PC News and Tips

RIVER BENDER - December,  2003

Google is great: The Google search engine (www.google.com) keeps getting better and better. It's mind boggling how fast information can be found. I was missing the date in my genealogy records that my grandfather died so I took a long shot and entered Andrew Sandquist Etowah TN in Google (Etowah TN was where he last lived). Up pops Green Hill Cemetery in McMinn county which I clicked on and then searched for Sandquist. Not only did I get his birth and death dates I got an inscription of where he was born in Sweden. Now I'm off googling in Sweden!

Apparently Microsoft thinks Google is great too because they're trying to buy them. It's reported that MS is willing to pay $20 billion to incorporate Google in their next operating system called Longhorn due out in a couple years. But so far Google is not interested and is considering going public in the stock market.

Here's another goodie I discovered in Google: Suppose you're looking for a classmate named Wallace that you think lives in New Bern. His name is either Dave or Dean or something starting with D so you enter in Google: Phonebook: D Wallace, New Bern and three Wallaces show up, including David F. Wallace, along with address and phone number. If you're not sure where in NC the Wallace lives replace New Bern with NC and you'll see every D Wallace in NC. It turns out there's 320 of them. You really need to have some idea where a person lives. It also helps if the name is not common. I gave up trying to find my old friend Sam Jones in PA.

Searching census records and books: Wow, the New Bern-Craven County Library now lets you access actual census records online using their Heritage Quest subscription. Elsewhere you have to pay a fee for this. All you need is the bar-code number from your library card and go to the web site at http://newbern.cpclib.org/research/index.html. Another new goodie is the new service from Amazon.com where you can search the text of over 100,000 books. Here's how: Search for the book you want at http://www.amazon.com, click on it and select look inside.

Online dictionary and thesaurus : I'm always having to check spelling or use a thesaurus to look up alternate choices of words in my writings. I use www.dictionary.com. You can also find it quickly by putting dictionary in Google.

End of Spam? This may be old news by the time it gets published but it looks like something is finally being done about the proliferation of spam. The U.S. Senate passed a bill on October 22 regulating unsolicited commercial e-mail and allowing fines as large as $3 million for some types of illegal spam. The U.S. House of Representatives could vote in early November on a bill. But some folks think the CAN-SPAM bill won't be enforceable because it's tough to identify the spammer and because a large percentage of spam comes from outside the U.S. More than half of my mail is spam and half of it comes from foreign countries (see http://www.wap.org/info/techstuff/domains.html to decode two-letter domain abbreviations in the address). Mailwasher (www.mailwasher.com) at least lets me delete all the junk at the ISP level before wasting time downloading it.

Internet Tax? Rep. Chris Cox -R co-sponsored HR-49 to make permanent the ban on taxing Internet access that expired September 17. This is a separate issue from taxing Internet sales that a number of states are considering. Let's hope this gets passed by congress because we certainly don't want to pay for each e-mail sent or each access to Internet.

Catch the culprit and get rich: Microsoft has created a $5 million reward program with hopes to find and convict those who illegally release worms, viruses and other types of malicious programs on the Internet.The first two rewards will be for information leading to the arrest and conviction of those responsible for the spread of the MSBlast.A worm and the SoBig virus unleashed earlier this year. The company will offer $250,000 rewards for each. Let's hope this helps but some folks think MS would be better off spending the money making their software less susceptible to viruses.

Can't send mail - try this: Every now my ISP Always-Online's send-mail server goes down and I receive an error message connection refused 10061. Receive mail is usually OK. I first reboot and sometimes the problem comes clear. But if it doesn't I go to Always-Online's Webmail site at http://mail.always-online.com:8383/ where I usually find that I can send and receive mail. I then send a message to support@always-online.com informing them of the error message.

Everybody's not getting RBmail and NBCUG mail : In running RBmail and NBCUG mail I'm seeing both systems become more and more unreliable. Rarely is a message now received by all members. Mail used to be missed only by members who forgot to tell me their address had changed. But now 20 or more error messages appear every time a message is sent. What's happening is that ISPs are subscribing to anti-spam lists and rejecting traffic coming from ISPs listed as offensive spammers. For example, AOL recently rejected RBmail messages sent from our host Carolina Connection. This caused numerous error messages stating that mail could not be delivered to AOL members. Joe Scharbrough, engineer at CConnect, sent out a message stating that the condition was being corrected. The reason ISPs are trying to reduce spam is that it has reached the point where they barely can handle traffic for their own clients. It has gotten so bad that some ISPs have to shut down their mail server on occasions.

All past articles are posted at http://www.always-online.com/nbcug/dwindex.htm.