Hi Y'all,

"Voyeur: Observer of sordid or sensational subjects" (partial definition.) If that might apply to you, then tune in to NTV (NASA Television) on October 2 and ride the nose of a Space Shuttle's central external fuel tank into space. Launch is scheduled for sometime between 2PM and 6PM EDT (18:00 - 22:00 GMT). Read the sordid details.

If you can't take the ride on TV, there is a NASA page containing links for watching the broadcast live on your computer, and I expect there will be rebroadcasts available there, also.

The League of Conservation Voters (LCV) will keep you up to date on what's going on in Congress through their Web site and newsletters.

The LCV's National Environmental Scorecard is a real eye opener. Do you care a whit about how much arsenic is in your drinking water and other air and water quality matters, or about oil and gas drilling and production in National Monuments, or chopping off mountain tops and dumping them into streams and rivers in the valleys below, or opening up National Wilderness Areas to road building and logging, or foreign companies being allowed to operate in the US without having to obey our pollution laws and regulations (too late on that one - it's a done deal), etc?

Check that Scorecard; perhaps your elected representives aren't representing you, or America as a whole, as well as you think they are – my Senators sure aren't, and my Representative is kind of ify. Me thinks it is time to vote for "the other Party" the next time around.

All of my readers should know by now to summarily delete any so-called Virus Alert mail forwarded to them which does not contain hyperlinks to verifying information, and you use the links to make the verification.

But just in case you're not tuned in yet, there is another hoax that's been floating around since May 2000 warning people to delete a file called jdbgmgr.exe because it is a virus. Like sulfnbk.exe, the target of another hoax mail, this file is also a legitimate part of the Windows operating system, specifically the Java portion. Luckly, unlike Sulfnbk.exe, Jdbgmgr.exe is not a critical file and is only needed if you use "Microsoft Visual J++" to write Java programs.

More info in Microsoft Knowledge Base Article - Q322993 for anyone needing to restore jdbgmgr.exe if they fell for the hoax.

If you haven't checked your Passport (now called .NET Passport) "profile" lately, better do it now. Microsoft has taken a page from Yahoo's dirty tricks book and "opted you in" to something you probably don't want. Microsoft has modified your Profile without your permission to make your personal information automatically available to any Passport-enabled site you may happen to Log In to using the site's Passport Login button.

You may turn off this unwelcome behavior at Microsoft Passport Member Services. Click on "Edit my .NET Passport profile" and scroll to the bottom of the page. If you have a Hotmail account, your Passport Profile is your Hotmail Profile.

To reach your Profile in Hotmail, click Options (to the right of the tab that says "Address Book"), then Personal Profile (in the upper left corner). Scroll down to the bottom of the screen.

UPDATE: The problem is worse than I thought. It appears that Microsoft has always shared your Hotmail, and now Passport, Profile info with "partners", and those partners were, and still are, free to do what they choose with that info, such as sell it to spammers. Microsoft says not quite true, but I, at least, am not clear on what they did with my Hotmail personal information before it invented Passport. It's an undisputed fact they published my Hotmail address in a public location, without my permission, the instant I signed up.

Something called the "MSN Chat control" is a component of MSN Messenger. It is also downloaded the first time you enter a chat session at chat.msn.com or other MSN site. It contains a "bug" which could allow someone complete access to your computer. A "fix" was issued May 8, 2002, but is was discovered the "fix" could be undone. On June 11, a "fixed fix" was issued.

The fix is included in the latest version (4.6.0082) of MSN Messenger which is available here. If you don't use MSN Messenger but do use an MSN chat site, you can install the "fix" from here now, or be sure to accept the program update the next time you visit an MSN chat site.

Won't Play in PCs and Macs

Record companies are shipping select new audio CDs in a new copy-protected format that prevents PC and Macintosh owners from playing or ripping (copying) songs.

Damages Macs

Inserting such a disk into a Mac is a little more damaging than it is on the PC. Not only will copy-protected disks not play on a Mac, they render the CD/DVD drive inoperable on certain systems, requiring the user to return the system to Apple for repair, which is not covered by any warranty. The Apple Web site states, "The audio discs are technically and legally not Compact Discs (CD format), and the CD logo has been removed from the disc. Audio discs that incorporate copyright protection technologies do not adhere to published Compact Disc standards. Apple designs its optical disc drives to support media that conform to such standards." In other words, it's not Apple's problem, it's yours.

99¢ Work-Around

You can sidestep the copy-protection scheme with a black felt-tipped magic marker: Simply color in the outer edge of the disk, on the shiny side, and you're good to go; the disk will copy and play just fine. Most Mac users aren't willing to try the magic-marker trick and risk ruining their CD/DVD drives if it doesn't work, so whether it works on the Mac is unknown.

Here is a good, and interesting, time-lapse movie of Antarctica's Ross Ice Shelf breakup last winter. The movie was composed from photographs taken from December 17, 2001 through January 4, 2002 from a satelite. This hyperlink takes you to a page explaining what you'll see happening in the movie.

The link on that page labeled jpeg shows the last frame of the movie, the link labeled mpeg is the movie.

To see where the Ross Sea and ice shelf are located, if you have Atomica, Alt-Click Antarctica and click on Maps.

In May 2002, Intel's latest crop of Pentium-4 CPU's for desktop computers run at 2.53GHz (GigaHertz, or, for us oldtimers, Billion Cycles per Second). In the industry-standard Linpack Benchmark test, they beat the specialized and very costly processors used in Cray and other super-computers on which the benchmark is based. This fall, computers will be available with Intel 3GHz CPUs, and 4GHz ones are in the pipeline for 2003.

Outside of the folks who process movies, sound, and gigantic mathematical spredsheets and complicated mathematical equations on PCs, do we "common folk" need CPUs this fast? In a word – Yes! Not today, but when (if?) you buy another computer it will have the Windows XP operating system, or its successor (which will be out in another year or so), and require all new programs just for that OS, which in turn will require massive processor power, amounts of RAM (Random Access Memory,) and disk space.

I've made my decision. I will not be "upgrading" to Windows XP on this machine. Like those of you who stayed with Windows 95, I'll be staying with Windows 98 Original until it stops working.

Am I another victim of "planned obsolesence," or is the world just leaving me farther behind as I get older and broker?

Have you noticed some of the Web sites you regularly visit taking longer and longer to display pages in your browser? That's because they contain more fancy page coding, advertising stuff, and pictures, with the assumption that by now you have a more powerful computer than you did "way back in the '90s". That Web page coding trend will continue.

Face it, folks. If we refuse to, or simply can't, buy a new computer every 2 or 3 years, prettty soon, I feel, those of us driving old Windows 95, 98, and ME models are going to be banned from the Information Superhighway because we can't achieve the minimum speed limit.

Yes, silk; spider silk, to be exact. Milk a goat, stir some salt into the milk, and a glump of spider silk falls to the bottom. Squeeze the glump through tiny holes, grab the emerging ends, stretch them out, and, bingo – you have spider silk threads which are 5 times stronger than steel.

How does the silk get into the goat milk? What is spider silk used for? You'll know that, and more, when you read this.

Did You Know?  A duck's quack doesn't echo. No one knows why.
From a newsletter; no reference cited.

Did You Know?  Smucker's has patented the Crustless Peanut & Jelly Sandwich? Apparently, if you cut the crust off the bread, and/or pinch the edges of the bread together to keep the fillings from oozing out, and/or put it in a sandwich bag, Smucker's will sue you for patent infringement!

Watch for this: SPD (Suspended Particle Device) glass and plastic. Automatic, or manually controlled, instant darkening and lightening to the degree necessary or desired of home, office, and aircraft windows; ski goggles; car and truck rear view mirrors, transparent sun visors and sun/moon roofs. Also in computer display devices in brightly lit areas.

Computer Training 2000. Learn about Windows, Internet Explorer, other Microsoft programs, and get free help.

555-1212.com is what you think it is, plus Reverse phone number lookup and more. I found this site better at reverse number lookup than the next ones. [Oops – it used to be free; now $10 subscription gives you 100 lookups. Still much cheaper than calling Information.]

infoUSA Directory Assistance,  AnyWho,  infoSpace. National Reverse Phone Number lookup as well as searching on name. InfoSpace does Canada as well. At least these are still free.

CIA predicts what the world will be like in 2015. Canada coming on strong.

Critical question: Taking or contemplating a Critical Thinking course? First, you have to learn Critical Reading. Quality help for anyone having trouble reading between the lines of advertisments or the-sky-is-falling e-mail.

DriverGuide.com has the largest collection of drivers, links, info. For computer equipment, not cars or golf.

Huge List of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) searchable by Area Code, and Web Hosts searchable by Personal and Business. (Submitted by D.V.)

See a Sonic Boom. You can see them? Yup.

Click Here

As always, your mileage may vary.

'Til next time,
Pete