Links for Sunday August 12, 2001

OC-Sue writes: In my initial conversation with Gene Zeigler he said, "written in an hour, 'A Grandchild's Guide to Using Grandpa's Computer' (along with 'Hang the Information Highwayman') has had a greater impact on the world than my entire career." www.people.cornell.edu/pages/elz1/clocktower/

What he does now is called eLearning. It is related to technology, not technology itself. However, for a long time he did run a tech shop and was deeply involved at the bits and bytes level. Now he is back to being an educator with www.corpedia.com . He is the Chief Learning Officer. He makes and creates concepts. These are turned over to production: writers, content experts, graphic artists, flash programmers etc. Big business is the customer right now. Corporations buy products to be made available to their employees. Some of the training might be in legal compliance; for instance, when there are requirements to have sexual harassment training periodically for 10,000 or 100,000 people. Peter Drucker and Tom Peters provide vision for management. Right now Peters is highly involved with issues of women and the economy. Zeigler said, "My personal vision relates to what I recently read, 'the purpose of life is to love to learn.'there is nothing else, that is who we are, why we are here. I think on-line education will change the world."

Think about the vast number of the world's population. Whoever has an opportunity to learn and be enlightened is such a small number. I hope Gene Zeigler is right. .

Another guest we have on the show today is Jim Hanson from http://coolcases.com/index.php3
We will be talking about cases and cooling fans.

Anonymizer Inc. has come up with a new plug-in for Internet Explorer.
The plug-in allows surfers to browse anonymously at the click of a button,
by preventing web sites from tracing their IPs.

http://www.anonymizer.com/

When you delete files, Windows stores them in a special place on your hard drive. The files can be restored by double-clicking on the Recycle Bin icon on your Desktop, right-clicking on the file you want to bring back and then clicking on restore. The size of the Recycle Bin is set to 10%, but that is 10% of the available hard disk space. I have suggested that you reduce that 10% default to 1% by right-clicking on the Recycle Bin, clicking on Properties and then dragging the sliding pointer left to 1%. Windows has a quirk that I want you to be aware of. You can bypass the Recycle Bin by holding down the Shift key while you delete. The quirk is that if the file you delete is larger than the available space in the Recycle Bin, Windows will simply delete the file and you can't recover it. If the file you want to delete is large, and you're not sure you want to really delete it, I have a solution. Right-click on My Computer and left-click on Explore. Double-click on the Icon (located on the left side of your screen) that represents the drive you will be working with. In most cases that will be the C drive. Right-click anywhere in right pane (Explore provides a 2 pane display) and select New. Click on Folder. A new folder will appear with the words New Folder highlighted. Type "Hold for Now" and press the Enter button. Now you can use Explore to drag and drop large files into the Hold For Now folder. If you decide to delete files stored in that folder, double-click on it in the Explore view, right-click on that particular file and then just click on Delete. Confirm by clicking on Yes.

Windows 98 and ME have a couple of useful features that Microsoft has chosen not to document. Here are two features I find useful. If you want to look at the properties of more than one hard drive, double-click on My Computer, hold down the Ctrl key and left-click on each drive you wish to see the properties of. Right-click on any of the selected drives and choose Properties. A Properties box will open with a tab for each of the drives you selected while holding down the Ctrl key. For example, if you selected your Hard drive, CD-ROM drive and your Zip drive, there would be three tabs in the Properties view box. Click on the tab that represents the drive you wish to see and the properties for that drive will be displayed. Note that if you have set Windows up to use a single click to do what a double click does, hold your mouse pointer over the first drive until it highlights. Now hold down the Ctrl key and do the same thing for any other drive whose properties you wish to see. You can now right-click on any of the selected drives and click on Properties. The Registry editor can be confusing as you drill down into the various folders and files. Windows shows the path of your current location in the Registry at the bottom of the Regedit panel. To use the Registry editor, click on Start, then on Run and type "regedit" (without the quotes) in the Open: box. Notice that as you double- click on folders that have a + located to the left of the folder, the Registry editor takes you deeper into the Registry file system. The current path location information presented at the bottom of the Registry editor window keeps you informed of your position and location in the Registry files.

Outlook Express has a feature called "stationery". You can send e-mail messages that look great by using stationery, which is actually a template that can include a background image, unique text font colors and custom margins. Outlook Express even lets you apply stationery to all of your outgoing e-mail messages, or on individual messages when you want to. To apply stationery to all of your outgoing messages, click on Tools, Options, and then on the Compose tab. In the Stationery area, you can click on Select to view existing stationery templates (double-click on any available stationery template to view it), create a new stationery template using a wizard (helper) by clicking on the Create New button, or you can download even more stationery templates (you'll have to be connected to the Net to do this) by clicking on the Download More button. To send an individual message on stationery, click on Message, click on New Message Using, and select the stationery you want to send that message on. You can also apply stationery or change your selected default stationery after you start a new message, by clicking on Format, and then on Apply Stationery. Now select the new stationery. You can also choose to send an e-mail message without using your default stationery by clicking on No Stationery in New Message Using. If you get an e-mail on stationery that you want to use, from within that message click on File and then on Save as Stationery.