• Home Delivery
• Customer Services
• Contact Us

Ted Como

Subscribe to RSS Feed

Ted Como's Latest Feed Content

Click headlines to read complete content, or click SUBSCRIBE above to add Ted Como's content to your subscriptions.

• Install W7 on new drive using upgrade media

  By Ted Como

  Windows7 comes in either an upgrade version or for an additional $100, a full version. But you may install Windows7 using the upgrade version on a new hard drive or for that matter, on a new, home-built computer though doing the latter violates the end user agreement.
  Before I tell you how to do it, here’s why you should consider it — besides saving $100 of course.
  On one of my systems I used a Windows7 upgrade disc to do what’s called an in-place upgrade, version-to-version. I upgraded Windows Vista Home Premium to Windows7 Home Premium without having to reinstall programs.
  But on a second desktop running Windows Vista Home Premium I installed Windows 7 Professional. Since the versions didn’t match, I couldn’t do an in-place upgrade and would have to reinstall all of my programs — that meant saving photos, documents, data produced by various programs etc., elsewhere.
  So I pulled my Vista hard drive from the system and installed Windows7 Pro using the upgrade media on a new hard drive. Then, I put the Vista drive back in as a secondary drive.
  This allows me to take my time moving data from the Vista drive to the W7 drive while retaining the Vista installation, which I can load if I have any problems with W7 by simply instructing bios to boot from D, rather than C.
  So here’s the process to install W7 on a clean drive using only upgrade media.
  Open your computer, remove your current C drive, put the new drive in, turn the system on and put the W7 disc in your DVD drive. The system should ask if you wish to boot from the optical drive since it didn’t find a bootable hard drive. If it doesn’t ask that question, restart, go into the bios (for most systems, just press the F2 key) and change the boot order to list the optical drive first, and restart.
  Windows7 setup will ask for language preferences; click the Next button and then the Install Now button. Check to accept the license terms and click Next. Now, click the Custom (advanced) option.
  If you’ve not previously formatted the new drive, you’ll now be asked to create a partition on it. Click the format option to format the drive and then the Next button. W7 will now begin the install.
  During this process it will reboot several times until you see a screen that asks for the user name you wish to use for the default administrator account, and any name you want to give the computer. Click Next, and type in a password for your administrator account. Type it in again to confirm it, then type in a hint for your password and click the Next button.
  You’ll now be asked to type in your W7 product key. Do so, but UNCHECK the line right under it that reads: “Automatically Active Windows when I’m online.” We do not want to activate online at this time.
  On the next screen, click Use Recommended Settings, select your time zone and click Next. On the next screen, click on your computer’s location to select it for the correct network location type — for most users this will be home network. W7 will finish preparing your desktop and start.
  Now, it’s time to activate your W7 install.
  Click on the Control Panel icon you’ll see on your desktop and click on the System icon. Under the Windows activation section at the bottom, click on “30 days to activate. Activate Windows now.” Windows should automatically activate and inform you the system is activated. Click the Close button and you’re good to go.
  The next step is to update what’s called a WEI score — W7 rates your system’s capability to use W7’s desktop Aero features.
  Click on Control Panel and then Performance Information and Tools, and then the Rate this computer button. You’ll see your score, and if it’s sufficient to run Aero features, you need do nothing else.
  You may wish to install sound and video drivers — Windows installed Microsoft versions but you may have more features available with specific drivers for your hardware. For instance, on this system I have Realtek onboard sound which allows me to configure a 5.1 surround system. And I have dual GeForce 9800GT video cards and so installed the latest drivers from Nvidia.com.
  Now that you’re up and running, shut the system down. Pull the cover and put your old Vista drive back in — if you’re using SATA drives, you don’t need to worry about strapping the drivers or the order in which you put them. Come back up, and you’ll see your old Vista drive as a secondary, probably designated as Drive E with your optical drive now D.
  You can leave them at that, or change the order by opening Control Panel and clicking Performance and Maintenance, then Administrative Tools, then Computer Management and finally, Disk Management. Right click the drive and then click Change Drive letter but do not change the drive letter for drive C.
  Cookstr: The net is awash with recipes but cookstr.com   has a bit of a twist with the ability to search by ingredients, chef or recipe, and featuring an author of the day and recipe of the day. It’s worth a look.
  Flu Check: Feel like you’ve got the flu? Visit https://h1n1.cloudapp.net/fluquiz.a px which will ask a series of questions, and hopefully provide an a n s w e r.

• LCD LED TVs coming on strong

  By Ted Como

  If you’ve been shopping for a television of late or plan on doing so for Christmas, be aware of the new kid on the block. LCD LED TVs appeared last year and now occupy a larger share of area retailer displays.
  There are three basic types of digital televisions currently available: plasma, LCD, and LCD LED. Plasma uses small containers of neon or xenon gas to light each pixel on the screen — hundreds of thousands of them. Each tube glows when stimulated by an electrical current. LCD, or liquid crystal display receivers, filter light provided by a series of fluorescent lamps at the back of the receiver; each liquid crystal twists, or untwists depending on voltage, to determine color and intensity.
  LCD LED receivers are simply LCD receivers with a different light source. Rather than fluorescent lamps, they use LEDs, or light-emitting diodes in either of two setups: dynamic RGB LEDs positioned behind the panel of liquid crystals, or Edge-LEDs positioned around the rim of the screen using a diffusion panel to spread the light evenly behind the panel.
  Plasma sets produce deep blacks and bright colors, work well in dimly lit rooms, are great for sports and video games and allow for wide viewing angles. But they have a shorter shelf life since the gas can leak or become less reactive. And if you damage the screen you’ll have to replace it — if a hard object hits a plasma screen it destroys hundreds of individual gas-filled tubes.
  LCDs are more energy efficient than Plasma and work in well-lit rooms with only slight image fading when viewed from an angle. LCD LED receivers have plasma-like deep blacks and bright colors with greater contrast, and consume about 40 percent less power than LCDs.
  Because they provide a crisper image with better contrast, LCD LED sets cost a lot more — around $400 more than the comparable LCD set. But they have a longer life and again, use a lot less power.
  By way of comparison, I checked local retailers last week for 1080p receivers and found: 42-inch plasma; a Panasonic for $900; 42-inch LCD, a Dynes for $600; and 40-inch LCD LED, a Samsung for $1,500. In the 46-inch range: a Panasonic plasma for $1,300; an Aquos LCD for $1,000; and a Samsung LCD LED for $1,850. And in the 50- to 52-inch range, a Samsung plasma for $1,200; a Sony LCD for $1,600; and an Aquos LCD LED, $2,300.
  Prices vary widely; check Web sites for features before you buy.
  As to the two different types of LCD LED, the RGB units using direct lighting offer the ability to adjust contrast by turning some of the LEDs off, while edge-lighting allows units that are incredibly thin because the LEDs are off to the side, rather than directly in back of the screen — picture quality could suffer if the diffuser isn’t working well to spread the light across the back of the screen.
  I’d go with RGB.
  * Tin Ear? I didn’t know for many years that I was red-deficient colorblind; likewise, some folks may not realize they are tone deaf. You can find out by visiting a test page offered by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders at http://www.nidcd.nih.gov/-   tunetest/DefaultPage.htm.
  The test requires the Windows Media Player add-on, which you simply click to install.
  You’ll see 26 audio clips of tones for popular tunes with which you should be familiar. Play them and click whether you think the tune was played correctly. The test checks your sense of pitch.
  According to the site, “Our ability to distinguish pitch is not fully understood, but we do know that it involves some processing by the brain after a sound is perceived. This means tone deafness is not necessarily linked to any hearing disorder. An individual with perfect hearing may still have trouble distinguishing pitch because of how the brain interprets the sounds.
  “Research shows that several percent of the U.S. population has problems with pitch perception. Studies in twins also indicates that the role of inheritance in deficits in pitch recognition is extremely high, with little effect of environmental experience.”
  As to color blindness, check that out at http://www.toledo-bend.com/colorblind/Ishi hara.asp  .
  And while we’re on things visual, visit tineye.com to search for images. TinEye is a reverse image search engine. You submit an image to TinEye and it will search to find where it came from, how it is being used, if modified versions of the image exist, or to find higher resolution versions.
  TinEye says it’s the first image search engine on the Web to use image identification technology rather than keywords, metadata or watermarks.
  And, if looking up is more to your liking because you’ve heard a bird you can’t identify, http://xeno-canto.org can help. It’s a database of bird sounds from North and South America — tens of thousands of bird sounds from thousands of species.
  * Off Beat: AP reported recently that a team of Bigfoot enthusiasts is hoping to find the legendary creature in the bogs and barrens around Elkins, W.Va. The disillusioned members of Sasquatch Watch of Virginia are camping out with cameras, recorders and a large supply of plaster of Paris.
  If I was a gambling man, I’d make an offer: Send me $100 and I’ll send you a notorized statement that I will pay you $10,000 if, in my lifetime, anyone, anywhere, discovers a scientifically verified live or dead Bigfoot, space alien, flying saucer part, etc., or causes a ghost to manifest in my presence.
  But, I’m not a gambling man.

• Windows 7 passes with flying colors

  By Ted Como

  Hands down, Windows7 is the best operating system Microsoft has produced.
  I had planned last weekend to move from Vista Home Premium to Win7 Professional by setting up a dual boot on separate drives but after thinking about it some more, decided against it. Doing so would put the boot loader for both operating systems on the primary drive and if that drive failed, I would not be able to boot into either operarting system. It also would have required resinstalling all of my programs in W7.
  Instead, I did an in-place upgrade from Vista Home Premium to W7 Home Premium. Since I was upgrading version-to-version, no re-installation was necessary. Although it took a while, W7 launched with all of my programs and data intact. It was the smoothest upgrade I've been through with any Microsoft operating system.
  W7 Setup uninstalled all of my programs, installed the W7 files and loaded them, and then reinstalled all of my programs; and all of them work as they did in Vista. The process took just under three hours.
  W7 fixed a graphical problem I didn't know I had. I ordered dual video cards on the system I upgraded which were not properly configured to share the graphics processing load. I had noticed that one of the cards was running hot and the last thing W7 did was to correct the configuration. The only immediate adjustment I had to make was to find other computers on my network - two running XP and one, Vista. W7 did not pick up the name of my network; if you install W7 and can't see the other computers in your network - and they can't see the W7 machine - the following may solve the problem.
  From the Start menu, right click Computer, Properties, Advanced, and under computer name, click Change Settings. Assign the network the same network name your other computers are using and click OK. You'll have to reboot the W7 system for the changes to take affect, and the other computers to find the W7 machine. You'll see a Public share folder on the W7 machine where you can put documents, video, photos, etc., that other systems can access.
  The only other issue involved an inability to access the Internet, though the system could see my router. This was quickly resolved through some research on my Vista laptop which found a third-party program called Bonjour DNS Responder Service installed with Office 2007 was causing the problem. To fix it, I typed "services.msc" in the Start/Run box and found the service which starts with "Id(underline)String2.6844..." etc. I right clicked to select properties on this service, selected Disabled, clicked Stop, and then Apply and rebooted. The problem disappeared.
  As to new features in W7, I use Wordpad often and in W7 it's finally redesigned. It now opens Word docx files and includes the ability to read and write documents to the Open Office XML format. You can insert objects or drawings, and date and time, and there are more choices for saving and printing, as well as search and replace. You may save a drawing as a .png. .jpeg, .bmp or .gif file, and new formatting options have been added including highlighting, bullets, line breaks and new colors.
  The W7 desktop is a godsend if you commonly work with many windows open; you'll find yourself using three new features: Aero Shake, Aero Peek and Snap. If you want to focus on just one widow, grab it with your mouse and "shake it" and all other windows will disappear; shake again, and they're back. If you want to see only the desktop through all those open windows - perhaps to view a desktop gadget - just move your cursor to the bottom right of the task bar. If you're working with text in two different windows, for example, snap one to the left and the other to the right and they will resize to half-screen each.
  Right click the desktop to personalize it with various themes including slideshows. Gadgets are small windows displaying such as the local weather, a clock, photos, etc., and they may now be placed anywhere on the desktop rather than just at right as under Vista. And searches are offered everywhere: in the start menu just type a few letters of a program's name to find it, or text you remember in a previous e-mail or saved document. You can use Windows Explorer's built in search box along the same lines, refining it to narrow the search for photos including when pictures were taken, or by file type, size, extension, etc.
  W7 taskbar buttons can be used to open programs, switch between them, or preview open windows with large thumbnail images, including multiple windows open in Internet Explorer. You can drop and drag to move taskbar buttons around, or pin any program to the taskbar where it may be opened - Wordpad for instance - instead of placing an icon on the desktop. Jumplists are another new taskbar feature: these are shortcut menus that open as you scroll over items in the taskbar. The jumplist for Windows Media Player, for instance, allows you to run it right from the taskbar.
  Among other new features: libraries may be used to aggregate content in multiple folders into single, easy to manage views; the User Account Control is now a slider to change settings; security and firewall have been enhanced; you can set up Homegroups to share music, pictures and documents over your home network provided those machine also run W7; Credential Manager saves your user names and passwords from enabled web sites; the Problem Steps Recorder may be launched if you are having a problem with a program and it will record what happens when the problem occurs; and Media Player gets a new look and new functionality.
  You can easily change system sounds, your account picture, the window border glass color, move the taskbar, add a toolbar to the taskbar, customize the start menu, change the power button action, tone down notifications, change your mouse cursor, chance you screensaver, change autoplay options, and even let the PC recognize your voice. Some W7 useful keyboard shortcuts: +Home, minimizes all but the current window; +Spacebar, makes all windows transparent; +Up or Down Arrow, maximizes or minimizes the current window; +Left Arrow or Right Arrow, tiles the window on the left or right side of the screen; and +T cycles through items on the Taskbar.
  Learn Piano: zebrakeys.com offers more than 50 free piano lessons for various levels of difficult at no charge, including the ability to interact with each lesson and actually perform the lesson on a virtual keyboard. Of most use are basic instruction that will teach you to read music, understand music notation and keyboard layout, but you'll also find intermediate and advanced tutorials for those with more experience.
  Off Beat: An Associated Press story in the Times-News failed in its attempt to debunk global cooling. Fact is, global temperatures have not been rising the past several years, but dropping. AP gathered temperatures for 100 years or so (the accuracy of this data is quite unreliable) and handed them to statisticians it hired to determine whether there was a global cooling "trend" of late. Of course, the result was quite predictable: a few years of global cooling temperatures, within the context of many more years of global warming temperatures, could not indicate a cooling trend.
  But this approach, in and of itself, demonstrates that a hundred year or so of temperatures within the context of five billion or so years of Earth history, cannot be used to demonostrate anything.
  
  

• Windows 7 upgrade plans

  By Ted Como

  Upgrading your system from XP or Vista, to Windows7 which was released last week, has some users confused about whether they will have to reinstall all of their programs. The answer for all XP users is yes; for Vista users, it depends on which version of Vista you're running, and which version of W7 you wish to upgrade to.
  You may only do an in-place upgrade from Vista to the corresponding version of W7 - you won't have to reinstall programs or data. But if you're moving up to a higher version in W7, you'll have to reinstall everything.
  For instance, I'm running Vista Home Premium on my primary systsem. I can do an in-place upgrade to W7 Home Premium and all of my programs will remain in place. But I want to upgrade to W7 Professional, primarily because that version has a fully licensed copy of Windows XP built into it. You can launch the virtual XP mode from within W7 Pro, and install XP programs that otherwise wouldn't run on either Vista or W7, and system devices that are not supported in Vista or W7.
  And so my plan is to add a second hard drive to my system and install W7 Pro there, using a W7 Pro upgrade disc that costs only half what I'd pay for the full version of W7 Pro. The W7 Pro upgrade disc is $200 but I ordered it directly from Microsoft earlier this year when it pre-sold certain W7 discs for half off. The full version of W7 Pro costs $300.
  After the installation, the system should come back up in dual-boot mode, allowing me to either boot to Vista on the C drive, or W7 on the D drive. In effect, with virtual XP running within W7, I'll have three operating systems available to me. I've got a lot of programs loaded on my Vista machine and this approach allows me to take my time reinstalling them in W7 on the second hard drive, and accessing data associated with those programs.
  Yes, I'm aware that technically this violates Microsoft's End User License Agreement which states that I may no longer use the operating system I'm upgrading from unless I buy the full version of W7. And once I've fully installed all programs on W7, I likely won't boot the machine to Vista. But I disagree with the EULA: I paid for Vista, and I paid for the W7 upgrade disc. Why should I abandon an OS I've paid for merely because Microsoft would prefer that I do so?
  I'll let you know in next week's column whether my install plan worked, and how I went about it - certainly, I'll do a full system backup before I proceed.
  But here are the upgrade paths by which you can move from Vista, to W7, without having to reinstall your programs: from Vista Home Basic to W7 Home Premium or W7 Ultimate; from Vista Home Premium to W7 Home Premium or Ultimate; from Vista Business to W7 Professional or Ultimate; and from Vista Ultimate to W7 Ultimate. For all other upgrades, you'll have to reinstall everything. Nor can you move backwards, for instance, from Vista Ultimate to W7 Home Premium or Professional without having to reinstall.
  Meanwhile, details about the next Windows operating system - Windows8 - are starting to leak and of most interest is that it may be a 128-bit system. So what does that mean.
  Currently, computers are sold in 32-bit and 64-bit versions, which refers to the ability of the computer to proces information; 64-bit systems have CPUs with more transistors and support larger amounts of system memory. They also move information between the processor and system memory much faster, which means the systems can more easily handle programs that require lots of system resources and can do so with greater speed, particularly for graphics processing.
  This allows for development of programs that are not limited by system resources. A 128-bit Windows OS will take advantage of another leap in system structure capability and technology will advance where otherwise, it would be limited by staying with 32 or 64-bit systems.
  Save Shipping Costs: If you're a customer of Amazon.com you're probably aware that Amazon offers free "super saver shipping" on orders over $25. But what if your order falls only a few dollars short?
  For the difference in what you'll pay for shipping, you could order more merchandise. But finding something that costs exactly the difference between what you've already orderered, and $25, could be quite a chose.
  Unless you visit http://www.filleritem.com.
  There, you enter the amount you need to spend to reach the $25 free shipping limit, and click the search button. The site will tell you everything sold by Amazon at that exact price, and continue to list products that cost one penny, more, then two cents more, etc. It's not difficult to find something you can use. And you'll never again pay shipping costs from Amazon.
  Chrome Extensions: Google finally has enabled extensions for its Chrome browser but you can't install them if you using the public version available at the Google Chrome home page: google.com/chrome. That installs a stable release, version 3.0. But you need a developer's version - a less stable version but one that runs perfectly fine for me at least.
  You can get the latest developer's version which is now at 4.0 here: google.com/chrome/eula.html?extra=devchannel. Once installed, right click on the Google Chrome desktop icon and select Properties. In the Shortcut tab, under Target, you'll see the path to Google Chrome. At the end of that path, add "(space)--enable-extensions" so that the line looks like this: "C:\Documents and Settings\tcomo\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe."
  Now, open Google Chrome and do a search for Chrome Extensions. Find them, download and install them. The ability to add extensions puts Chrome on a part with Firefox, which has thousands of available extensions.
  One of the more useful extensions is Google Chrome Backup, a small tool that creates and saves Chrome profiles holding all of your bookmarks, history and saved passwords. I also installed a session manager tool, a screensaver, and a tool that tracks an mail received at my Gmail account.
  You can also modify Chrome with some interesting and appealing themes by clicking the tool icon at top right in the browser, selection Options, and under the Personal Stuff tab, selecting "Get Themes" at the bottom of the tab.
  SIW Update: System Information for Windows (SIW) is a free, advanced tool that gathers fully detailed information about your system properties, settings, hardware and drivers, and displays it in a comprehensible manner. SIW now has been upgraded adding even more features, and may be downloaded from gtopala.com.
  SIW can create a report file in text or HTML and delivers information in various categories:
  Software Inventory: Operating System, Installed Software and Hotfixes, Processes, Services, Users, Open Files, System Uptime, Installed Codecs, Software Licenses (Product Keys / Serial Numbers / CD Key), Secrets (Password Recovery).
  Hardware Inventory: Motherboard, Sensors, BIOS, CPU, chipset, PCI/AGP, USB and ISA/PnP Devices, Memory, Video Card, Monitor, Disk Drives, CD/DVD Devices, SCSI Devices, S.M.A.R.T., Ports, Printers.
  Network Information: Network Cards, Network Shares, currently active Network Connections, Open Ports.
  Network Tools: MAC Address Changer, Neighborhood Scan, Ping, Trace, Statistics
  Miscellaneous Tools: Eureka! (Reveal lost passwords hidden behind asterisks), Monitor Test, Shutdown / Restart.
  Real-time monitors: CPU, Memory, Page File usage and Network Traffic.
  SIW is a standalone utility that does not require installation and runs directly from wherever you save the download.

• Share your documents online with Google Docs

  By Ted Como

  In its quest to capture the real time digital communications market - and it will - Google released promised upgrades to Google Docs, adding shared folders and improving the look of the interface. Google Docs is a free service allowing you to post documents - and now entire folders of information - online, accessible by persons you designate. A shared document may not only be read by users you authorize, but edited.
  I use it for genealogy information that other family members can add to but it's also an easy way for families to share photos, compile family menus, exchange vacation information, etc., and for remote businesses to collaborate in real time. You may create basic documents from scratch or start from a template (http://docs.google.com/templates) such as a family budget planner, resume, invoice, yearly calendar, project manager schedule or todo list.
  You can put a photo slideshow up on Google Docs and invite family members to view it. There's a template for business cards - fill it out and print on Avery business card stock. You may create a loan amortization schedule, a checkbook register, project report, school calendar, wedding album - if you can imagine it, there's likely a template for it among the thousands offered. Going to a business meeteing with a Power Point presentation? Just put it here, and open it when you get to the meeting.
  Each document can have a maximum size of 500K and each image, 2MB. Spreadsheets can be up to 256 columns and 200,000 cells or 100 sheets; you may store up to 10MB per .pdf from you computer. The free web space offered here by Google is more than generous: up to 5,000 documents and 5,000 images, and data you place may be copied or downloaded by those you authorize.
  With folders, you may not create a file structure at your Docs page and organize content as you would on your computer; determining which individuals have access to which folder. allowing access by some to some information. A new upload page allows you to choose multiple files and upload them simultaneously into a folder.
  File types can be almost anything, though in my tests Docs refused to upload some documents including an RTF document created by Wordpad. But at no cost to the user, I'm not complaining.
  The next step in this approach to realtime data exchange is Google Wave, already being tested by thousands, myself not included. Despite all the free publicity I give Google in this space, I didn't get an invititation on Wave, which slight will result in my looking for opportunities to promote Microsoft at Google's expense (you folks at Google may redeem yourself but time's running out.)
  Wave is, well, pretty cool - it takes the online communication and collaboration tool to a new level. A "wave" as used here is a conversation with multiple participants collaborating on the wave's content. They may access the conversation at any point, rewinding it if they choose, and inserting images or video.
  I'll holler when Wave is released sometime next year; meantime, more information here: wave.google.com.
  Getting Bang Out Of Bing: As promised, herewith a shameluss plug for Microsoft: Bing (bing.com) is a search utility designed to compete with Google and does a pretty good job of it. But there's more to Bing than you may realize.
  Bing's focus is to help users make decisions - currently about buying something or going somewhere. Other launch aspects center on obtaining health information or directions, but the interface at bing.com always has an interesting photo as background and if you pass your mouse over it, you'll see little information sqaures appear within it; hover over one and find information tidbits about the image with links.
  While those are interesting, of more use (and something Google doesn't offer) is the ability to glean some further information from a search return and I'll bet you weren't aware of it because there's no reference to this function on the search return page. For example, open Bing, and do a search for "Kingsport." If you're used to Google, you'll begin scroll down the list of returns, looking for particular information. But before you do that, place your cursor over the first item returned and you'll see a little orange bullet appear to the right of that item. Now, pass your mouse over that, and you get extended information about this referenced web page.
  For instance, on a search for "swing flu" the fifth item returned points to a site called www.swineflu.org and the organge bullet tells you that at this site, you can discuss the latest swine flu developments with others, around the world, in real time.
  At left on this results page under what Bing calls the Explorer Pane are other results that attempt to hone in on what you might be looking for, including articles and related searches - and under that, your search history. Under search history, click "see all" and on this page, you can put a check mark next to a particular search and then share it - saving it to file, connecting directly to Facebook, or e-mailing it.
  While on this returns page for swine flu, click on the images tab and pass your mouse over the returned images to see an exploded view with some information. Go back to the explorer pane under Images and you'll find options to narrow your search by image size, layout, color, style and people.
  Now click the Videos tab and pass your mouse over any of the returns to hear what any of these videos are about. Click Shopping and you'll find returns for health products; click Maps and you'll see local pharmacies listed. So how does Bing know where you are so that it can tell you about local pharmacies? Click Preferences at top right and enter your current location.
  You may also get maps in 3D, save maps or e-mail them - the 3D aspect will require a download. Click the Maps tab and type in Kingsport, TN; click on the map and then and save information. Do a search for Kingsport, TN, click on the map and then right click and select "Add a pushpin." In the box that opens under the General tab to save or e-mail the map; and the 3D Tour tab to view the map in 3D - you'll get instructions to download and install the 3D aspect. Once installed, you'll get a satellite view and instructions on how to use it to rotate or tilt the image, to see Bays Mountain looming over the city.
  For the last trick, if you're not sure whether you want to use Bing, or, Google, then use both at the same time. Visit www.bingandgoogle.com and type in Kingsport, TN to get two windows, side by side, showing returns for each search engine.
  You can add this dual search site to your Internet Explorer browser by clicking the down arrow at top right on IE right next to the default search box. Select "Find more providers" and on that page at botton left, click on "Create your own Search Provider." Now, open another copy of IE and visit www.bingandgoogle.com. In the search field, type TEST in all capital letters and click "Bing & Google" to effect the search.
  Now, highlight the URL that appears in the browser (it should be as follows: http://www.bingandgoogle.com/bing_google.php?q=TEST) and copy it. Go back to your first browser and pasts the URL into the space on the Add-ons Gallery page marked "URL:" and give the new search a name, i.e., Dual Search. Leave the Character Encoding field as it, and click Install Search Provider.
  The search may complain that the URL is not valid; if it does, repeat the process - it worked for me. You may make this your default search site for that search space at upper right in IE, or, simply access it in the future by clicking the down arrow.

• Upgrading to Windows7

  By Ted Como

  Microsoft redeems itself from the sloppy initial release of the Vista operating system with delivery next week of Windows 7, a thoroughly vetted OS that brings greater stability and security to the PC world. But it's no great leap over Vista and especially if you're running XP and are thinking of upgrading directly to W7, buy a good book or check out an old episode of Scrubs and hopefully, get that bad thought out of your head.
  Depending on your system hardware, you might be able to go directly to W7 from XP but unless you're using your computer for some specialized application like CAD or gaming for example, you won't need W7 until Microsoft fully pulls the plug on XP and stops delivery of security updates and fixes. In sum, if you're on XP and want W7, buy a new system with it already installed.
  But if you just can't help yourself, here's what you need to know.
  You can do what's called an in-place upgrade from Vista to W7 - put the W7 upgrade disc in your computer and a few minutes later you're running W7 with all of your programs intact and working. You also can upgrade directly from XP to W7 but unless you set up a dual boot custom install, your programs won't run because they will not be registered.
  W7 will save your XP operating system, program files, documents and settings, etc. in an folder it calls Windows.old so you won't lose data. But the programs will have to be reinstalled in W7 - from the original discs, not from the saved folder. Not to worry about installing "old" XP programs on W7 though if you've got the Professional edition or above (it doesn't come on the Home Premium version which is what you'll find installed on mosts new systems.)
  W7 requires more memory than XP. If your XP system is only several years old, likely it will support W7 if you have at least 2GB of RAM. To make sure, visit Microsoft.com, click on the first dropdown menu button at left called Windows, and select Windows7. In the next screen, click on Get Windows 7 and then on the Upgrade Advisor tab. Read the instructions, and download the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor.
  It'll check your system and let you know if it can run W7. Generally, if your computer is running Vista, it can run W7 - the advisor will check all hardware, programs and attached devices on your computer and tell you if anything needs replacing or upgrading for W7.
  I was a Microsoft beta tester for the XP operating system and at the time, configured a system to triple boot to either XP, Win98, or Red Hat Linux. There was really no need to do that - it was just something I wanted to play with. But if you do a Custom upgrade from XP, you'll have the option of setting up a dual-boot situation where you computer will ask you when you turn it on whether you wish to bring it up as an XP operating system, or a W7 operating system.
  This process will retain your XP environment and all of your program installations but requires you either put in a second hard drive and install W7 there, or, repartition the primary hard drive to create a new partition for W7. You can do that without losing data in your existing XP installation using free software such as Easeus Partition Manager Partition (www.partition-tool.com.) Once W7 is installed and you reboot, you'll be asked which OS you want to boot to.
  But if you're like most who'll upgrade from XP to W7, you'll just say to heck with it and have at it. Before you put the disc in, take some precautions.
  Open Wordpad and go through your Programs. Make a list of those you'll want to reinstall in W7, and then check it off as you gather the install discs. Some of these programs may have installed from a download - be sure to save everything in your download folder.
  Some programs save data in their own folder structure. For instance, you may use a genealogy program that saves your information in a folder under its primary directory. W7 should save this information in the Windows.old folder it creates - or it may not. For instance, what if you currently are near disc full and do the upgrade - I don't know what will happen but it's a safe bet you'll lose data.
  So, go through those program folders and save information to either a second system drive, or a USB external hard drive. W7 comes with a program called East Transfer which you can run from the install disc before you install W7 and it will move all of your files and settings.
  To upgrade a system running Vista to W7: While running Vista, insert the W7 DVD and click "Install now." You are presented with the option of going online to retrieve any updates for W7, and you must agree to the license terms. Then, click "Upgrade" and a compatibility check will run to ensure that all drivers will work after the upgrade. If issues are found, you will be shown a report. If no problems are found, the upgrade will proceed.
  To transfer certain files and settings on an XP or Vista computer to a new computer running W7: Use Microsoft's "Easy Transfer" software available in different versions for XP or Vista (Google Windows Easy Transfer.) This software will allow you to move user accounts, files and folders, e-mail messages, settings and address books, photos, music, video, Windows settings, program data files and settings and Internet settings (you will still have to reinstall programs.) The transfer is accomplished through a home network, or a transfer cable - not a USB cable but a special cable for this purpose.
  To upgrade an XP system to W7: The Upgrade option is not available in W7 setup when installing on a computer running XP; you'll be doing a full installation of W7. You can, however, use Easy Transfer which comes on the W7 DVD to move files and data to another locations like an external USB drive. You then do a full install of W7, and use Easy Transfer to move data back (you will have to resinstall programs.)
  Once you're done with Easy Transfer, use Windows Explorer to browse the W7 DVD and find and double-click "setup.exe." Click to retrieve any W7 upgrades online, and accept the license terms. Now, click Custom, to ensure that folders in your existing XP installation are saved to Windows.old. Select the partition (C Drive) where you'd like to install Windows, click Next, and then OK, and W7 will install.
  If you're upgrading to W7 from XP and have never used Vista, it's a good idea to spend some time at Microsoft's Windows 7 page (as instructed above) to learn how to use Windows7, which is quite a departure from XP. The site has good information on features of the new OS and how to navigate it.
  Once you're up and running, visit http://download.live.com to download and install Windows Live applications that are not included in the W7 DVD. This includes Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, Mail, Instant Messenger, Live Writer for blogging, and browser customization tools.
  If you have programs that you ran under XP and aren't sure they'll run in W7, be aware that the new OS has XP built-in to certain editions, including Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise and Ultimate. This is a free, licensed copy of XP that runs under W7 virtually. Once you launch it, you may install and use XP programs on your new W7 operating system.
  Physics site: Visit custom-logic.com/exp/cloth/cloth.html to stretch and pull at a piece of virtually cloth, an experiment in physics. You can use your mouse to move the anchors holding the "cloth" to the ceiling for added affects.
  Twitterer? If you're using Twitter a lot more than Facebook, you're rotting your brain according to Dr. Tracy Alloway of the University of Stirling in Scotland. He says that according to a study, Facebook users show increased working memory whereas Twitter users show decreased working memory. She concluded that Facebook has more mentally intensive activities, but Twitter’s communications are too brief to require substantial brain activity.

• Two free programs you'll find useful

  By Ted Como

  As Scrooge said to Bob Cratchit, "Before you dot another 'I,' " grab two great software programs released last week that won't cost you a penny. One is Microsoft's security suite which will replace security software you have to pay to renew annually; the other is Picasa 3.5 which does amazing things with your photo collection.
  I wrote about Microsoft Security Essentials last Sunday - it's a basic antivirus system that will protect your XP or Vista system and next month, the W7 operating system. You can get it at www.microsoft.com/Security(underline symbol)essentials.
  Before you install it, remove any security software you currently use through Add or Remove programs on XP's Control Panel, or Programs and Features on Vista's; this will require a reboot. When Security Essentials opens for the first time it automatically downloads the latest virus definitions and is defaulted to begin an immediate scan. Click the Settings tab to change the default weekly scan which is set for 2 a.m. Sundays. Otherwise, the program will automatically update itself daily and yes, it does do real-time protection against infected e-mail. The other thing it does well is leave you alone.
  SE runs quietly in background and doesn't interrupt you with messages. I removed McAfee from a Vista system last Wednesday and replaced it with SE - no more alerts about my subscription expiring soon; no more forcing me to open McAfee to see the results of a scan. If SE finds a problem, you don't get a message; you see an icon that's always present in your task bar turn from green to red - you may or may not click it to see what problem SE found, and fixed.
  As to the latest release of Picasa, if you keep digital pictures on your computer you'll find this free program a godsend. It's available at http://picasa.google.com.
  Even if Picasa didn't offer an incredible new feature which uses built-in facial recognition software to allow you to consolidate every individual in every picture you have on your computer into a personalized folder for that person, the tools it offers makes it essential to organizing your digital photo collection.
  I have 15 years worth of digitized family pictures on one system, plus a collection of thousands of historic images of my hometown available at www.ogdensburg.info. The photos are scattered across dozens of folders, some named by date, some by event. To find all of the pictures in that collection of a single inidividual would be incredibly time consuming. But no more.
  I was amazed at how rapidly Picasa scanned the images - less than an hour to examine each of thousands of photo and create a thumbnail image of every face in every one of them. Picasa then presented me with more than 15,000 "unnamed" individuals found in all those pictures, and grouped into several dozen thumbnails at a time. Pick one and name that person, and Picasa creates a folder for that individual and moves into it thumbnails from every picture where it recognizes the person. It won't get them all on the first past because poses are different, or you may have pictures of an individual taken over time where features have changed. But every time you find another instance of that individual and quickly add it to your named individual collection, Picasa looks for similar photos.
  What you end up with is an alphabetical list of individualized collections of all of the people in your pictures - every instance of Aunt Martha will be represented in the Aunt Martha folder. Again, these are merely thumbnail links created by Picasa - it does not move any images from any folder on your system.
  But Picassa does so much more: you may geotag your photos using Google maps by clicking the Places button in Picasa and dragging your photos to the location where you took them. You can import, upload and share your images to Picasa Web Albums. You can tag your pictures, rename them, export them, import directly from your camera, e-mail them, print them, consolidate them into albums, or do basic photo editing on them including removing redeye and adjusting color, contrast, fill light - even retouching. You may build a photo collage of your imates, or create a movie that plays fullscreen on your desktop.
  As readers of this column know, I like free, and Gimp (gimp.org) is the open-source equivalent of Photoshop, now in version 2.7.0, which runs on any platform and makes a great companion software to Picasa in allowing you to do anything you can imagine to a photo. It has an easier learning curve than Photoshop and every feature you'll need. Similarly, Open Office (openoffice.org) provides the equivalent tools to Microsoft Office including a spreadsheet, word processor, presentation and graphics software and more.
  Available at blender.org, Blender is billed as a content creation suite to do high-end 3D modeling. But if drawing is your thing, grab Inkscape (inkscape.org) and you'll have graphics capabilities similar to Illustrator or CorelDraw.
  Stellarium: Also available free at Stellarium.org, is a planetarium for your computer which shows a realistic night sky in 3D from whatever coordinates you set, featuring hundreds of thousands of stars, illustration of the contellations, the Milky Way and planets in our solar system, and zoom and timing controls.
  Fine Tune IE8: Visit http://tiny.cc/KRxwD for a great Computerworld piece on getting the most from Internet Explorer 8, including how to manage security settings, add-ons, Accelerators, and Web Slices. The article explains how these features works, and illustrates how to use them.

• Free security suite from Microsoft

  By Ted Como

  Before the end of the year, Microsoft will do us a very large favor - as well as save us money - by releasing Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE,) a free security package for the XP, Vista and Win7 operating systems that will protect your computer against viruses and spyware, Trojans, worms and other malicious software. It will effectively replace second-party security suites which require us to not only purchase them, but pay an annual fee for the privilege of using them.
  No doubt, McAfee and Symantec security products have overcome problems that I and many others users encountered years ago. So when AVG released a free version of its antivirus and security software I immediately began using it and since, have never had a problem where something got by it. Part of my setup on a new system is to remove any McAfee and Symantec products and install AVG.
  But from what I'm reading from beta testers, I'll be switching to MSE when it releases - which should be soon since testers have been advised to upgrade to the latest beta release to ease the transition to the final product.
  There's no costs to download MSE - I'll advise you when it's released and where to get it. And there is no annual subscription fee. Testers say it's easy to install, easy to use, and updates and upgrades are automatic. And it got a thorough review through 75,000 beta testers.
  Antivirus software should be part of any operating system and Microsoft has recognized that with Windows Defender, which provides limited protection, and its failed attempt at a commercial security suite called Live OneCare that was shelved last June. But MSE is a full security suite: it will scan your system for malware, check files that you import from thumb drives, block downloads from phishing sites, and use less memory and disk space than commercial products. It's fast and quiet, and displays an icon in the taskbar that, so long as it stays green, means your machine is clean.
  Easier Searches: The search engine war between Microsoft and Google has notched up a bit with an agreement between Microsoft and Yahoo to merge search engines - search Yahoo and you'll get Microsoft Bing results as well - and by several new search innovations. While Google accounts for about 65 percent of the search engine market, Microsoft's Bing is the fastest growing engine and claims about 11 percent of the maket since its launch about three months ago.
  Microsoft is testing a visual search through Bing - visit the beta test site at www.bing.com/visualsearch - whereby you look for information using image galleries rather than text links. The test currently centers on visual searches in the areas of entertainment, famous people, reference, shopping and sports, and features such galleries as digital cameras, dog breeds, movies in theaters, new cars, sports players and celebrities, popular books or TV shows, top songs, heroes and villains, film legends, greatest movies and U.S. states, among others.
  It's an interesting approach; more focused that simply searching Bing (or Google) for images and videos.
  And Google has unviled Fast Flip (http://fastflip.googlelabs.com) that combines "the best elements" of print and online articles. Fast Flips allows you to browse sequentially through recent news reports and popular topics which include feeds from some publishers. You "flip" through the information rapidly by clicking such information categories as politics, business, sports, world, health, opinion, travel, etc. Each category returns thumbnail images of related information sites. For instance, click on "Sci/Tech" and you'll get a couple dozen images that include the latest science and technology news from the BBC, private web sites, Smithsonian, Technology Review, the Washington Post, and others.
  This design is useful if, for instance, you're interested in the latest on healthcare legialtion or some other focused informational interest.
  As with any intense competition, the battle for search engine advertising dollars is driving innovation that we all benefit from. Note: if you launch a Bing visual search and don't have it installed, the site will ask to install Microsoft Silverlight, a web application framework that integrates multimedia, graphics and intereactivity into a single "runtime environment." The download is necessary to visual searches and will not harm your computer.
  Facebook Scams: Facebook is more than a phenomonen. The number one social networking site in the world now claims more than 300 million active users and these aren't kids: the fastest growing demographic are users over 35, the average user has 130 friends, half of users log on daily, more than two billion photos are uploaded monthly, and more than 45 million active user groups exist on the site.
  With that kind of incredible userbase, Facebook has become a breeding ground for scams and users need to take care they don't become victimized.
  The most prevelant scam involves theft of log-information through what are known as phishing attacks. These involve messages posted on Facebook pages that suggest users visit a particular site, many set up as fake Facebook pages, If you visit the site, it downloads malware - most often a Trojan that allows the hacker to gain access to your computer. The site may also steal your Facebook login nformation.
  Various quizzes and applications may be a scam: a popular IQ quiz on Facebook requires you to submit your cell phone number and await a text message. One user entered her cell phone number three times and then got a phone bill for $44. Another scam hijacks a Facebook page and then sends "friends" a message that the person is in financial trouble, asking for PayPal donations. Others can send messages to friends containing links to malicious sites, and steal passwords, account numbers and credit card information from your computer.
  Never give out your telephone number online - at Facebook or any other site. Use up-to-date browsers that protect against phishing site; these include IE8 or Firefox 3.0. Be cautious of any links, and do not use the same password for Facebook as you use for online financial transactions.
  If you're a Facebook user, visit and thoroughly read Facebook's security information at www.facebook.com/secutiry, for information on new threats and how to protect yourself. Do likewise for MySpace or Bebo.
  Off Beat: When salesmen became associates and we began to insult chairmen by calling them inanimate objects upon which one sits, I began to mourn the purge of language by the intellectually challenged. Advocates of political correctness demand we limit our discourse to words which do not offend in any context and we are at the point where, according to the Times of London, where dozens of quasi non-governmental agencies in Great Britain (we should no longer use that term since it implies that other nations are inferior) are demanding politically correct use of English. Among everyday sayings that have been dropped are: gentleman's agreement (offensive to women,) black mark (offensive to blacks,) right-hand man (offensive to left-handed persons,) ethnic minority (something smaller and less important,) and master bedroom (implying I'm not sure what.)
  It all started with words deemed inappropriate on the basis of race but of course, censoring language does not serve the intended purpose and how can it, when we continue to propagate racism by classifying people as to their race. Why, for instance, should the Census Bureau ask us about our race? What does it matter what race we are? How is it that we continue to allow race-based organizations such as the NAACP? At some point, I suppose, we'll refer to the recently deceased as living impaired.

• We test the new Palm Pre

  By Ted Como

  Got smartphone?
  It's a booming market and Microsoft just jumped on board with phones running Windows Mobile 6.5 available next month that won't be tied to a particular provider - Windows phones will be available through AT&T, Sprint and Verizon. The smartphone also is a bonanza for service providers who are raking it in on expensive plans - too expensive for the most part.
  But having access to the Internet wherever you go with a device that plays music and videos, takes photos and videos, plays games, gives you directions, downloads your e-mail - there seems no end to it - is certainly convenient, and courtesy of Sprint, I've been testing the new Palm Pre the past several weeks.
  While the Pre eats iPhone's multitasking lunch, it lacks ability to shoot video. As well, there are more applications for iPhone than residents of Kingsport and for the same money as the Pre, you can buy iPhone with twice the memory. Palm Pre has 8GB of memory and sells for $200; same price as the new 16GB iPhone3GS. Or, you can buy the 8GB iPhone 3G for just $99.
  On the other hand, iPhone costs $160 a month through AT&T with unlimited texting and navigation while Palm Pre through Sprint is $100 a month under their Simply Everything Plan.
  Then there's the BlackBerry and I recently updated my Verizon plan with the Storm - two phones for $49 after a $100 rebate and an additional $60 added to my regular calling plan. I don't have all the features of the Pre or iPhone, but I have all I need at a more reasonable price and I love the Storm's touch screen and speed.
  The Pre has a lot going for it. It feels more comfortable to hold - it fits the hand better than iPhone. Its top features (as opposed to iPhone) are a QWERTY slide-out keyboard vs. touch for iPhone, a sleaker design, faster navigation and web access, better sound, and most important, multitasking.
  With iPhone, you exit out of the browser to check your contact list; with Pre, you can have multiple applications open all at once, and "page" through them quickly.
  Some may have problems with Pre's keyboard; it's small, but I had no difficulty typing on it. And launching apps on the Pre isn't just easy, but fun. Just click a button to fill the screen and touch the app; they stack up on the screen as "cards" and are dismissed with a flick of the finger.
  Of course, the king of applications is iPhone with tens of thousands. But there are plenty for the Pre as well, though why Palm opted against releasing native libraries so that users could write their own apps - a major selling point for iPhone - is a mystery. This failure to encourage development of applications ensures Pre's second-place slot against iPhone.
  Pre does not have voice dialing or voice recording - iPhone does, but the Pre includes turn-by-turn navigation and video playback looks great, though on iPhone you can edit and upload video. On Pre, you can combine inboxes and contacts from all e-mal accounts and social sites like Facebook. And the Pre comes with a neat charging feature called Touchstone which works without cables - just place the Pre on the Touchstone base.
  I'm happy with my BlackBerry Storm, however, especially the costs and digital plan which is unlimited for only $30 through Verizon - if only I could just find a good astronomy program.
  Touch Screens: Windows 7, due out next month, brings touch screen technology to the PC though I have to wonder what most home users will do with it. Other interesting features include Aero Peek, which brings the window you want to focus on to the forefront, rendering other windows transparent; Aero Snap allows you to easily place two windows side-be-side; HomeGroups lets you easily link to other W7 computers to share files and printers; Media streaming moves photos, music and video among PCs on your home network and includes Remote Media Sharing so that you can stream media over the Internet to other computers; with Jump Lists you get quick access to a mini-Start menu including pictures, music, documents, etc.; and Libraries eliminates having all files and folders under the Documents folder and instead, separates content types such as contacts, documents, downloads, music, pictures and videos.
  3D TV: We're seeing more movies in 3D and by the end of next year, we may be seeing them at home on our TVs. Sony plans to have 3D sets available by the end of 2010 using active shutter technology where electronic glasses contain tiny shutters that open and close rapidly in synch with the television image to create a 3D impression. Sony plans to make its Vaio laptop computers, PlayStation3 games consoles and Blu-ray disc players compatible with the technology.
  Solar Facts: If the Sun was six feet in diameter, Mercury would be orbiting 249 feet away, Venus, 466 feet; Earth, 644 feet; Saturn, more than one mile; and Neptune, nearly four miles. You can do your own calculations by adjustsing the size of the sun at http://www.exploratorium.edu/ronh/solar_system. The site also has allows you to adjust distances to stsars and galaxies and offers links to other astronomical web sites.
  Birthday: Learn some interesting facts about the day and year you were born at http://www.dayofbirth.co.uk. For instance, I discovered I was born on a Wednesday, that I'm 434 years old in dog years, and have inhabited the earth for more than 551,000 hours.
  

• Turn computer into cash machine

  By Ted Como

  In these tough times we are saving money where we can and looking for additional income and there are opportunities you might pursue using your computer, first and foremost being selling on eBay.
  All one needs to become an eBay marketer is a digital camera, a credit card, and "stuff" you don't need. The process is simple: take pictures of your merchandise and save them to your computer, visit ebay.com and register as a new user, click the "Sell" button, follow instructions on classifying and naming your merchandise, upload your pictures, and wait for the bids. I've sold a lot of merchandise on eBay and found over the years that folks will buy almost anything.
  Do not insist that buyers only pay via certified check or money order; that just sends them away. Allow payment through PayPal or make clear merchandise will ship when a personal check clears. Give as much detail as you know about merchandise, ship immediately upon payment, and read eBay's very thorough information for sellers.
  Other online opportunities may involve finding online taks for which you are paid, such as helping with surveys or searching for information but a word of caution. There are a lot of scam sites out there promising untold riches. Typically, they involve downloading some program or process that will earn you lots of money - don't do it. Legitimate sites match you with companies looking for folks with time on their hands, www.mturk.com, for instance.
  At that site, you may become a "Mechanical Turk" worker. Mechanical Turk is a wierdly named web site but legitimate, that matches people looking to make money with people looking to get something done. You can work from home or accept assignments that take you out of the home, at your convenience.
  Jobs needing doing are called Human Intelligence Tasks, or HITs. For each HIT there's information on what the job entails, what it pays, and time alloted. Once you set up an account, click on a group of HITs for specific information and click to accept.
  American Consumer opinion operated by Decision Analyst, Inc., pays you for participating in surveys - www.acop.com; visit www.wikianswers.com and enter the question " Where do you find legitimate survey research companies?" to find more.
  If you have a good command of language and grammar - writing experience - there are numerous freelance opportunities online. A good place to start is www.freelancewriting.com which lists opportunities under headings like magazine guidelines database, and the freelance writing jobs network at www.freelancewritinggigs.com. Also try http://www.freebyte.com/makemoney for additional ideas including selling photos to online photo providers, or looking for data entry or bookkeeping jobs. But again, many, if not most of the web sites promoting work-at-home schemes are illegitimate. Look for online jobs through your local newspaper classifieds or craigslist.com or monster.com.
  Any online work opportunity that requires you pay something first, or that asks for information other than just your e-mail address, is likely fraudulant.
  Win7: As we get closer to the October Windows 7 release date, the new operating system from Microsoft is gaining more and more respect. Here's a site that details seven good reasons to switch to W7: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/08/windows7-seven-reasons. Says one reviewer: "Upgrading from Windows XP to Windows 7 will be like ditching your old Toyota Camry for a sexy, new Nissan GT-R. Everything from the typography to the icons, and from the toolbar to the windows, has been refined with some extra detail, polish and shadows. Finally, Microsoft creates a clean, modern look that competes with Apple’s finely designed Mac OS X Leopard."
  Maps Compare: At http://googlemapsmania.blogspot.com click on "Comparing On-Line Map Providers" under Top Posts at right. On that page, click on "Maps Compare" to open a window with four maps each focusing on the same geographic area. The site places Google Maps, the Google Earth browser plugin (which you might have to download but it's no problem to do so,) Yahoo Maps and Microsoft's Bing maps on the same page. You control all the maps by moving just the Google map.
  Kitchen Hints: To keep potatoes from budding, put an apple in with them. Use a meat baster to make pancakes. Zap garlic cloves in the microwave for 15 seconds and the skins slip right off. Many more kitchen hints may be found at: http://www.bearhaus.com/kithints.html.
  3D Fun: You'll have a lot of fun at this site: www.dhteumeuleu.com/dhtml/rotate3D.html. Just click your mouse, and watch the effects - fascinating.
  
  
  

• Social networking etiquette...

  By Ted Como

  E-mail etiquette should have more to do with grammar and construction than content but in posting to a social networking web site such as Facebook and My Space, the reverse is true. One would think that the times it takes to type provides a bit of a safety net over what is said.
  But for some, it's easy to not only speak, but type, without really thinking about the consequences. Never mind the embarrassment but friendships can be lost when folks go astray and fail to consider the audience that will have access to what they post. Some things to keep in mind:
  - I joined LinkedIn, a business-oriented social networking site, only to write about it. It wasn't long before I started receiving requests from folks to add them to my LinkedIn list of contacts (connections.) In some cases, I had only a passing relationship with these folks and no desire to continue it - otherwise, I would have done so via e-mail.
  Likewise, there are folks you perhaps don't know well who are on a friend's or relative's Facebook list and they may see what you post. We always are more casual with very close friends and family, and something you might say to people who know you well might not cast you in a favorable light with others.
  If you've joined a social networking site, confine your "friends" to just that. There are some who seem to make it a contest as to how many friends they have on these sites but friend-collectors probably have few true friends and should be avoided.
  - Know your audience: some within your family and circle of friends might be very religious; others may not be. Some might be very supportive of particular politicians that others might loathe. In general, do not broach subjects that might cause offense unless you're looking for a fight. And if you get one, you may find some friends and family delisting you.
  Your conversation should be light, fun, entertaining and casual. Don't respond to posts that are bait - if you bite on a political comment, you might regret the deluge that follows.
  - Get a hobby other than Facebook or Myspace. If you're one of those folks who posts every 15 mintues throughout the day, you're causing friends to have to wade through all of that probably useless information to find messages from others. And, avoid telling people you're bored, tired, upset, etc. - in particular, I find comments about how smashed someone got the previous evening or how hung over they are today rather patethic. Your personal life is not an appropriate topic for sites such as this.
  - Never get in the middle of a spat; once the parties have kissed and made up, your taking sites will cost you the affection of one or the other. And never post when you're upset, intoxicated, tired, etc. These conditions can cloud your judgment.
  - These sites allow folks to have photo albums and post pictures. Be careful about putting up pictures that show other people without their permission; they may resent it. As well, spare your friends all 300 imaages you took on that trip to Cancun.
  -X Edit what you write before you post it. There's an add-on for the Firefox browser that filters out undesirable comments from YouTube comment threads, including those with a certain number of mispellings, all capital letters, no capital letters, doesn't start with a capital letter, has excessive punctuation or capitalization, or uses profanity. You can get it here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/7115.
  How nice it would be if it could be dupicated for e-mail and social networking site comments.
  ....................
  Do you know where your kids really are? For a small monthly fee to your cell phone provider, you need only a computer, or a web-enabled phone to find out where there at any minute, or even where they've been the past several days.
  Leading providers offer a child locator solution that allows parents to locate a family member's phone via a web browser on a PC or other mobile device. AT&T calls its service FamilyMap; Sprint labels its program Family Locator. All use GPS technology built into cell phones to pinpoint the exact location of a phone and display it on a map.
  Parents can sign up for password-protected safety checks, an automatic notice of their child’s location on specific days and precise times, including a history of up to seven days to see if they were really where they said they were. Fees vary from $5 to $10 a month.
  ....................
  Chrome Update: Google has added the ability to change the look of its Chrome web browser by selecting any of several dozen themes.
  Chrome is a good alternative for IE8, is faster, more stable, cleaner, and with greater flexibility. I've used Chrome as a back-up browser on numerous occasions when IE8 had a problem with a site, or just choked on loading one.
  At https://tools.google.com/chrome/intl/en/themes/index.html you can select a theme and click Apply. A quick way to find them is to select Options from the little wrench tab, and then the "Personal Stuff" tab - this tab may not appear if you've been using Chrome and haven't updated to the latest version. To do that, just visit www.google.com/chrome.
  ....................
  Interesting sites: Some years ago a lady stopped by the Times-News to talk to us about the people living under her bed and the radio stations that were attempting to bombard her with cosmic rays. Her head was wrapped in aluminum foil.
  The other day I discovered she was not alone; visit http://zapatopi.net/afdb to learn how to shield your brain from these electromagnetic psychotronic mind control carrier waves. Some other strange sites: The Virtual Toilet Paper Museum: http://nobodys-perfect.com/vtpm/index.html; make Paul dance, http://www.dancingpaul.com; and yoga with your kitty, http://www.yogakitty.com.

• "This message will self-destruct..."

  By Ted Como

  Fans of Mission Impossible, a TV series that began in the late '60s featuring a government team of secret agents, will recall the line, "As usual Jim, this message will self-destruct in five seconds," wherein the team leader listens to a taped message which then dissolves in a puff of smoke. Absent the affects, there are several web sites that will assist you in causing a digital communication to disappear within minutes of being read, or at a date certain.
  There are times when we need to send sensitive information quickly despite knowing that absent encryption, nothing is secure on the Internet. At the least, you could suffer great embarrassment from information perhaps posted in a forum years ago, or which you e-mailed to a friend in confidence who either passed it to someone else, or which was found on his computer when he sold it and neglected to protect the contents of the hard drive. At worse, the information could cost you a job, or land you in court. Setting up encryption between communicating parties can get complicated since both must have a key.
  As with other such sites, DestructingMessage.com offers a free service where you create a message which is hosted at their site. You generate either a link to the message which you may send by Instant Messenger, or, the site will send an e-mail to a recipient with the link. You then set a timer for the message to be erased - from 15 seconds to five minutes. Once the link is activated, the timer starts.
  At htpps://privnote.com there's no timer - once the message is accessed, it is erased when the web site is closed. Other sites (do a Google search for "self-destructing messaages") use various themes but in all cases, you may select the message, copy it and paste it to Wordpad or some other text editor before it goes away.
  But these sites also limit the messages to only several hundred characters. What if you wish to send a longer document?
  At the University of Washington, (http://vanish.cs.washington.edu) the computer science department has created Vanish as a research project.
  Vanish offers the ability to create e-mail, a Google Doc document, a Facebook message, a blog post - any digital text format - where the information self-destructs at a specific time, wherever it is, regardless whether it has been accessed. The intent is to ensure that the protected document has no permancy. Until it "vanishes," it may be accessed by anyone, though reading it is another matter.
  What you see displayed in an e-mail, on Facebook or in any other wise is a bunch of gobbledegook.
  Vanish is free but currently only works with the Firefox browser. Both the sender and the recipient must download and install the Vanish software. The sender then highlights any sensitive text entered into the browser and presses the "Vanish" button in Firefox. The tool encrypts the information with a key unknown even to the sender. That text can be read, for a limited time only, when the recipient highlights the text and presses the "Vanish" button to unscramble it. After eight hours the message will be impossible to unscramble and will remain gibberish forever.
  To ensure that even the sender doesn't accidentally lose the encryption key, he or she never sees it. Instead, once the encryption is created, Vanish breaks the key into many pieces and distributes those pieces across a peer-to-peer network so that over time, the pieces disappear and even the person sending the message will no longer have access to it. When the document "expires," it expires permanently.
  You can experience how this works through an online demo at the web site where you encrypt a message, and then e-mail it to someone. The e-mail tells the recipient that he or she must visit the web site to decode the message.
  Merge Accounts: For social networking enthusiasts who converse with friends through multiple accounts, there's not enough real estate on the computer desktop for all those windows and keeping them minimized nonetheless consumes system resources. The solution is Digsby, which combines AIM, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, Google Talk, Jabber and Facebook Chat accounts into a single interface.
  And it doesn't cost anything.
  With Digsby (www.digsby.com) you may manage multiple conversations in a single window; rename contacts who use strange, convoluted names with something you can remember; merge friends using multiple accounts into a single account; manage Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and personal e-mail accounts in a single window; and combine alerts for your Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn accounts. In short, Digsby consolidates your external contacts whatever form they're in. And that certainly makes life a lot easier.
  Digsby's also customizeable with various themes and offers numerous features such as complete control over layout of buddy lists, icon sizes and how you are alerted, and if you have a web presence and promote Digsby, you'll get $1 for ever user you bring to it.
  Today's Chuckles: World leaders meeting in Italy recently decreed that global temperatures shouldn't increase more than 2 degrees Celsius. Too bad they missed the opportunity to also decree that it rain every other day for five minutes so we don't have to water gardens, and that the moon should halt its slow retreat from the Earth.
  Then we have the Center for Biological Diversity giving notice of suit against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency because pesticides are reaching the Arctic through the atmosphere and the oceans, and affecting polar bears. No word from the EPA on why it is being held responsible for pollutants manufactured the world over. And what about the seals - has no one any concern for those cute, baby seals?
  

• Should you upgrade to Windows7?

  By Ted Como

  Windows 7 has been released to manufacturers and will be available Oct. 22 as an upgrade from XP or Vista for $120 for Windows 7 Home Premium, $200 for Professional, or $220 Ultimate; if you want a full retail disc to install it on a new system, that will cost $200, $300 or $320 respectively.
  Rumor has it Microsoft also may sell a Home Premium Family Pack that would cover up to three systems in a household for about $190; no details as yet.
  So, should you plan to upgrade? My answer is yes on my Vista primary gaming machine only because high-end games - and other applications - will be more stable on W7. But I have a Vista laptop and two XP machines that I won't upgrade, because at base, W7 doesn't offer me any reason to.
  Windows 7 Home Premium provides "improved desktop navigation; faster and easier launch of applications; a faster, easier and safer web experience; makes it easiere to create a home network; and allows you to watch many TV shows for free with Internet TV (you'll need a TV graphics card.") That translates into the ability to record TV directly to your computer and with Windows Media Center, watch, pause or rewind. You can more easily manage the appearance of your desktop, even turning it into a slide show of your favorite photos. You may access recently used files with just two clicks, stream music files to any network-connected device, easily search for anything on your computer, share files across others PCs in your home, and pin any program to the taskbar.
  W7 Professional adds the ability to "run many existing Windows XP productivity applications in Windows XP Mode (requires a free download after installation;) allows you to connect to company networks more easily, and to recover your data easily with automatic backup to your home and business network." And W7 Ultimate adds the ability to "help protect data on your PC and portable storage devices against loss or theft with BitLocker, and to work in the language of choice or switch between any of 35 languages."
  If you upgrade from Vista, you may do an in-place installation where you will not have to reinstall anything but if you upgrade from XP, you'll have to reinstall all of your applications.
  Can you even run W7? Download a utility from Microsoft at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/upgrade-advisor.aspx and it will let you know. Minimum requirements are a 1 GHz or faster processor, DirectX9 graphics processor, 1GB of memory and about 16GB of drive space.
  We'll know more about W7's capabilities and any install issues as we close in on the fall. But for the moment, if your computer is doing all you need it to do, there's no reason to upgrade the operating system. W7 does not represent a major leap, as for instance the move from Win98 to XP; it's more like XP to Vista.
  Firefox, Winamp: We'll have to wait for W7 but two other popular applications have been upgraded - and they don't cost anything.
  Firefox, the open source browser that continues to slowly gain on Internet Explorer, is now in version 3.5, and according to Mozilla which develops it, represents significant improvements including JavaScript performance and native support for open video and audio. Mozilla says this version is twice as fast as Firefox 3, and 10 times faster than Firefox 2 on complex web sites.
  It includes the ability to play audio and video without the need for plugins or seperate appllications, something even IE8 has yet to deliver. Privacy controls are also updated and a new Private Browing mode leaves no trace - anywhere, including your computer - of web sites you visit. A feature called Location Aware Browsing allows sites to ask you where you are located and if you respond, it uses that information to find nearby points of interest.
  For screenshots and video, or to download, visit www.mozilla.com.
  Visit www.winamp.com to upgrade your Winamp installation to version 5.56. Winamp is a full-featured multimedia player.
  DVR Without A Box: Recent action by the U.S. Supreme Court ruling was the final appeal from broadcasters seeking to halt development of a new Digital Video Recorder (DVR) service that does not require you have a set-top box on your TV with a hard drive. The ruling means that the service will be coming to cable users nationwide, in the near future.
  The issue in the case was over where the hard drive that stores recorded television was located - either near your TV, or somewhere else. Cablevision plans to offer users the ability to click a button on their remote - or perhaps use their computer - to instruct the cable provider to record TV programming on its servers, instead of a on a seperate set-top box in the home. The user could then access the recording, and stream the media directly to their TV.
  Broadcasters claimed Cablevision in effect, would be "rebroadcasting" their signal; their problem with that is that the user would have the ability to zip through commercials, thus lowering the value of those commercials and therefore their cost to advertisers. Cablevision claimed its service was no different than any other DVR, except that the hard drive was elsewhere. The court agreed with Cablevision, and refused to hear the appeal.
  SSDs Coming: Intel may be on the verge of launching new hard drives that use Solid State technology (SSD) in which there are no moving parts. This type of memory - flash storage - is used in digital cameras and MP3 players for example, and even on some laptop computers, but heretofore, storage has been unsufficient for the needs of most laptop and desktop computers.
  But reports are that Intel has produced a 320GB SSD that initially, will cost a lot more. But SSDs great improve performance while greatly reducing the threat of drive failure, use a lot less power, and remove a major source of system heating, which should therefore require less cooling and make computers much quieter.
  It'll be a while before we see any mass-maketing of these drives, especially since the price of the chips used in them has increased. As well, current operating systems are not fully optimized for SSDs.
  The End Of Cash? In this economy, not a lot of us have a lot of cash, but at some point in the future, none of us will be carrying coins and bills that have passed through many, many hands and have been who knows where. As well, everything else in your wallet from credit card to driver's license will be replaced by digital media such as computer chips in your phone. Some predict cash will no longer be used for most transactions is less than a decade.
  

• "How does the Internet operate..."

  By Ted Como

  "You may have explained this at some point, but I don't understand how the Internet operates? Is there a central distribution center run by the government? I know how other utilities like electricity and telephone distribute their product, but have never understood who distributes the internet information. Other readers may be clueless also."
  That's a good question and one you can answer online through a Google search. But I have no doubt that reader Barry in Jonesborough asked me to answer it because he is among the many who appreciate my amazing ability to take the complex, and make it understandable - what can I say; it's a gift; as is my modesty.
  Mitch is chatting with the family over dinner: "Timmy, how was school today." Timmy responds, "Dad, I didn't go to school today because Donny and I went fishing." Mitch opens the kitchen window and yells to his neighbor, "Hey Bert, did you know that the boys skipped school today?" To which Bert responds, "Thanks Mitch, hand me the switch when you're done with it."
  Mitch and family are a network: a group of people who exchange information. Bert and family next door are also a network. The Internet is simply a worldwide collection of networks, where any member of one network can communicate with any member of another. Like members of Mitch's family, each member has a name - in the case of the Internet, it's a number. This is how we find each other over the Internet.
  That number is called an Internet Protocal, or IP. It's different for every computer or other device which is connected to the Internet. It consists of 12 or fewer digits: an example might be 68.191.236.70. To learn the current IP - or address - of your home computer, visit www.whatismyip.com.
  Your IP is assigned to your computer by whoever provides your connection to the Internet - Charter Cable for instance. Let's say you get a second computer. Typically, you would then place a router between the two computers and your cable modem. When that happens, Charter assigns the IP to the router, and the router then assigns different addresses to each computer in your home network so that the information you're passing to and receiving from the Internet on the computer you're working on, can be distinguished from the information another family member is passing to and receiving from the Internet on the second computer.
  That's a lot of numbers - we could never remember them. So it's made easier by giving web sites names. For instance, the point of entry server for google.com has an IP, but instead of asking to connect to that number, you simply type google.com. That request is translated by a Name Server from "google.com" to google's actual IP address.
  Who owns the Internet? Nobody in particular.
  Joe's Hot Dog Hut might have a network of three computers with different IPs. He owns his local network. The Times-News owns its local network; Eastman Chemical owns its local network. These networks connect to each other locally through an Internet Service Provider like Charter. Charter, in turns, owns the cables and routers that connect its local group of networks to other local groups of networks, and so on. Expand this across the world, and you see that there isn't a single owner and fortunately, the Internet also is not fully managed by any single government.
  But you do need someone to write rules (protocols) for how these networks interact, a task that falls under a group of organizations like The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, which in turn is overseen by an international board of directors. It also includes The Internet Society, a nonprofit group that develops standards; the Internet Engineering Task Force, an international group that manages security; The Internet Architecture Board, and others.
  When you open a browser on your home computer and type in an address like www.google.com, your computer sends that request in the form of a relatively small amount of information called a Packet to your router, or, cable modem, which then sends it to your Internet Service Provider, or ISP. Your ISP then sends it "upstream" to the physical network that carries messages back and forth between other ISPs and routers, known as the Internet Backbone. The backbone's collection of cables and other hardware such as Internet Exchange Points, or IXPs, is owned by a variety of companies like IBM, Verizon, Sprint, Qwest, UUNET, and others. IXPs are the physical connections between the networks and ISPs - they relay information.
  Your browser's request to locate the server www.google.com is translated by a name server into Google's IP, and is then is forwarded to a router which examines the IP. The router can tell from the IP where to next send the request - another router. The request may be sent to a lot of routers before it arrives at the designated IP, or web site.
  This happens very quickly because information moves over the Internet at the speed of light. It works something like the post office delivering a letter to a specific address. When the letter arrives at your local post office (your ISP), it is then forwarded to a sorting center (the first router) which determines what city it needs to go to. It is then forwarded to that city (another router) where the specific street address is determined, and it is then sent to the mailman for delivery to that street.
  If you're using Windows XP, you can examine that delivery structure by clicking on Start, then Programs, then Accessories, and then Command Prompt. Click the box, and you'll see a flashing underline symbol. Now type "tracert www.google.com" but without the quote marks. You'll see a list of "hops" or transfers, that your request to access www.google.com has taken.
  The first one is the IP of our computer. The second will be your Internet Service Provider. The rest will be transfers through various routers until google.com is reached. This little program also tells you how long it took to connect to google.com from each access point, in milliseconds - a millisecond is one thousandth of a second. If you're using Vista, click on the Windows Start button and in the search bar, type "Command" without the quotes. Select Command Prompt and type the traceroute command as above.
  For more information, Google "how the Internet works."
  Free Music: Nothing relaxes me more than good music and one of my favorite pieces to calm the nerves is Chopin's Nocture No. 2, Op. 9, which I used to have on CD but couldn't find the other day. So I went looking on the Internet and came across musopen.com which has available for download an incredible collection of classical music sorted by composer, performer, instrument, period or form - though it offers nothing by another of my favorite composers, Johann Strauss.
  But for what's there, merely click on a composer or form, etc., to open another page where you may click View, and then Download to begin playing the piece on your default media player. Or, you may right click Download and "save as" to save the piece to your system.
  I found the second of Chopin's nocturnes there though I wasn't impressed by the performer; a Google search found a YouTube video with Arthur Rubinstein's much more satisfying rendition.
  For more information, Google "how the Internet works."
  Free Games: Visit www.downloadsquad.com/2009/06/20/free-open-source-cross-platform-games to access 25 free games you may download for PC or Mac.
  
  

• Check out Microsoft's new search engine

  By Ted Como

  Until a few weeks ago, had you asked me about "Bing" I'd have mentioned a popular crooner of the 1930s and '40s who made some funny movies with Bob Hope. Today, Bing might be considered an acronym for "But It's Not Google."
  Indeed, it's Microsoft's new search engine, formerly known as Windows Live (no, Live is not yet Dead) and within a week, it surpassed Yahoo to become the number two search engine worldwide. That's not a bad start in Microsoft's effort to compete with Google and while it's going to be an uphill fight - Google has about 71 percent market share to Bing's 16 - Bing will steadily gain ground for some unique design elements.
  Visit bing.com to check it out.
  Open a Google window and type "laptop computers." You'll get several sponsored web sites (they pay Google to keep them at the top of the search return) followed by a mishmash of sites selling laptops or parts and service and, at right, some advertising from vendors.
  Do that in Bing and for the most part, you'll get the same result. But, there's more: now, click on Shopping in the space at left and you get a list of 10,500 laptops for sale, each with a photo of that laptop. Pretty nice - but there's more.
  At the top of the list you'll find some sort buttons: by best user rating, by best expert rating, or by price. As Bing says in its promotional material, it intends to take a lot of the guesswork out and simplify the process of searching for something. But you're still not done. At left, you may continue the laptop search by brand, or, by price.
  You'll see category definers at Bing's home page and in every search return page. They include: Web, Images, Videos, Shopping, News, xRank (see who and what everyone else is searching for,) Local, Maps, and Travel.
  Click on Images and type something in the search engine. As you mouse over the returned images, they slightly enlarge and provide the name of the image, its resolution and size, and the site hosting it. you also may click to show similar images, or leave feedback on an image. Notice that the search returned more than 200 images on a single page - with Google, you must scroll through multiple pages.
  You may sort the results of your search by image size (small, medium, large or wallpaper,) layout (square, wide or tall,) color or black and white, by style (photo or illustration,) and by people (just faces, head & shoulders, or other.)
  Click on videos and you'll see some that are representative of TV shows, music and news videos, but the interesting thing on this page is that you may mouse over any of those video thumbnails to to briefly play them, giving you a better sense of what they're about.
  Microsoft says Bing ranks by logical category instead of popularity, i.e., type "Kingsport restaurants" and you'll also get links to reviews and other restaurants in the region.
  I didn't find a direct link from Bing but if you visit www.discoverbing.com/mobile/, you may type in your cell phone number and get a link to Bing for Mobile (or visit m.bing.com) for your Internet-ready phone. And you can set preferences at Bing at top right on the home page by clicking on Extras. This includes ability to filter web pages returned from Bing searches to all, some (moderate) or to exclude (strict) those with sexually explicit text, images or video. You also should set a location if one was not set automatically so that when you type in "french restaurants," Bing will search your local area.
  Also under Extras you'll see a link to "your cashback account." This can mean cash in your pocket if you purchase a product through a participating advertiser by using Bing search.
  As to the News category, it doesn't compare to Google's - yet. But enter the name of a disease or health topic and you'll get a wealth of related information and links. Most certainly, you'll get to the health information you're seeking faster in Bing than in Google.
  Bing's new, neat and in some respects powerful, and I'll be using it - right along with Google. Bing is not a Google alternative, but another useful tool in helping you get to the information you want.
  Wave: Microsoft may be putting the rush on Google in the search department, but Google is responding with something one developer says could make Windows irrelevant - not gonna happen Jack. But the product, due out later this year, is very interesting: Google Wave (http://wave.google.com/) in effect is an online document to which anyone can add any content, be it e-mail, text in any form, video, maps, illustrations, photos, even web feeds. This is done is such a way that it creates a "wave" that can be rolled back and forth to view the documents evolution.
  Some at Google think Wave could consolidate Google Gmail, Docs, Talk, Picasa, and other applications, as well as attract those using competing such products. We'll learn more about it in coming months.
  Win7 Release: It would appear from a leaked memo from a technology retailer that as of June 26, customers buying Vista-enabled computers can opt for a free upgrade to Windows 7 when (if) it is released this October. Or, they may pre-purchase Windows 7 Home Premium for $49, or Professional for $99.
  It's a shame that Microsoft has begun marketing multiple versions of new operating systems - it's unnecessary, and confusing for users. Win7 should be a single version, at a single price.

• Entering the world of Facebook...

  By Ted Como

  Seniors seem all atwiiter over Facebook and similar networking opportunities and as my inclinication is to ignore fads, under that assumption I've resisted. But it was time to see what the fuss is all about and the first order of social web site business is to dispense with Twitter.
  If there's a purpose to the absolute waste of time that twitter.com offers, it not only escapes, but flees from me. It would appear that you sign up at Twitter and then look for friends who have done likewise, so that you can message each other - I prefer e-mail, much as I prefer calling someone rather than texting. On your Twitter home page you also may post a useless comment to yourself or your friends, i.e., "I'm having a bad day" - as if anybody cares. Again, perhaps I'm missing something.
  Facebook, on the other hand, is interesting though it, too, seems like pablum for the extremely bored. I found a bunch of relatives on Facebook - not surprising since most still reside in my hometown in Northern New York where you have little choice but be bored. The two major winter activities in Ogdensburg, NY (winter occurring from September through May) are consuming alcohol and cheating on one's spouse. In the summer, which arrives in July and lasts through August, the two major activities are, consuming alcohol and cheating on one's spouse.
  Of course, none of my relatives engage in these pursuits but you can't blame those who do. There's simply nothing else to do in Ogdensburg, NY except drive around the very flat countryside and smell cow manure from all the dairy farms, or, catch some disease or other by swimming in the heavily polluted Oswegatchie River, which passes through town enroute to the St. Lawrence. Now, one may swim in the St. Lawrence but you risk being run over by a "saltie" - a seagoing vessel passing through the St. Lawrence Seaway - or chewed on by very large mutated fish which hatched in the Oswegatchie.
  I seldom interact with these kinfolk so I credit Facebook with improving these relationships. Over the past week or two, my newfound relatives and I have enjoyed sending each other virtual drinks, informing each other of five things we can reach from where we're sitting, traded our Chinese names, tested each other on how well we spell and which things we hate that everybody else likes, decided the best albums of all time, which movies we'd watch over again, thing we'd blow lottery winnings on, what generation we are most like, which president we would are most like and what our personality types are.
  So if these are things that you, too, have been missing out on in life, facebook.com's for you.
  But, on to some useful information: privacy hints if you sign up for Facebook and join some 200 million of the also-bored.
  You have several ways to quickly find "friends" at Facebook. You search your e-mail to see if any are on Facebook, search your AIM Buddy List, import Windows Live contacts, find classmates from your high school or college, or just search Facebook directly by name. When you find someone you believe you know, you click "Add as friend," which sends a message this person must confirm.
  Lots of folks want to be your Facebook friend - be verey careful and do not confirm people you don't know. But it's easy to dispose of unwanted friends: click Friends in the facebook main menu and then, All Friends. To the right of each friend's name is an X - clicking it removes that person.
  Anyone may see your friends list because that's public information on Facebook. But you can hide that list by clicking Settings in the main menu, and then Privacy Settings. On this page, click Profile to control who can see your personal information including your friends list, and Search, to control whether you can be searched for. Perhaps there's a former Facebook friend who is annoying you - you can add their name to a block list which prevents them from finding you in a search, seeing your profile or interacting with you in any way through Facebook.
  Back to Search, if you wish to hide the fact that you're on Facebook from Google and other search engines, you may deselect "create a public search listing for me." You also may control whether searchers see your profile picture, friend list, a link to add you as a friend, a link to send you a message, or pages that you are a fan on. Similar information and more may be hidden by clicking the Profile tab.
  Also check the News Feed and Wall tab where you can control whether other users see various aspects of your Facebook page.
  On your main Facebook page you may find that one of your friends seems addicted to Facebook and is posting huge amounts of information that overwhelm everything else on your page. Pass your mouse over their name and the word "hide" will appear at right; click it and that content goes away.
  Of course, there are other social networking sites, but Facebook is most popular and that's where you may connect with friends and relatives you may not have heard from in decades.
  Vista Update: A second service pack for Vista is being sent to manufacturers but there's no word on when consumers will get the upgrade either as an update, or a direct download. That's no big whoop since the service pack doesn't fix anything that's a problem at the moment on Vista. Vista SO2 includes support for Bluetooth 2.1, makes improvements to system searches, and provides Vista the ability to record to Blu-ray discs if you're one of the six people who have that hardware on your PC.
  Meanwhile, as I indicated last week in this space, Windows7 will allow some users to run the XP operating system virtually within W7, which means you won't have to upgrade old hardware if it currently is supported by XP. But that doesn't mean you'll be able to run virtual XP on just any old system. Microsoft has revealed that 2GB of system RAM will be required as well as virtualization support in the CPU - older chipsets do not support virtualization. It's a year before we have to worry about this but if you can't wait, go here to download an application that will determine whether your system will run virtual XP within a W7 window: http://www.grc.com/securable.htm.
  I've also complained about one aspect of Vista that's annoying and that I disabled: the User Account Control. In Win7, you have the ability to disable it directly. Win7 also provides flexibility on controlling those also-annoying balloon messages that pop up at bottom right on your desktop in XP and Vista.
  Net's Down: You've probably heard someone in your office, unable to connect to a web site or download e-mail, exclaim that "the Internet's down." Of course, it never is - but things do get slow at times and now comes a warning that we may be facing Internet brownouts as capacity continues to increase.
  Bandwidth demand on the Intenet's backbone is growing 60 percent per year, but is accelerating as more users begin downloading huge video files from sites such as YouTube. It's been reported that the amount of traffic generated each month by YouTube is now equivalent to the amount of traffic generated across the entire internet in all of 2000.

• The power of the Internet...

  By Ted Como

  We got a glimpse of the enormous, untapped power of the Internet in the hundreds of “tea parties” held across the nation to protest insane government spending, and, in a stunning vocal performance by an unassuming Scottish woman auditioning for a talent show.
  In both instances, mainstream media was bypassed, and they sure didn’t like it.
  Susan Boyle is a middle-aged lady of incredible vocal ability who has set an incredible record for the YouTube videos of her appearance on Britain’s Got Talent show. The videos have been viewed nearly 90 million times in just two weeks; nothing has ever approached such numbers. And media didn’t take notice until it simply could no longer ignore the story.
  As to the tea parties, the reaction of mainstream media was different. Forced to the story, it lost all objectivity and in some cases demonstrated an amazing bias.
  The media big feet seem to believe that it isn’t news, until they say it’s news; they see anything outside their blessing as a threat — and well they should.
  Since the collapse of United Press International, the only ball game in town for many newspapers — including this one — for national and international news is the Associated Press.
  AP failed to do an advance on the tea parties despite that it was a major news event — there were more than 700 of them planned for every state. On the day of the event, AP didn’t move the first story until around noon, when it reported they were organized by social network Web sites and the “conservative Fox News channel.” When’s the last time you saw AP reference “the liberal” NBC/CBS/ABC/MSNBC, etc. news channels?
  The tax protestors used the Internet to organize with incredible success, leveraging social networking and communications technologies in what began just a few weeks ago as a blog in Seattle. And for the most part, the politicians were kept out of it.
  Such may well be Democracy’s saving grace — they put new blood and energy into the electorate once citizens see they can, indeed, bypass the largely corrupt political establishment. Our own story on Kingsport’s tea party event leads conversations at www.timesnews.net   by a long shot; these are energized local citizens and let’s hope they stay that way.
  Some go further. As New Media Editor Don Fenley noted in a recent blog, the director of the Trends Research Institute who predicted the current recession — Gerald Celente — sees the tax protests as harbingers of revolution of a different sort: an “Intellectual Revolution ... where people free their minds from the tyranny of ‘dumb think.’ This is a revolution about thinking — not manning the barricades. It’s about brain power — not brute force.
  “Americans are doomed unless they kick the junk news habit, deprogram themselves from celebrity worship, refuse to blindly follow political leaders and question all ideological dogmas ... especially their own.”
  Lastly, in the midst of this was Texas Gov. Rick Perry supporting a resolution reaffirming states’ rights under the 10th amendment to the U.S. Constitution: “I believe that our federal government has become oppressive in its size, its intrusion into the lives of our citizens, and its interference with the affairs of our state... I believe that returning to the letter and spirit of the U.S. Constitution and its essential 10th Amendment will free our state from undue regulations, and ultimately strengthen our Union.”
  It will be interesting to see how this all plays out.
  Net Sales Taxes: Legislation is pending in the U.S. Congress to tax Internet sales in some fashion and as we said in this space in January, it’s well past time. Many disagree — understandable, especially when government thievery of the fruit of our labor is rampant. But trade is the foundation of civilization and government is necessary to maintain civilization — and both are dependent on sales taxes.
  Sales taxes help pay for the operation of state and local governments; in the handful of states that don’t tax income — Tennesseans, knock on wood — it funds much of that cost. If you allow the sale of goods and services to proceed without collecting sales taxes, government either gets the money in some other fashion, or it collapses, and this will begin to happen as the digital marketplace continues to grow, at the expense of the physical marketplace.
  There is a limit to the number of widgets we consume. If widgets are cheaper over the Internet because sales taxes aren’t collected, then eventually, that’s where consumers will get them, and the local widget store will close, and the widget store “associates” will be out of work. When the physical marketplace leaves, the community dies — the sale of goods and services is the major producer of local jobs.
  The U.S. Supreme Court says states may not require businesses to collect Internet sales taxes unless those businesses have stores, or some physical presence, in the state. That’s about to be overturned because it’s irrelevant, because states need the money, and because it’s the logical and fair thing to level the playing field.
  Opposing this effort, of course, are online retailers like eBay, L.L. Bean, Overstock.com  , etc., who, among other things, complain about the feasibility of collecting sales taxes that vary not only by state, but by county and municipality. But that’s a hollow argument; this is the perfect use for computers.
  IE8 Add-ons: I visited ieaddons.com   to see what’s new and interesting for Internet Explorer 8. Here are some great add-ons — search for them in the box at top right to download. Google Translate: with this add-on, you need only highlight text on any Web page to get an instant translation without leaving the page — dozens of languages are supported; visual search: there are two you should look at, eBay Visual Search which lets you search images of items for sale and Wikipedia visual search; preview and launch URL: this accelerator allows you to see a thumbnail Web site image of any URL to pass your mouse over, and then launch the URL immediately without having to cut and paste; and Google Define, which gives you ability to look up definitions.
  “Living Prints:” You’ve seen those plastic pictures that, if you turn them a certain way, morph into a different picture. Now, you can do that with photos you take. Visit snapily.com   to see how you can set up two of your photos to interchange with each other or, put one of your photos on a 3D background.
  Thank you: We offer our appreciation to a nationwide group of Hispanic pastors which is urging illegal immigrants to boycott the 2010 U.S. census. The National Coalition of Latino Clergy and Christian Leaders says illegal immigrants should not agree to be counted unless Congress first passes immigration reform.
  Good!

• Zap Vista's User Account Control

  By Ted Como

  I'm generally pleased with the Vista operating system except for that irksome User Account Control (UAC.) But I found some help in the form of Tweak UAC, available free from http://www.tweak-uac.com/home/.
  UAC was no afterthought - engineers were looking for a way to protect users from themselves and indeed, many home computer problems I hear about result from uninformed action - user doing something on their system they should not have done because they didn't understand what they were doing.
  UAC helps because even if you're logged into your Vista system as administrator (the primary user) Vista still requires permission to do certain things in the form of an advisory along the lines of: are you sure you know what you're doing? Well, this can get very annoying for those of us who believe we do.
  For instance, Family Tree Maker advised via e-mail that an update was available to FTM 2009, which I use for genealogy work. So I launched FTM and asked for the update. FTM then advised that I had to be running it as administrator in order to install the update - simple, just a right click and "run as administrator" selection. And I was able to do the update.
  But now, every time I launch FTM, UAC asks me if I really, really, want to launch it. "Yes, you blinkity-blank, blah blah blah," I respond. "Why do think I instructed it to launch...?"
  I don't need UAC reminding me thusly. Indeed, I don't wish to communite with UAC at all. So my inclination was to turn it off but that's not really a good idea since occasionally, others have access to my computer and could do nasty things to it like download some malware.
  What I wanted to do is shut off UAC for me as administrator, but leave it turned on for anyone else who might use my system. And that's not something Vista allows you to do. But Tweak UAC does.
  If offers three options: turn UAC off completely, switch UAC to "quiet mode" where it's running but doesn't bother the administer with pop-up warnings, or, leave UAC on. Download and select the middle option.
  IE8 Final: If you've been listening - reading, that is - you probably have Internet Explorer 8 Release Candidate 1 installed as I suggested several months ago. I haven't had a problem with it - some have - and when Microsoft released the final version of IE8 several weeks ago, I promptly downloaded it (Google IE8 for the home page, which URL is too long to reproduce here.)
  There's no need to uninstall IE8 RC1. Just download IE8 to your system - if you've installed IE8 RC1 the download will advise that you already have this file on your system; just tell it to overwrite. After the download, double click to install. Your system will go through two reboots, and you'll be good to go.
  System Care: Reader Steve Jeffers pointed me to Advanced SystemCare 3.0, a free download from iobit.com (click downloads, then Advanced SystemCare Free.)
  This utility is a simple but effective way to accomplish several ends: it will clean up registry errors, scan for and remove spyware and adware, get rid of temporary and other extraneous files, and speed up your operating system. I ran it on a box I hadn't "cleaned" in several years. It found more than 700 registry errors and opened more than 750MB of disk space by taking out the garbage.
  The utility sets a restore point for XP in the event it creates problems, but I rebooted the box and came right back up. One thing to keep in mind is that it also deletes cookies, which is good in that a lot of them are wasted space, but not so good for sites you frequent which recognize you via cookies. If you delete all cookies, you may have to log back into various sites for which you've registered, so that they can drop another cookie on your system.
  SystemCare runs and allows you to edit everything it plans to do, before you push the button telling it to do them. So, if you want to take the time, you can peruse all those cookies to uncheck the ones you want to keep - it was more than 1,000 cookies in my scan.
  Good program, and it does a good job. Be aware that this program will attempt to install the Yahoo tool bar and search engine in IE, and despite that I told it "no thanks," it nonetheless did attempt to install Yahoo as the default search engine. I use Google, and I have it set up to thwart any attempt to change it as the default, which saved me having to uninstall Yahoo (for which, I have absolutely no use.)
  ICE: In this instance, ICE stands for In Case of Emergency and it has to do with a campaign that has over the past few years picked up steam because it just makes good sense. The idea is to store the word ICE in your mobile phone address book, and under it to enter the number of the person you would want to be contacted in an emergency situation.
  Consider: you're alone, and in an accident, and unconscious. Your wallet has your ID but that doesn't tell investigators who they should call to notify. They have to do some research to learn who you are, where you live, whether you're married or if not, who your nearest relatives are and how can they be contacted, etc. They may have your cell phone but they won't know who's who among the dozens of numbers.
  Much better if you have numbers listed under the name: ICE. In fact, several are better - make one home, home mobile, one office, etc., but make them different people. Or, just list them as ICE, ICE1, ICE2,. etc. And tell those people what you're doing in the event they ever get a call.
  More information is available here: http://www.icecontactusa.com/index.html, including a list of emergency departments by state who have been trained to check your cell phone for this designation. Sadly, in Tennessee, that only includes four localities.

• You don't have to pay for image manipulation software

  By Ted Como

  Brother Tim in Hickory got a new scanner for Christmas that reads old negatives and of late, I've started receiving images taken by my late mother's Brownie in the 1950s in our hometown in Northern New York State. They're severely scratched from decades of mishandling and cleaning them up with Photoshop reminded me of a software I used on Win98 called Kai's Power Tools, which allowed you to do some interesting things with images.
  Alas, Kai's is now part of Corel, which charges $100 for the software. So I went looking for the free stuff, in particular photo mosaic software. I collect historic images from that same home town and I'd like to build a poster of an historic site, using thumbnail images of other historic sites. You may have seen such posters - a popular one is a portrait of Lincoln which, seen up close, reveals it is made up of hundreds of tiny Civil War images.
  Back in the day when I was using Red Hat Linux I found an open source (free) program that would do a fairly good job of building a mosaic image and in unsuccessfully trying to find that, I came across AndreaMosaic (AM) from www.andreaplanet.com which is better still. Visit this site and click on Artworks, to see what this program can do.
  The top image is a flower made up of 156 other photos. At a distance, it looks like a slightly distorted flower but click on it and you get a closeup, showing the various photos that comprise it. Mosaic software scans an image in black and white or color, and reads colors and tones. It then gets fed dozens of smaller (thumbnail) images and it uses these to reproduce those colors and tones; thus, images within an image.
  The more thumbnails you use to build the image, the better the result, i.e., click on the reproduction of Van Gogh's "Starry Night" right under the flower. This looks like an exact copy of that famous painting, even when you click the plus sign at bottom to enlarge it. But click again, and you see it start to break up a bit. Click yet again, and now you see the thousands of tiny photos that make up this image.
  Indeed, this huge, 1.5 gigapixel image, is comprised of more than 210,000 of these tiny photos.
  AndreaMosaic allows you to build huge images - up to 8,000 pixels, or about 30 inches. Once you have finished your project, you can put it on a thumb drive and take it to a office supply store to have it printed on high-quality, glossy stock, for framing. The program also has great flexibility in the number of tiles - or smaller images - you use to build up the final image. The author says the program will incorporate thousands of these smaller images - apparently limited only by your system's memory. Dealing with this many images will put a strain on your system's resources and unless you have several gigabytes of memory, it may not work.
  As to those smaller images, you don't need thousands of different photos. You can use just several hundred, and instruct the program to create a final image of, say, 5,000 tiles, by using those images over and over again.
  The AndreaMosaic web site is very user friendly with tutorials on how to use the program.
  But if you want some simplier, or don't have the system memory for a large project, try on online mosaic builder at pixisnap.com. Click the photo mosaic at left to upload the primary photo you wish to reformat by using a bunch of smaller, thumbnail images. Once that's done, you may upload up to 20 smaller images to be used in the rebuild. Using only 20 photos doesn't give much of a result, but it's suitable for desktop wallpaper. The site asks you to join in order to save your finished photo but that's not necessary; just right click on the finished image and select "save as."
  Here are some other photo manipulation web sites:
  Befunky.com doesn't offer a lot of effects but it does a better even than Photoshop at turning a color photo into a "charcoal" rendereing. Click Get Started Now and then "Charcola." You'll be asked to browse your computer for an image to upload. Then, use the simple editing tools to crop the pixture and wait for the result.
  To save this image, click save, give it a name, and download to your desktop or folder.
  At www.vincentchenug.ca/shapecollage, download the Shape Collage program which will take as many photos as you care to use, and turn them into various shapes such as a snowman or a heart, or letters.
  Use Picasa (picasa.google.com) to organize, edit, create and share photos, uploading them if you need web space to Picasa Web Albums. It runs on any verson of Windows or Linux.
  If Time magazine has passed you by as Person of the Year, visit maymypic.com, upload a nice photo of yourself, and paste it onto any of a dozen or so fictitious magazine fronts. Right click to save it to your computer, or, buy a print, or post it to MySpace, Live Spaces, Xanga, Facebook, iGoogle, etc.
  If you need to eliminate redeye from a photo or wish to apply about as many affects as you can with Photoshop, visit pixlr.com and click on "jumi in n' get started!" You'll see a window that looks very much like Photoshop with many of the tools and filters found in the professional program. You may add text to the photo, crop it, adjust colors, use the magic wand tool to select and move portions of it to a new window (put hair on a bald head, etc.) and then save it back to your computer. This is about the best free online photo editing program I've found other than Gimp. A similar utility is available at picnik.com.
  Gimp is the open source community's response to Photoshop and considering what Adobe charges for that software, it's needed and welcome. Gimp (gimp.org) is free, runs on Windows or Mac, and is continually updated. If you take digital photos, Gimp is a must-have. It comes with plenty of documention and help files.
  You can swing your camera around to capture 360-degree video but how about doing the same thing with photos? Visit clevr.com and sign up - you give your name, a user name and an e-mail address and they'll send you a password. Once that's done, you can upload a series of photos taken while you move in a circle of, say, your back yard, and this site will stitch them together into a panorama. You may leave them on the site, or put them on a web page where users may click on them to rotate them up or down, or left or right. This is made possible by a program called Adobe Air, which will download and install on your system.
  Which brings us back to Kai's Power Tools which and a suitable replacement - that doesn't cost anything.
  The kids-grandkids loved playing KPT because with it, you could take a photo of mom or dad, or the dog, or each other, and stretch ears, noses, eyes, etc., all out of proportion, then save or print the result.
  MAGIX FunPix Maker does exactly that. Download it here: http://www.magixphotowidgets.com/magix-funpix-maker-12.html. When you install, you'll see that the program's good only for seven days unless you register. It's free to register - click on the registration button and provide you name and an e-mail address, and you'll receive a key that allows you to use the program indefinately.
  Free Backup: Looking for a place to put up to 25GB of your data (photos, etc.) at no charge. Google Windows Live SkyDrive to get the address and sign up. You'll be able to create folders, and upload whatever you wish. This is a great solution if you don't have a backup drive, to saving your precious digital images in the event of a hard drive failure.

• Incredible technologies on the horizon...

  By Ted Como

  A flood of interesting technological developments and discoveries holds the promise of incredible new products and capabilities. For instance, a startup company in Bangladesh will release scratch and sniff computer monitors later this year, according to Amalgamated Press. The monitors incorporate smell-a-vision technology, says Lil Faroop at Stinkemup, Inc.
  Faroop told AP the company has been able to reduce all odors in the human sensory library to three primary odificiaries and that by mixing them, any conceivable odor may be achieved. The monitor takes commands from the computer as to what smells to associate with what programs, and miniature fans on each side of the monitor direct the odors to the user. "So if you're playing a fishing game, it could smell like dead Carp," Faroop told AP. "Or, if you are looking at pictures of your dad in the 1960s, you'll smell Brylcreem and Jade East; your grandfather, Old Spice. Walk through a garden and you'll smell different flowers. Walk through a farm and you'll smell cow manure, horse manure and pig manure and a real farmer will tell the difference," Faroop said. "We're pretty excited about it."
  At the Olivia Violet Arapakos Center for Computing Technologies in Mont Royal, Canada, researchers have claimed success accessing a plane of existance they describe as the afterlife, and are building a computer software program they believe will allow users to contact those who have gone before. This amazing technology came about, researchers say, when they were probing the background noise from the Big Bang - and heard voices.
  "We were picking up conversation we first thought was the space station because, well, the sounds were coming from out there," said Pierre LeQuois, CEO and chief test tube washer, as he pointed straight up. "But it was general chat stuff like, 'how are you this heavenly morning,' or, 'will you be attending the choir rehearsal and pancake breakfast tomorrow,' you know, the kind of chit chat you hear everyday just in passing," LeQuois said. "So I turned to Jean Baptiste here and said, 'Jean, qu'est ce que c'est? what do you make of this?' And Jean said 'Pierre, it sounding to me dat you tapped into ze heavens," LeQuois said. "I just said, 'sacrebleu.' I just kept saying it and saying it."
  LeQuois said the company is using the technology to develop an e-mail client by which users will be able to send and receive information from the everlasting bliss, provided they can find someone "up there" to help set up an address list and forward messages, etc.
  Over at Invisible Leash, LLC, of Sandusky, scientists are developing a wireless memory implant for animals that directs their behavior using a remote control. The implant sits on the outide of the skull and is wired directly to the animal's brain. The programmable remote can, for instance, direct a dog to walk itself including where and when it relieves itself, and cats to do anything from purr on command to mount a toilet seat and flush. The device also has military applications including using dolphins to sink enemy naval vessels and polar bears to attack Sibereian military installations by loading them down with explosives and having them detonate on command.
  However, some controversy has developed over potential human applications and Sen. Nancy Blowitout has introduced legislation "to protect women from exploitive men who might implant this into their wives while they are sleeping, much as removing someone's kidney without them knowing about it, and then exercising full control over them, turning them into virtual robots. Can you imagine?" Blowitout said, while grabbing and clawing at the air around her.
  But a competing firm, Digital Brainwaves, is working on a memory implant of a different sort. Their approach is to simply add digital memory to human memory, the potential being that all schools and libraries would be closed since a memory module inserted into a port in the back of your head could contain the full extent of human knowledge. "Hey, everybody would know everything there is to know at any age," said researcher Sam Spaghet. "Nobody would have to learn how to do anything; five-year-olds could do brain surgery. No more books since all books could be accessed instantly and read internally... all new information being will be transmitted immediately and wirelesslessly to everybody on Earth at once, as it is developed," Spaghet said.
  Somewhat along these lines is technology reportedly being developed by Chinese researchers that would allow you switch places with various of the other you's that inhabit alternate universes.
  Explained One Wrong Wong of the combined People's Research Center and Crematorium, "Countless universes are created every instant to account for all possible outcomes that could develop from that instant in time. Since those outcomes are infinite, so are the number of you's who are either slightly, or largely different. We have a machine we hook you up to and you can enter the minds of the other you's which are in sync with your mind. And if you like what you see, for instance, you have a prettier or richer wife, or you're smarter or handsomer, we can permanently switch the minds," Wong welated.
  "We do that by locking in the frequency through a supersequencer, while at the same time, we slap you so hard it knocks the taste out of your mouth and send you into the other you in the other universe," said Wong.
  Russian scientists and engineers apparently have taken this approach one step further. By accelerating the supersequencer to nearly the speed of light, they find that not only can someone swap minds temporarily with anyone, but can do so in the past - in other words, time travel. And they have produced evidence that time travel is constant and frequent. One is a photo of a Roman ampitheater on the dark side of Mars. Apparently, the Romans initially made it to mars some 20 centuries ago, but somewhere along the line, history got changed but entropy missed erasing the temple. On the other hand, apparently, the North lost the The Great Unpleasantness to the South in the original reality.
  Also making news:
  - The Nightlight Savings Time bill is advancing through the U.S. house and supporters say if they're successfuly, they'll next push to move Monday, which nobody likes, to between Fridays and Saturday so that the work week will begin on Tuesday, which is more productive.
  - Motorolie is planning a June release of its combination smart phone, electric razor and fish depth finder.
  - Al Gore is launching a global cooling initiative so as to corner the market, just in case he's full of hot air on his global warming initiative - which he is.
  - Japan will be conducting an antigravity test later today which will have the effect of lessening gravity on the exact opposite side of the world, which is Northeast Tennessee. About 2 p.m. today, you should be holding onto something attached to the ground, don't be holding a drink of any sort, and definitely do not be occupying a bathroom.
  - And this just in at presstime: Kingsport police early today rescued an elderly woman who had been trapped in the Watauga Street traffic circle for at least five days.