There seems to be an expressed interest in the past two Disks-of-the-Month. I made what I thought would be enough, but I received requests after they were sold out. March's DOM was "Pop-Up Killer" and April was "Sheepshead and Business Card Maker" programs. More will be available at the next meeting.

Frederick Young submitted a very nice report on the audit he and John Schoenfeld did of WAUC's treasurer's books.

The raffle for May will be a Hewlett-Packard scanner. The raffle for May will be a Visioneer OneTouch 8100 flatbed color scanner for Windows with 600 x 1200 dpi optical resolution, 42-bit color.

We will be selling Quill brand CD-Rs; ten to a package for $3. Each CD-R includes a jewel case. The CD-Rs will be for sale at general meetings only.

Bruce will contact APCUG to see what papers are needed to become a non-profit club. He will also work with Kris Bedalov on updating the by-laws.

The topic for the May general meeting is Linux.

With a lot of good old-fashioned trial and error, we learned several things.

Disk of the Month: Three-handed Sheepshead and Business Card Maker were available as the DOM. There is also Pop-Up-Killer from last month that was quite popular. WAUC is also selling CD-Rs in jewel cases at 10 for $3.00.

Raffle: The winner of the raffle has a choice of Reference Library 2002, Encarta, Microsoft Money 2002 Deluxe or a carry-all bag.

There are also WAUC sweatshirts for sale: $14 for the embroidered logo; $8 for the iron-on.

Buy/Sell: James Sebum would like to buy an HP Tool Kit for the Mac.

Bill Yahle has an HP Colorado 800mb internal tape drive with 5 or 6 tapes for $25, also a parallel adapter card to use with more parallel ports for$10.

Sam's Club Membership: Bruce finalized the memberships. Richard Coplan inquired why he was not contacted to renew as a former member. Bob Horvath said Bruce sent e-mails to former members asking if they wanted to continue. Somehow, Rich didn't get contacted; he will contact Bruce to discuss the matter.

By-laws: This is an on-going project; hopefully, they will be rewritten soon.

Web Page: John Hirsh updated the page and noticed 6000 hits to date. He was pleased since the page has been up for only six months. Bruce Schneider said that by going to www.sewwug.org and clicking on COMDEX at the bottom of the screen we could view pictures of COMDEX that were taken by Valerie Hauk.

Super Computer Sale: Leo Hoffer had some positive feedback from Blue Star, managers of the show. Quite a number of people took advantage of the help desk that was manned by members of local computer clubs.

Indispensable Person Award: Rich Coplan received a sweatshirt and certificate for the help he provides WAUC members.

Questions/Problems: Bob Malek is having difficulties using his previous MSN Internet account when he installed Windows XP. It seems he is getting another MSN account. Jim Seidel suggested going to the third menu on the web page and follow the prompts. Bill Regner said he had no trouble getting help by calling the number on the web page.

Ron Toro is having problems with Windows 98se not shutting down, on an intermittent basis. He was told to go into Windows Update found in your Start menu. Rich suggesting going to the Control Panel, then System and check that there are no errors in the Device Manager. Doris advised closing all programs before shutting down. Dave Landstrom said that it is important to let Scandisk run completely before shutting down.

Jim Seidel notices that on a number of websites the size of the picture that appears is only about half the size of the available window, with the text hardly visible when he's using Windows NT.

Bill Yahle would like to have a good reg cleaner to use with Windows XP. Windows no longer offers a reg cleaner for XP. Bill Regner said Windows 2000 RegClean would be most compatible, but advised using the system restore feature that comes with Windows XP.

Paper Sale: Chris Gardner said that the Paper Sale and Stamp Expo would be running concurrently April 26, 27 and 28.

Demonstration

We were very fortunate to have Mary Ann Dawson, a trainer at Quad/ Graphics, who gave us a presentation on Excel, a Microsoft spreadsheet application. Mary Ann gave us a background on the development of electronic spreadsheets, from DOS versions, to Lotus, then Excel. She also gave us a humorous list of how we know when we have a bad spreadsheet program.

Next Mary Ann brought up another tool bar and showed us how to anchor it by double clicking on the blue bar. This tool bar had functions for checking off amounts that were paid and adding shading and borders to the cells. It's also a good idea to check the status bar to see the range of the calculations. One can also see averages, minimums and maximum ranges.

One topic covered was Buy and Hold Funds versus the other school of thought In and Out.

We visited web site -- http://www. fabian.com. This site tells when to buy and sell mutual funds and charges $199 a year for services. It comes with 12 issues of a newsletter. One feature it has is a Lemon List. Rich explored several items on the Lemon List with the guidance of the attendees of the meeting and suggested visiting the FAQ listing on the web site. If you join fabian.com, you may get some unsolicited information in the form of junk mail.

Next we went to the web site: www.capitalismmagazine.com, went to the bottom of the web page to the Archives and visited the January issues. We reviewed an article by James R. Glassman called Investment Assessment Focused Strategies. We went to www.moneycentral.msn.com, clicked on Investor, and reviewed some funds. We then went to www.google.com and did a "mutual fund research" search and arrived at www.Morningstar.com. where there is one free lookup per day of a stock at this web site.

Next month, Bruce Schneider will be showing the SIG a variety of investment websites he has recently discovered.

Many times in Web browsing or editing, you may encounter a number or phrase that you would like to copy, but the field cannot be edited so you cannot click the copy button. You may still be able to highlight the field.

Try highlighting the field by left clicking the mouse, and drag it over the non-editable data. Release the mouse and the data should be highlighted. Then, while holding the Control (Ctrl) button, press the Insert button.

Then go to the document or Web page onto which you want to paste, place your mouse over where you want to paste the image and single click so that Windows places the cursor there. Then, while holding down the Shift button, press the Insert button.

Submitted by Sandy Karlovich

To send a picture in e-mail, open an e-mail program, open blank message - change to HTML format, go to insert picture, browse to the picture you want, click on the picture and it will go into your e-mail. Photo editing programs were demonstrated such as Canon Photo and Adobe Photo Deluxe.

The recent report shows IE 5 and IE 6 hold the number one and number two spots for browser acceptance, worldwide, with Netscape users dropping off "precipitously" to a seven percent acceptance rate. That's a five percent drop-off since the last survey.

Taking information collected from nearly 50 million Hitbox visitors a day (Hitbox is owned by Web-SideStory), the report's authors parsed information by operating system, browser version, and browser plug-ins used by surfers.

An industry expert believes the advent and success of Microsoft's latest browser version, IE 6, is much to blame for Netscape's version 6 free fall.

The two disparate browser versions were released at practically the same time several months ago.

Part of the blame, the report finds, is with the owner of Netscape, AOL Time Warner. With more than 34 million users worldwide, you'd think the company would use the latest flavor of Netscape to drive their service.

Unfortunately for Netscape, however, is the fact that AOL has been using IE as the web browser people use to navigate the millions of web pages, forums, shopping sites and other communities for the number one internet service provider (ISP).

submitted by Terry Harvey

Media Player is a great piece of software that plays CDs, music, video, and other multimedia software formats. It comes with Windows Me, is available for download for Windows 98, but is NOT compatible with Windows 95. if you are still running Windows 95, do NOT attempt to download and load Media Player. It will not work!

submitted by Terry Harvey

Sixteen members shared thoughts at the meeting location, Speedway Station, 60th & Layton, on April 18. Bob West delivered a report of autosites and offered a review as he brought some of them to the screen, using a local zip code to obtain dealers located in our area.

The best site for car pricing is www.edmunds.com. Other good sites are www.autosite.com and www.autoconnect.com. Sometimes a car's optional features and pricing of the options were a bit hard to find. For a 2002 Chevrolet Cavalier, 2-Dr. Coupe, Sport Model, it was necessary to first go to the Chevrolet site, "optional package" rather than to the 2002 Chevrolet Cavalier site.

It seems that generally one can obtain a better price when dealing in person, eyeball to eyeball, than on the internet. To get the best deal from the Internet, it is necessary to go to the person you dealt with on the Internet. Only one person Bob called via phone returned his call.

Features of the largest site on the Internet, eBay, were perused. As many as 3 million items may be listed for SaSe. Bob led us to "new sellers" start here. It is not necessary to register unless you are planning to bid. Fees for listing an item for sale begin at 30 cents and go to $3.30. It is helpful to provide a picture of the item to be sold. A camera is then shown in front of a listed item. If, or when, an item is sold, an assessed percentage of the sale is charged.

Club members dispersed shortly after 9 PM.

GUI (pronounced gooey, as in: "this mud is gooey!") stands for Graphical User Interface.

This often-used term means that unlike the old world of DOS where you had to type in every command on a strictly textual screen, you can now point and click your way to computing power using icons and a graphical presentation.

Some of you have been asking about "UNICODE." Here's my 2-cents worth:

UNICODE is a 16-bit system for encoding letters and characters of all the world's languages.

At 16 bits, it can encode 65,536 different characters. That's 2 raised to the 16th power. Work it out: [2x2x2x2x2x2x2x2x2x2x2x2x2x2x2x2 =65,536]. (Hint: It's quicker on your calculator.)

Sixteen-bit characters (like Unicode) are also called "Two-Byte" or "Wide Characters."

The latest version is 3.2.0

Want to learn more? Click Here: http://www.unicode.org

With computer prices dropping so quickly, it's tempting to buy a new computer and upgrade your entire system to the next level - or if you're like me, several levels. One thing to remember, many of the new systems do not include a recovery CD. (A recovery CD contains all of the programs that your system had installed when you first bought it.)

Before doing anything else, burn a CD using one of the many excellent disk-imaging tools to capture how your system looks. That way if something catastrophic happens (and it will), you can quickly get your computer back to first base.

Also remember to create a boot disk. If you don't, you can count on your system crashing.

submitted by Terry Harvey

A quick way to see what you have on your computer is just to type-in ABOUT:PLUGINS on the "Location" line of your Netscape Navigator browser. (Don't forget the colon.) The list will come up, showing all the installed .dll files and what kinds of files each can handle, by Mime Type. Now, if I only knew what "Mime" meant.

With eBay, you are using them as a vehicle to sell or buy stuff, but the deals are worked out between the seller and the buyer directly. eBay charges a very moderate listing fee for each item listed and a moderate percentage of the item sold, ONLY IF IT SELLS. If an item does not sell, you are only responsible for the listing fee, which is from $0.25 to $2.00, based on your starting value or your reserve price.

eBay asks you to set a specified period of time for each item listed.

Becky White is known as "whitebear"