Monday, June 08, 1998

Summer Surfing Expedition

Summer Surfing Expedition...By Steve Plunkett

It seems almost everyone I know is taking a vacation, or planning one. One of my co-workers is the cheap airfare Queen, she can find airfares for next to nothing and all she uses is the Internet. If you don’t know by now, the EASIEST way to find things on the Internet is to put “www.” before something and “com” after it. So check out http://web.archive.org/web/20010524032330/http://www.bestfares.com/. Believe it or not, she also told us about the most obvious, http://web.archive.org/web/20010524032330/http://www.reservations.com/. Some other great airline travel sites are, http://web.archive.org/web/20010524032330/http://www.aa.com/ (American Airlines), http://web.archive.org/web/20010524032330/http://www.iflyswa.com/, (Southwest Airlines), http://web.archive.org/web/20010524032330/http://www.funjet.com/, a general bargain trip site. These are just the sites, which someone could rattle off the top of their head. Now it is summer and there is real surfing, so if you want the scoop on the Hawaii surfing scene, check out, http://web.archive.org/web/20010524032330/http://www.h3o.com/. Now if you’re not planning on leaving the house, be sure to check out http://web.archive.org/web/20010524032330/http://www.easttexasbrick.com/, for some killer bar-b-que grills, and patio furniture. Better yet, if you shall be golfing this summer, (who isn’t), take a look at http://web.archive.org/web/20010524032330/http://www.cheapgolfballs.com/.
I know you are saying, “Yeah right, Steve, how am I supposed to find all these things?” Well, let me show you, need a walk in the park? Try http://web.archive.org/web/20010524032330/http://www.centralpark.org/, if putting “.com” or “.net” in front of the domain name doesn’t work, try “.org”. Give up? Pick a search engine, as you know search engines are like the card catalog at the library, just places for web sites to be cataloged.
The most popular search engine is Yahoo, and they have many links for travel of all kinds, look at, http://web.archive.org/web/20010524032330/http://www.yahoo.com/Recreation/Travel/. An important top, capitalization after the domain name (the .com part) is important to remember to capitalize the “R” and “T”. Excite is the second most popular search engine and can be found at http://web.archive.org/web/20010524032330/http://www.excite.com/. Several friends and myself play an online game at http://web.archive.org/web/20010524032330/http://www.moongate.net/. Sometimes people from all over the globe will meet in one location, after talking to each other online. This year the “Moongate Gathering” is in New Orleans. Having only been to New Orleans once, and that was only for about 8 hours, I decided to do my homework.
Time to get a pen if you are reading this in a waiting room, or go to Brookshire’s and pick up a copy of your own. Shall we take a quick trip in cyberspace, step by step?
Step One. Figure our where you want to go. (We are using New Orleans).Step Two. Once you are at the Excite home page, click on “travel”.Step Three. Click on “Destinations”.Step Four. Pick continent.Step Five. Luckily on the next page they had spotlighted New Orleans, but you can pick the state or country at this point. Then select the city.Step Six. Look or print, everything you need to know is on this page or linked off of it.Step Seven. At this point I found hotels, restaurants, and other places to go. This is where all the good stuff is. Luckily the hotel we are staying in had a Red Star next to the name. “The Inn on Bourbon”, now I haven’t been there yet, but this is a vacation not a drinking expedition. This particular hotel sits right on Bourbon Street and is the favorite for people during Mardi Gras. The hotel has a balcony famous for throwing beads off of during the parades. A good friend of mine, however is partial to the Hotel Monteleone on Royal Street near Bourbon Street. She says staying at the Hotel Monteleone is the best way to experience the French Quarter.
Speaking of expeditions, a friend of mine called Ballistic and needed help on a Microsoft web site, http://web.archive.org/web/20010524032330/http://www.expedia.com/. I walked her through the registration and registered for myself while I was there. I couldn’t find any info about “The Inn on Bourbon” at this site so I decided to change search engines. The main reason why you want to look in more than just one search engine is because some web sites don’t submit to all the search engines. It would be really hard to submit to ALL 753 search engines. I gave up after 4 days of trying. There are search engines that search other search engines, they are called “meta” search engines. The best one is http://web.archive.org/web/20010524032330/http://www.metacrawler.com/, it searches the most popular search engines for the top results. If you are trying to search quickly, this is a tool you will use everyday. Metacrawler allows you to select “any”, for example on the words “New Orleans”, it will find web pages, with the word “New or “Orleans”. If you select “all” it will find only those web pages that contain both “new” and “Orleans”. The best part is searching using a phrase, when you click on this choice it shows those pages, that contain only the words “New Orleans” in sequence. This will save you time and headaches, the reason you are taking a vacation after all.

Wednesday, October 08, 1997

World Wide What?

World Wide WHAT?
By Steve Plunkett

In our last issue, we told you how to start your day the Internet way. This brought out several questions. First, I do get up before 6am and get that much stuff done, that seems to be the only easy answer. We received several questions about the Internet, to someone who has been "online" for several years, just don't come to mind. Guess what? It's time to answer them ALL!!!
The Who, What, When, Where, How, and Why of the Internet is a Herculean task, but I think we can handle it. Once upon a time in a country named the United States of America, there was a man named Ike, as in "I Like Ike!!" President Dwight D. Eisenhower created a federal agency called the Advanced Research Projects Administration, or ARPA. This agency was established to explore new technologies related to defense. In 1969 this agency created ARPAnet. ARPAnet was developed to allow researchers to login and run programs on remote computers, but it quickly became an essential tool for sharing information through, and file transfer (FTP), electronic mail (E-mail), and interest-group mailing lists (News groups) . In 1980 the architects of the ARPANET designed a new architecture and protocol suite called TCP/IP. This is the system we currently use to communicate across the Internet from one computer to another. In a nutshell the Internet is just a bunch of big phone lines used to carry data (sent in packets) from one computer to another.

Unless you live in a cave, you have probably seen the "www" and ".com" printed on company letterheads and in newspaper ads, almost every TV commercial shows some kind of corporate web site address or "URL". These are web sites composed of web pages on the World Wide Web; the Web is just an extension of the possibilities of the Internet. The Web came about in March of 1989, when Tim Barnes-Lee proposed a project that would allow scientists to easily browse fellow researchers' papers on the Internet.

The name World Wide Web or WWW was granted to this project. During August 1991 Mr. Barnes-Lee announced availability of software from CERN in USENET newsgroups. The new language was developed, known as hypertext Markup Language or HTML and the protocol for handling HTML documents was to be called HyperText Transfer Protocol or HTTP.
This all gathered together into what we use today when a new program called a "browser" was released from National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NSCA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign called Mosaic in February 1993. Later that month Marc Andreessen from NCSA proposed that images could be placed in the browser with a tag to be called "IMG". With that addition, Mosaic became truly multimedia. This is how you see all those beautiful pictures of Hawaii on web pages.

A little over one year later, Marc Andreessen and Jim Clarc, former CEO of Silicon Graphics, founded what was called, at first, Mosaic Communication Inc. They hired many of the Mosaic and WWW developers and started to work on new browser and secure WWW server to allow transaction over the Internet. After protest from NCSA's lawyers name Mosaic Communication was changed to Netscape Communications and its first browser was released. This is more than you could ever possibly want to know about the World Wide Web, but now you know.

I think that establishes the beginnings of the Internet. Do you want to know how to get on the Internet? First of all you will need a computer or a WebTV device. WebTV is a box that you can use with your TV to connect to the Internet for sending e-mail and viewing web pages. These units are an alternative way of experiencing the Internet. If this is all budgets will allow then some Internet access is better than no Internet access at all.Computers are machines or "Hardware" used to run applications called "Programs". The underlying sets of instructions used to tell the computer what to do are called "operating systems". There are several different operating systems, Windows95, Windows 3.x (older version of Win95), and MacOS are the most popular. The most popular are the DOS (Disk Operating System) based ones, Win95 and Win3.x. The MacOS runs on an Apple Macintosh computer which this magazine is created and this article was written.

Once you have the computer, you will need a modem (a device that connects your computer to the phone line), which will allow you to connect to another computer somewhere else. These modems range in speed from 14.4 KBPS (kilobytes per second) to the new 56kbps speed. The faster the better because this determines the speed at which data is brought into your computer. Data being brought into your computer is called "downloading".Downloading is one of the greatest technologies for business or personal use to come around since the fax machine.

To connect to the Internet you must sign up with an Internet service provider or "ISP", like for example "Ballistic Action Net". Internet service providers are connected to that big bunch of phone lines we talked about earlier, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. The monthly costs to be connected to an ISP are usually around twenty dollars a month. Once your computer has dialed across the phone lines and connected to your ISP, you are connected to the internet, basically all the internet consists of is a bunch of computers like yours connected to the big bunch of phone lines. Now that you are connected some say you are "online". This means that you will have your own e-mail address like "today@tyler.com" . E-mail or electronic mail is the ability to send some words, pictures, sounds or even movies from your computer to another computer somewhere else. This also allows you to access newsgroups, web pages, ftp sites, chat channels, and even play games with people all over the world.

WARNING: THIS IS
ADDICTIVE!!

Web sites consist of web pages; web pages consist of text, graphics, sounds, and or movies. Just in case you didn't know it, this entire article will be on the Tyler Today website "www.TylerToday.com" . Sorry no movies or sounds yet. Almost anybody can design a website, and not all websites are created equal, but if the website is not inserted into the search engines, it is just a snowflake in a snowstorm. Search engines are like the card catalog at the library that helps you find books on a particular subject. There are approximately 736 search engines on every type category or sub-category you could possibly think of, but there are about 10 really popular ones that most people use. A web site or web page can be in one search engine but not in all of them, so different search engines can have different results. If you still haven't found what you are looking for don't worry it is there somewhere.

Web surfing (riding this link to that link and so on) is only one of the other things you can do on the Internet besides e-mail. There are all kinds programs for all your needs. There are "chat" clients, that are programs used to "chat" (talk real-time by typing, called IRC- Internet Relay Chat) with other people all over the world. The programs cost money to buy, but you can spend hours, sometimes even days talking to friends on the other side of the planet. Chat is the business replacement for those silly speaker phone conferences with the home office in Des Moines. You could theoretically have 50 people from your company all over the globe talking to each other and sharing ideas for the cost of an Internet connection rather than international long distance charges. Back before the graphics, sound and video came along with the web pages, College students and/or professors would group together on MUDs (Multi-User Dimensions) they could simulate working conditions, thought processes and a myriad of opportunities to share ideas and problems with each other. These MUDs still exist, the scholarly uses now have moved to different platforms, but MUDs are still an enjoyable experience for kids or adults of all ages. A good one to check out online is MoongateOnline, by Ingenii Interactive, a very fun game.

Games are something that has really exploded on the Internet.With the graphics and sound capabilities of today's computers, you can become immersed in other worlds, complete with sight, sound, and yes--even touch. A very popular game is "Quake"; this game equips your computer with rocket launchers, double-barreled shotguns, and many other kinds of weapons to simulate running around a maze and defeating the forces of evil, or current and former co-workers. With a connection to the Internet, you can connect to other computers directly across the Internet or connect to one of thousands of game servers worldwide and battle or team up with other Internet users. Most of the games in the software stores today come with some kind of component that allows one person to connect to another or some type of server that allows players to congregate.

We hope this has helped you understand the complexities and possibilities of the wonderful World Wide Web and the Internet. Of course once you get connected the internet service provider, "ISP" should have a good technical support crew to help you explore all the advantages and wonderful things

you can accomplish on the big bunch of phone lines we call the Internet.

Monday, September 08, 1997

The Morning Surf

By Steve Plunkett
5:45am
'Bong!!' The Apple computer comes alive of it's own accord. 'screeeaaaacchh' The modem connects to Ballistic Action Net and downloads my mail.The coffee maker starts making those silly, somewhat unearthly noises.'BEEP' 'BEEEP' 'SLAM' The Sony alarm clock starts to try to wake me up and is silenced. Netscape is launched and my other e-mail is downloaded and the first web page of the day appears on the computer's screen.

6:30am
I stumble past the dusty television and sit down at the computer. Now for the news,type in the URL, w-w-w-.-c-n-n-.-c-o-m, hit the Enter key, the site comes upand now I remember why I don't watch television anymore. Enough of the bad stuff, time to post the cool site of the day. Open the Telnet connection to tyler.com to post today's listing, a website with great graphics, but most of all killer content. It seems a little too quiet so I point my browser to Joseph Vincelli's website to download some real audio to surf by, energetic Jazz, just the right touch. Now to get some of the stuff I have to do today out of the way. Where is that list...

6:45am
First, #1 on the list, find out when the next Internet committee meeting is at the Chamber of Commerce, got the info, and while I am here might as well bookmark the City of Tyler page.Now for the rest of the list I can just go to the Tyler Mall website.
#2 Find out info on the new Fine and Performing Arts center at UT Tyler.
#3 Get some info on the Tyler Real Estate market, lots of listings andinformation at the Hearth and Home and Pirtle websites.
#4 Look up information on hospitals and brain surgery, found four websites,trimofran.org and etmc.org for the hospitals; for the brain surgery,NeuroCare Network and Tyler Neurosurgical Associates.
#5 Find out health and life insurance.
#6 Look for stuff about financial planning
#7 Find a nice gift.
#8 Get stuff for the food fight at work , and a hidden, covert camera to film it with.
#9 Find computer training on some *gasp* microsoft products.
#10 Find the best place to buy plane tickets .
#11 Get the latest info on the 1998 Business Expo in Tyler.
#12 Get new tags for the cats.
#13 Order melatonin from the healthfood store.
#14 Make room in the closet.
#15 Find out legal information and about a lawyer in Tyler.
#16 Find out who is playing at Rick's On The Square this weekend.
#17 Find out about Henderson, Texas.
#18 Order some flowers and have them delivered today.
#19 Print out a schedule of the events for the East Texas State Fair#20 Get to work on time.

8:00am
Turn off computer and go to work.

These are the Url's in order of appearance:
www.apple.com
www.ballistic.com
www.braun.de
www.sony.com
www.netscape.com
www.cnn.com
www.paisleynet.com/cool
www.tyler.com
www.joevincelli.com
www.tylertexas.com
www.tylertexas.com/city
www.tylermall.com
www.uttyl.edu/arts
www.uttyl.edu
homes.tyler.com
www.pirtle.com
www.trimofran.org
www.etmc.org
www.NeuroCare.org
www.TylerNeuro.com
www.healthandlife.com
www.henrypeters.com
www.pntl.com
www.bluebonnetgourmet.com
www.expocase.com
www.isisinv.com
www.compued.com
www.microsoft.com
travel.tyler.com
expo.tyler.com
www.safe-t-pet.com
www.karenshealthfoods.com
goodwill.tyler.com
www.texaslegal.net
www.bailey-law.com
www.rix.com
www.hendersontx.com
www.judgetheflorist.com
www.tyler.com/web