWN.net Linux Distribution List has been tracking Linux distributions since 1999. This site has all of the information about the latest releases.

I suspect you will be hearing even more about Linux since Novell bought SUSE, Europe's leaning Linux distribution. You can expect to see SUSE showing up in this country SOON! Hopefully with the documentation in English and not German.

Linux the official operating system for the State Of Massachusetts?

Well maybe not quite yet but soon. In a memo sent last month, Massachusetts Administration and Finance Secretary instructed the state's chief technology officer to adopt a policy of "open standards, open source" for all future spending on information technology. While the directive wouldn't completely cut out Microsoft from the state's $80 million technology budget, it may have been the clearest example yet of a state government taking sides — against Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft — in the most important struggle in the software industry.