The Ides of August 1999

E-MAIL TIP We all get junk mail at home - it seems to be one of life's little annoyances. But when we receive junk mail via e-mail it's known as "spam", and it can cause problems. (For an explanation of how a canned luncheon meat came to be associated with e-mail, visit The True Story Of How Internet "Spam" Got Its Name.) Spammers may use provocative subject lines such as "An invitation," "Regarding your request," or "Make money fast" to lure you into reading their messages. When we receive spam at work, it... Displaces normal e-mail Takes up bandwidth (the volume of spam is suspected as a contributor to slowdowns in Internet access); Reduces productivity by wasting employees' time reading and deleting it; Takes up room on the System's e-mail server; and Can frustrate and anger people, and no one needs that! Unless you want to receive even MORE junk e-mail DON'T write to spammers asking to be removed from their lists. If we were to believe the statement, "If you wish not to receive these updates by email, please reply with a 'Do not email' in the subject field and make sure your first and last name are included in the reply," we would actually make our problem worse. Ironically, when you reply to a spammer asking to be removed from their list, many spammers use these "remove me" messages as a way of collecting valid email addresses, which they then sell to other spammers! If you're interested in going beyond pressing the "delete" key each time you receive spam, visit The Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email (CAUCE) Web site to find out how you can join the fight against spam. Just for grins, visit the C-SPAM Web site, or try your luck at the find the Spam game. INTERNET TIP If there's a Web page that you visit often, you can add a button to the Netscape 4.x Personal Toolbar, to make it easier to re-visit your most used Web sites. Many versions of Netscape 4.x have a Personal Toolbar pre-set with buttons for "Welcome to Netscape," "New&Cool," and "Lookup." You can keep these buttons, or replace them with buttons that are more useful to you. Consider creating buttons for Wiscat, your favorite search engine, or even last night's Top Ten List from David Letterman. Adding a customized set of buttons is just as easy as creating bookmarks -- just follow the directions at Netscape's Creating a Button For a Page or Customizing Communicator's Toolbars. For details on deleting buttons, visit Netscape's How Do I Add or Remove Items From the Personal Toolbar? page. WINDOWS TIP Part of the Windows Taskbar is something called a Tray or SysTray. At first, the Tray contains just the clock and a little yellow speaker (the volume control.) However, as you add software to your PC you may find your Tray collecting what Wired's Jargon Watch terms "taskbar lint." According to the Windows95 Annoyances Web site, the Tray " doesn't seem to follow any rules. It holds mostly icons, except for the clock that is. Some icons get double-clicks, some get single-clicks, some get right-clicked, and some don't get clicked at all. Some icons have tool-tips, others don't. The icons don't light up when clicked, and you can't drag-drop new icons into the tray. It seems as though the tray is a little area that someone at Microsoft dreamt up in which to put all the lose ends - all the screen elements which otherwise wouldn't have a place to live." If you find that your Tray contains a lot of icons for things you never use, try right-clicking the icon to discover if the program gives you the option NOT to show the icon in the Tray. And for a walk on the weird side, visit a page "dedicated to the more useless items you could find" in one, an attempt to build the world's longest Tray. USEFUL URL O' THE MONTH The Your Nation Web site is a database that provides an interface to data from the 1998 CIA World Factbook and other sources. You can use it to ... compare statistics for any two countries of your choice; rank countries by a statistic of your choice; and display a summary of a country. You can compare countries in a continent, NAFTA members, NATO member countries, G8 members, as well as individual countries. Some of the data categories you can compare include birth rate, GDP, area, external debt, imports, population, and literacy. FUN URL O' THE MONTH You may be tempted to include Banswork: a New Integrated Library Application Suite in your library budget, as soon as you see it offers... RefQuest™ software, which reads the answers to many popular reference questions to your call-in patrons. "Currently available is the "Word Games" disk, containing such perennial favorites as 'Words that end in -GRY'..."; "ShelveA™, using robotic technology to"shelve materials with up to a 50% guaranteed accuracy rate."; and (my personal favorite) "Hoppin' Java™, a "state-of-the-art, completely automated, solid-state coffee management system." RECIPE O' THE MONTH because the tomatoes are getting ripe, is Darlene's Salsa.

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	This page was last updated August 15, 1999 The Ides is written by Joy Schwarz. Please direct any questions, comments or recipes to schwarz@winnefox.org URL: http://www.winnefox.org/ides/idesaug99.html