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 lin k 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.

Very Highly Recommended dept: Gerard Van der Leun, boswell@well.com, has an excellent cookbook recipe for a successful virtual community in the virtual community conference. http://www.spring.com/yapp-bin/public/read/vc/12

Two new Michigan virtual communities are the subject of new topics in the vc or virtual community conference: grex and m-net.

I am trying to get an alternative medicine topic off the ground in the health conference. Even if you don't take vitamins and think acupuncture is a bunch of hooey, check it out and say so.

I'd like to point out some topics getting activity in the travel conference: 16 15 dive travel with Divine Spark 17 3 India 18 4 Micronesia and the Pacific region 19 3 Fiji There is a fascinating tale of travel to India and some comments from some islanders themselves in topics 18 and 19. Have you traveled any places that we could start a new topic about?

How about Germany, where I'm from? (Specifically Swabia)

Swabia?

Swabia?

uh huh. that would be the southern country where i'm from. the city is Stuttgart. Hi wer!

Sure start a topic!

I put some procative posts in the Internet conference today in a new topic. Something called Cyberwar: The Information Revolution and Warfare. It turns out, for the last half century, the US has been intercepting and decrypting the top secret documents of most of the world's governments. It's topic 22.

Cool! What will we Yanks think up next?! :-)

Hmm...just occured to me that this topic and "What's hot on the Spring?" rather overlap with each other. Perhaps one or the other should be frozen?

thumbs down on that, it would leave us one less place to babble, and we can't have that now, can we?

dunno, wer, maybe we can talk the higher powers into creating a conference just for babbling-we'd never have to leave!!

Good idea Mike, which one should I freeze. Anyone object?

I don't know, but definitely kill 16 and 19.

In music, topic 44 is Van Morrison - the Man with news of an upcoming Van and Dylan tour. About time to pay some tribute to Van Morrison. Gotta get me that Astral Weeks CD.

Done deal on killing the redundant topics, this is now spring pointer to other topic world headquarters.

wait, what was 16 and 19?? terry, didja catch my hint for a blabbing conference? *grin*

they were just doubles, Wolf...

I got the hint, I'll hold hearings for more comment.

thanks *smile*

What's hot, hot, hot. News. There's now a whole news conference. Go there and find out stuff you should know (maybe), talk about your Spring anniversary, discuss spam, enter your offsite email address if you care to do so, request favors, talk about springeurs who have hit the big time or made the news, pat yourself on the back, and find out about places to go and things to do.

In the media conference, bet you didn't know we had one, there's a new topic on the Drudge Report. My friend Judith Lewis of the LA Weekly is just down the streeet from Matt Drudge and has been known to pay him a visit every so often. Go to media and get in on this drudgery.

And also something about our homeboys. Guess where?

Let's rewind to June 22, 1995 and pick up where we left off. Nike was there. So was Gena. GenX is back!!!!!! Here's the scoop: 1 4 genx conference bidness 2 1 genXer intros 3 0 drugs 4 1 sex or . . . 5 1 Embarassing Things I Did in the '80s 6 1 First jobs from hell and beyond ... and a total of 64 topics to come Melissa Marie, I still love you.

The Spring's original topic list from 1995: http://www.spring.com:/~dbii/forum/confs/confs.html

Some very good thoughts on the CFP conference in the last topic in our cfp conference: From: Lorrie Faith Cranor [For the past five years I have written a Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference report (see the archive at=20 http://www.research.att.com/~lorrie/pubs/cfp.html). This year, turned the job over to Danielle Gallo, an undergraduate student who has been working with me. Feel free to forward this report. -- Lorrie Cranor] Danielle Gallo's CFP98 Conference Report Computers, Freedom and Privacy '98 was held February 18-20 at the Austin, Texas Hyatt Regency Hotel. Although there have been eight in total, this is the first CFP I attended. The program featured daily single-track sessions, lunch breakout sessions, and several concurrent tutorials. . . . contines with her extensive observations. A good read! Recommended.

Letter to me and Mike: Sounds like a good trade to me. I am doing a CGI project for the Exploratorium in San Francisco on a volunteer basis and that is why I need the test space. I don't have years of experience doing this, but there are some prewritten CGI libraries available that allow a developer to write a CGI script that will put up the HTML form and collect the data. At this point I would have to say that I could probably write the part that put up the HTML and collected the data. So, in that regard, let me take a stab at what I think you might mean. Name: Email: What you do in real life: Favorite sites on the web: Other interests, and miscellaneous biographical information: Other or different fields that you have in mind: A couple of areas that I am going to have to do some research on, or get ideas about: If there are variables that I can access for the visitor's email address, or am I going to have to make them enter it by hand. How to link the information I collect to the visitor's alias. Maybe the people at the Well would be willing to part with some secrets in that regard. Anyway, I think it would be fun to be involved in writing the CGI script for this, and if the library I mentioned is loaded, or could be loaded, on the server, I don't think it would be too much work to get to the point of having the form displayed and collecting the information. Let me know what fields and other form elements you think should be in there. I will follow up with some questions for Terry. Regards, Bill

Allie McBeal, a new topic in the tv confernce (and also 'babes'). See, there's this tv show called Ally McBeal. And it features three *hot babes*. That little bit of sexual subconscious out of the way, let me say it's a very funny show. It's a great show, I'll go even further. It's about a law firm. And Allie's ex lover just happens to be a member of the firm and he's married to a gal that has a jaw and blonde hair that Allie doesn't have. Billy, the ex lover of Allie, has mixed emotions And Allie has become friends with Billy's wife. We're talking age ranges of 25-28 here, folks. My theory is that this is a guy type show, and that women will find it embarassing. I don't think it will end up on the feminist top ten listing of tv shows, maybe the bottom ten. The women are too cute and too bimboish at times. And the women aren't the aggressive, free wheeling Marcia Clark types, they're quite timid usually. But how can you not like a show whose lead actress is *** Calista Flockhart *** That name just does it for me. I would love to have a girlfriend like her just so I could introduce her to people. Uh, I'd like you to meet my girlfriend, *Calista Flockhart*. Dream, dream. I'll have more to say about Allie McBeal. It's my favorite tv show. I hope others will join me in this quaint little discussion.

Jordan's up to bat, does that mean Lewinsky's in the on deck circle. Politics, in the topic on the Clinton Presidency. Hey, it's great to see the new conferences, news and genx, off to such a roaring start! I have a lot more surprises in store in both conferences in the way of stome startling new topics. Stay tuned.

There's an *awesome* array of new material in the cfp conference. Warning, this is heady stuff, the legal and moral consequences of today's cyberspace mileau and the implications for our future freedom, privacy and lives are freely discussed. It's a stretch to get past the gate, but the effort may be worth your time. Danielle's observations are far reaching and comprehensive in her roundup of the confernce. Danielle Gallo, on CFP98. j cfp.

The most underutilized, ready for prime time conference on the Spring that has potential for future stardom: cultures Hear me now, or hear me later. Pump it up!

Yes, dad.

Dad!!!

Is there something you want to share with us, Terry??

You mean I haven't been forthcoming, autumn?

ok, terry (aka wer's dad)..... Hi Autumn!

Heya, Wolfie, havin' a good weekend? :-) Mine has been soooo relaxing....

not really, kinda stressin', been working on my site and trying to figure out what the deal is with this browser....... got the baby girl's ears pierced yesterday, she did soooo good. the part she can't handle is the cleaning and turning the posts, but today it is going much better and she's doing it for herself. am very proud of her. the whole thing was her decision, told her she didn't have to if she didn't want to, but she was gung ho!

Good coverage by Gary Chapman of the Bruce Sterling speech in the cfp conference. j cfp

My older daughter came to me yesterday asking for pierced ears for her birthday (she'll be 6). Her dad said age 15, I said 10, so it'll probably be next year! How old is your little girl?

4, she'll be 5 next month (didn't we have that conversation before?) didn't get mine done til i was 16 cuz the big d said heck no. we let her think about it for a while and i carefully explained the whole thing, my big thing was letting her make up her own mind, you know?

yeah, but mine also wants to be bald (she literally cries about wanting to have her head shaved), black (which I can do nothing about) and handicapped (which I'm tempted to do something about--just kidding!) So giving her too much control is definitely o ut of the question. Oh, she also wants me to get a job so she can go to day care (just tear out my heart, I tell her!)

Babe of the week in babes. I know, we pale next to drool.

what is this an invite? Autumn, my daughter hasn't gone that far yet! she wants me to tell my boss i'm not coming back so i can be with her! (she's mama's for sure)

New topics in the news conference: Asteroid! WASHINGTON (AP) -- It's not time to panic, but Earthlings need to keep an eye on a mile-wide asteroid that will zip very close to the Earth in 30 years and could even smash into the planet, causing widespread destruction, astronomers say. Is it time to book that flight to Mars or is this a bunch of hype? Discuss among yourselves in the news conference topic called Asteroid!

That will be the year 2028 in case you need to mark your calendars. It will be 1:30 on a Thursday morning. October 26, 2028. Thursday. 1:30 am. Got that? Did you have anything planned for that day?

wait.....do dayrunners plan that far in advance? (anyway, it's gonna be a near miss by about 600,000 miles)

I was very concerned about this when I saw it on the news. As a student of geophysics, and the science of major collisions, if this thing hits it's going to be The Big One. For the religious ones amongst you (including me), it's time to get your on your knees =)

hey, it's going to MISS US......

Maybe. It will be four months till they have accurate calculations. But even if was aimed dead center at Manhattan, they'd turn it into a media circus and attach rockets to it and turn it into a theme park and steer it into a different orbit. And the commercials would dwarf what it costs to put an ad on the superbowl.

I wondering Terry what did you mean you pale next to drool? I'm chewing my nails waiting for the day my son will be born. So please you guys don't scare me so that I start chewing my fingers... O.K. thanks, drool

I meant drool the conference!!! ha!

A certain Gerard van der Leun, boswell, shows up doubting the Spring will make it, and giving it poor grades. He posts in the Spring's most infrequently utilized Internet conference.

A photography topic is now in the art conference. I talk about some findings I got re: 3d photography.

terry, theres a confrencecalled drool? really? How do I get there from here? I am sorry if I offended you or anything. drool, the person

There's a link to it from our main http://www.spring.net page. Wow, just getting used to that dot net!

I will be giving a live talk via realaudio at http://www.spring.net today and call ins will be accepted (512.303.4000), it will be a live internet "talk show".

Rush Limbaugh has come out in favor of legalization of marijuana. Full details in the Rush Room topic in the radio conference. This is not a joke, he did come out in favor of legalization. It happened March 12 10:40 am pst. Three times!

wasn't limbaugh one of the bastards that so unmercifully tormented clinton's first surgeon-general (forget her name) for basically saying that we should consider decriminalization of some drugs?

I'll guess Jocelyn Elders, if we're talking about the "pro-decriminalization/pro-masturbation" surgeon general.

what elders (thank you) said was that it (decriminalization) was an issue that merited discussion... she's in good company with that view... re: masturbation, don't think it really means a tinker's damn what her opinion is, one way or the other... (and regardless of one's view, really must ask one's self where republicans would be, without it?...(especially rush)... they're certainly repressed enough, as it is)...

(hi autumn)

Just mentioned that, because she'll forever be remembered for her ideas on masturbation rather than decriminalization...

We'll be going live with our talk show again in an hour.