Past Diatribes

Dublin's Only Toaster Oven is doing fine, by the way. Damo- this good mate of mine I haven't seen in ages- was over the other night at this party we had and he thought it was Deadly. Everyone wound up crashing out here at the famous "gaff" (i.e. house) and we used it to warm up some rolls the next morning for "breckie."

(They have these little "Cuisine de France" rolls over here that I love. It's a brand or a chain-- they bake them fresh in most of the supermarkets, a couple of times a day. There are long French baguettes, then demi-baguettes and all the way down to the rolls. You can get a sack of them, usually about ten for a pound. Hot, they're delicious. I can put away a whole bag of them myself like a bag of chips. Warmed up in the toaster oven, they're excellent with soup or to make little ham or turkey "samboes" out of.)

Well anyway I've been enjoying life here in Dublin, freezing my nads off but chowing down on Cuisine de France rolls and staying up later drinking with old mates. And as ever, I've been messing about with computers------ three things to note this time around.

FIRST, let me key you in to an excellent source of information that encompasses all aspects of contemporary computing. It's called ZDNet, and I not only peruse it regularly, but allow it to peruse me. There are more than a dozen different newsletters you can subscribe to, regularly funneling the latest and most relevant information from the world at large to your in-box. One especially cool find there: a list of 100 free screen savers that are easy to download and install! I was getting sick of that 3D brick maze thing , BIG TIME. Check it out, if you don't already.

SECOND, I have discovered Microsoft Access. Of course, I'd been hearing about it ("Microsoft's database program, good enough for 10,000 or so records.") The crash-prone DOS look alike I've used in the course of some jobs, though, kept me loyal to Excel. Enter the '97 version. The information can be displayed as a standard spreadsheet, like Excel, and is capable of pretty much what Excel is. The real advantages lie in the Query, Report, and Form options the user can program. With Excel, for instance, if I wanted to find all records declared Closed on a certain date, I've had to use "Find" from the Edit menu, specify "Values," and count them manually. With Access, there's the facility to program a Query that will sort out only the records matching your criteria and offer you a couple of different ways to view them. The user can even arrange for a Report to be generated from the data-- pretty professional looking, too. Forms are straight outta VB, in terms of the labels, command buttons, and so on that can be whipped up. And, the programming of all these things are a snap. Literally stuff you can pick up in an afternoon, go back to work, impress your boss, and make the tasks easier on yourself and your coworkers.

THIRD: I've just been introduced to Access, really, and plan on messing about with it this coming couple of weeks. I'm always messing about--- over Christmas, with the Windows 95 operating system and its options. I've recorded and warped a bunch of .wav clips in the Sound Recorder accessory, and have them going off when all sorts of different events happen. (This is all easy enough, going into Programs, Accessories, Multimedia and then Control Panel, System, Sounds. I've done some more customization with the appearance of things by deleting .bmp files from various companies and saving my own bitmaps with their names. I don't like the MSN icon there on my desktop, or any other built-in advertising being rammed down my throat. If you'd like to get rid of these things, I'd recommend doing what I did: use the Find feature in your Start button to pull up all the bitmaps, locate the offending ones, and eradicate 'em!!! I've got some Chinese kanji (pictograms) in place that I like far better than these previous ads, and so far everything' still working fine on my machine.

Well, that's it for now. YES I REALIZE I HAVEN'T UPDATED MY LINKS AND OTHER PAGES IN MONTHS. Check back soon you spa. Mind the busses.