RIVER BENDER - JUNE,  2003

The month of May was a busy month for me. The deadline for submitting my article for the June RIVER BENDER was fast approaching and I didn't have the faintest idea what to write about. What made matters worse was that we traveled to the Duke Medical Center in Durham for Marilee to have hip replacement surgery. All I could think of was how to maintain e-mail contact with family members and friends from a motel room. Since many of you travel and someday may want to have e-mail while out of town in a motel let me tell you about my experience:

I'm the custodian of NBCUG's ancient laptop donated about a year ago by Brad Geres, instructor at Craven Community College. I decided to take it along with us to Durham. It's an old 486 running at 75mHz, 16MB RAM and a 33kbps modem and agonizingly slow on web pages but OK for e-mail. I installed MailWasher just in case someone sent a large attachment or spam that I could delete at the ISP and avoid the time downloading it.

The first problem was to determine if I could access my Always-Online account in Durham. I needed to know (1) that the motel had a phone jack to plug my modem in and would not charge an arm and a leg to make data calls and (2) that a local phone number existed in Durham for Always-Online. I stayed at the North Durham Red Roof Inn and found that they only charged Duke patients $37/night, had a modem jack and charged absolutely nothing to make local calls. So far, so good.

Before leaving for Durham, I accessed Always-Online's web page that said they were in 800 cities and checked out the list for North Carolina. Two numbers were shown for Raleigh and one for Durham. The problem was that the list said that one must access the same network you are registered on. My account in New Bern was shown as being on the QW network, whatever that is. Only one of the phone numbers was shown on the QW network but it was in Raleigh while the other two numbers were shown on the TE network. So we left for Durham not knowing if the Raleigh phone number would be a local number dialed from the motel in Durham. I couldn't get an answer from Google.

Another problem was to determine if Outlook Express 5.5 on the laptop needed to be re-optioned to access Always-Online in Durham. It was a good thing I checked with Sandra at the helpdesk because she told me I needed to change the outgoing SMTP setting in OE from mail.always-online.com to smtp.safepages.com. I'm glad I found this out otherwise I would not have been able to access my mail account using OE. I could have used WebMail, of course, but preferred OE with all my addresses and past messages available.

A backup plan, just in case I wouldn't be able to use the laptop at all, was to find a nearby library in Durham with Internet access where I could access my account via WebMail. Google found the North Durham library just a couple miles from the Durham Regional Hospital (part of Duke complex). I ended up going there a couple times just to use WebMail and be able to print out a few e-mail messages to take to Marilee in the hospital.

As soon as I got to the Durham motel room I tried out the laptop dialing into the Raleigh phone number and surprisingly it worked. I checked with the motel clerk to make sure no phone charges were billed and they were not. From then on I made lots of data calls and exchanged lots of e-mail with the family and friends. The old slow laptop really can through fine and it sure beat making toll phone calls with extra charges that you usually get at a motel.

It's hard to see how one can get along without a computer and the Internet nowadays. It not only helped us keep in contact with folks while out of town but enabled us to learn all about hip surgery and what to expect in advance of the operation. By the way, our initial contact with Duke Medical was by e-mail and a reply was received the following day.

All past issues of my River Bender articles are at http://www.always-online.com/nbcug/dwindex.htm.