The Spring as a whole and pointers to other topics

Perhaps this topic will be a place to respond to all the email queries about "why is this free?" and "what can I do to help?" and other questions along a similar thread. The Spring is building some contract websites. One that is currently under construction is http://www.childrenstory.com I am billing a customer for this website. The revenue will go to replace a badly needed hard drive for one of our servers, make upgrades, and pay our kindly bandwidth provider. So, those of you with website contruction skills, this is something very specific and concrete you can do to help support the Spring and keep it going. You can help build this site, which is going to have a Real Audio server and will provide children with stories in written and spoken form. You can help directly by writing html code (I'll give you access) or you can just make suggestions. I'm going to open a new conference called 'projects' and this will be one of the first topics and we can carry a discussion of how to build and improve this site there. Another website under construction to look at would be: http://www.tvpc.com Let me know!

A pointer to a new conference: poetry. It just started this morning. I sent out a few invitations. If you have that poem hidden away in the bottom of that sock drawer, type it out and post it. Any poets or poetry lovers here?

Hey Terry, you can link to or kipe my HTML-ization of George MacDonald's The Light Princess, at http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~churchh/lprincss.html

Oh, HC - do you have any more MacDonald up your electronic sleeve?

I also converted The Day Boy and the Night Girl (The Romance of Photogen and Nycteris) to HTML, but that was for the CCEL people, and it's on their web-site (you can find it through the CMU on-line books page, or I think there might be a link to it at the end of the text of the Light Princess).

Who are CCEL? [something] Children's Electronic Literature, perhaps? Do you happen to have a link handy for CMU on-line books?

"Christian Classics Ethereal Library", I think... I'm too lazy to look up the CMU on-line books URL right now, but there's a link to it from the Jane Austen info page at http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~churchh/janeinfo.html

I looked at the Jane Austen info page and it's terrific. I got into reading some of Jane Austen's works and I'll be coming back for more visits. What I'd like to do is set up a team of folks who have shell access to this site and who are able to work in various websites of their own and on the projects that I'm developing to help support this conferencing system. Has anyone visited the projects conference yet? I'm on Microsoft Netmeeting all day today so if anyone wants to "talk" please drop by. I'm on the uls1.microsoft.com server. You need to have NetMeeting software, which is free from Microsofts site.

Poor mixu! He's posting all alone in the books conference about his favorite books and putting out a mystery quote for folks to guess. Is anyone up to giving him a bit of company in the 'books' conference? http://www.spring.com/yapp-bin/restricted/browse/books/all/

Check out the interesting comments on community in topic 4 of the community conference and respond, if you care to.

Terry, are you sure that you mean topic 4? That is the same (linked) topic as the "ramble" topic (with a different topic number) here. We don't have to "go there" to see it.

Ooops, no it is the last topic added I believe. What other conferences on the Spring have folks here in Austen been visiting? Any suggestions for new topics elsewhere on the Spring?

It's topic 5 in community actually.

If you want to read some very eloquent stuff: Topic 14 of 14 [music]: Players you have met Response 21 of 21: drymartini (drymartini) * Thu, Dec 26, 1996 (21:27) * 3 lines One of my all-time favorite interviews. Carlos Montoya, playing for a college crowd at Alfred, NY. Small, very dapper guy in this elegant tux, with a white hanky in his breat pocket, folded just so.... [much more]

We have got permission from ronks@well.com to reprint his celebrated tech news comments, starting today. Here's a sample: Scientific American has an interesting article in its January 1997 issue about developments in fiber-optic bandwidth and their implications for the telephone industry. Companies including AT&T, Fujitsu, and Nippon T&T have already used a single optical fiber to transmit data over "many kilometers" in excess of a trillion bits per second. NEC has gone them one better by using wave division multiplexing to create multiple channels transmitting at different wavelengths; with WDM they sent 132 channels, each carrying 20 billion bits per second, over a single optical fiber. While these "hero experiments" are not yet ready for commercial deployment, they seem to demonstrate big changes in store: glass cable is much cheaper than copper, and WDM is said to eliminate both the need for expensive boosters along the path to clean up the signals periodically and for a separate laser on each channel. As the cost of providing humungous bandwidth plummets, the phone companies' revenue and even their monopoly status could be in jeopardy. A rogue spokesman at British Telecom says technology will make "bandwidth free and distance irrelevant." The director of H-P's labs says phone companies will become digital utilities something like the water or the power company, and an independent analyst estimates "telephone service should cost about three cents a month." Check out topic 2 in techbusiness.

The Spring was down for the past hour. I apologize to Myretta, Henry and others that may have been trying to access it. I'm going through the log and emailing folks that have tried to access it and letting them know that it's back up. I messed it up this morning trying to reconfigure and restart the logs. If you're interested in the technical details of what I did you can read the sordid details in the web conference. Sorry folks, I'm not happy about being down for an hour this morning.

That is OK Terry it is working fine now.

Thanks Terry, happy new year 1997 (it's 1997 already here in Singapore)

On a cheerier note, Paul McCartney is now Sir Paul McCartney And you can read all the details in the new Sir Paul McCartney topic in the music conference. Please do my a favor. Do a search on Paul McCartney and find a neat website about Paul McCartney, then email the webmaster or whatever email address is listed on their website and ask them to please put a link on their page to our Paul McCartney discussion group. Tell them this is the link to add: http://www.spring.com/yapp-bin/public/read/music/16 Let's see if we can honor Paul in this way! Thanks.

I'm encouraging folks to do this same kind of thing all over the Spring. If you have a favorite topic, do a search for websites about it and then email the person in charge there to put in a link to the Spring. Just copy the link from your browser window and sub the word public for the word restricted. (test it) Beep beep beep beep yeeeahhh!

The Spring was down for the past hour. I apologize to Myretta, Henry and others that may have been trying to access it No apology necessary Terry. Been there, done that. All's well, they say, that ends well.

Terry -- thanks for getting things back together so quickly. I did try to get on this am, and kept getting called an "Unprivileged User"!! I was afraid it was something wrong w/ my system, and I am much relieved to see that all is again well. Have a Happy!

We're back. And I just got back from installing another server on our network. So we even have more ooooomph now.

The austen conference is featured today on the Spring's front page. Along with a revision of the whole page. Take a trip through the past in the archives. The new golf site is my sisters (she lives in the SF Bay area).

The restaurants conference has a much bigger menu of topics and a place to talk about the best restaurant in your town and the best restaurant in the world. Any ideas?

Amy, this has started up just recently -- http://www.islandmm.com/islandmm/cgi-bin/bbs.pl?action=bbs&mbaction=msgs&item=alice

Amy, this has started up just recently -- http://www.islandmm.com/islandmm/cgi-bin/bbs.pl?action=bbs&mbaction=msgs&item=alice

That board looks familiar.

That board looks familiar. Indeed.

You'll find the rest of this poem in the poetry conference. This is just a taste. Flowing Like Spring Waters Tonight is the night, my dear friend. The feeling has ripened inside for months... Every time you and I were together Laughing, chatting, and rambling endlessly much more in the poetry conference --------->

There's a new conference called 'unix' and I posted quite a few things in the Internet and Web conferences. You'll find out about the seven new domains that are going to be on the Internet. This will shake things up for sure. Maybe we should get austen.art? Or eeyieeyi.io? Or spring.firm? Things are going to get very interesting. You have to read the whole thing.

What are you watching on tv right now? That's a new topic in the tv conference. Have fun with this one.

In the sports conference, news of a womens' sports site that has been months in the making. Topic 39 on sports web sites ------------ go there -------------->

Like figure skating on ice? Then you'll like the new figure skating topic in sports which has all the latest schedules of ice skating events on tv. And there is a packers joke there too.