PC Trivia

RIVER BENDER - June, 2006

This is a fantastic program that's lots of fun. For example, would you like to see what your former old house looks like today? Enter an address and zoom in and not only see the house but the whole neighborhood as well. We used to live in Colorado Springs 40 years ago so it was fun to see our old house and fly around town to see how it's grown. Google Earth, of course, is billed as a fast broadband service, but works surprisingly well (albeit a bit slow) on 56Kb/s dialup. It's a big program to download (11.5Mb) so take a look at the web page above first and see if your PC meets system requirements. It's only good for Windows XP.

This is another fantastic web page that provides appraisals on houses including aerial views. Unfortunately only about 50% of homes in NC are currently in the system (RB is not), but we went back and looked at former homes we owned in other states and it worked fine. On some, we were able to see a birds-eye view and look at the front and back of the house. A broadband connection, of course, will speed up the display but the program works fine on dial-up.

I hope everybody is now aware of the Craven County Geographical Information System (GIS) at http://gismaps2.cravencounty.com/maps/ (click on maps). Enter an address or name and see the property tax appraisal

Do you have old US savings bonds you never cashed in? If so, find out what they're worth at http://wwws.publicdebt.treas.gov/BC/SBCPrice. Just enter the serial number and issue date.

I hate to keep harping about BIG files that folks send to over 450 members of RBmail but after the last complaint, several people asked "Wallace, what's a big file?" or "How can I find how big my file is before I send it?" Duh...

File size is shown where the file is listed, provided you have clicked on View and Details on the toolbar at the top. Most files are shown in Kb, which means Kilobytes or 1000 bytes (a byte is 8 bits). Bigger files are shown in Mb, which means Megabytes or 1 million bytes. For dial-up service a 1Mb file will take approximately 3 minutes to download at 50+kb/s speed. Most plain text messages are 2-5 KB in size and only take a fraction of a minute to download. Dial-up folks become very unhappy when they have to wait several minutes for your epistle to arrive before they can see more important mail. In running 4 e-mail lists of over 900 members I receive lots of mail that I don't have time to download so I delete it at my server using MailWasher. See www.mailwasher.net. By the way, I've now set a limit of 1Mb for a message sent to rbmail@XXXalways-online.com (remove XXX) and may reduce it further if folks continue sending huge files. Watch out for PDF files as they are generally very large and can't be resized easily. Get free Photo Resizer at http://www.nbcug.com/links.htm.

If you haven't seen any messages sent to RBmail for several days, it may be because you changed your Internet Server and never sent me your new address. This causes an error message that mail can't be delivered to you so I try calling you on the phone, provided you've given me a number. If I can't reach you (nobody answers phones anymore) then I remove your invalid address and wait for you to contact me.

Another problem is that either your ISP or Always-Online who hosts the RBmail list may be down. Check your ISP by sending a message to yourself or test RBmail by sending a message to RBmail at rbmail@XXXalways-online.com (remove XXX) and see if your copy arrives. Another way to determine if RBmail is down instead of sending mail to 450+ people is to go to DNS STUFF at http://www.dnsstuff.com/ and type rbmail@XXXalways-online.com (remove XXX) in the E-Mail Test section. Lots of other good stuff is on this page to tinker with.

By the way, you can't send mail to RBmail unless you are a member and using the e-mail address you registered with. Some people are still trying to use the old rbmail@cconnect.net address that doesn't work. We moved to Always-online.