BENTSEN GROVE COMPUTER CLUB BULLETIN

Week of January 13^th 2003

MEETINGS

MONDAY

ROOM 3R

BEGINNERS

MEETING

9:30 AM

GENERAL

MEETING

10:30 AM

SPECIAL INTEREST GROUPS:

If you would like to meet in a small group to discuss one of the following subjects, contact the following people.

PHOTOGRAPHY

WEB PAGE

GREETING CARDS

INVESTMENT CLUB

Bill Wiese

Harold Buechly

Donna Stanwood

Corinne Higbee

580-3184

519-7375

581-1671

585-5664

If you would like to lead a SIG, discuss it with Val.

Our bulletin is also available on line by visiting http://www.bgrcc.com/ and clicking on bulletin. You may also select bulletins by its subject

NEED SOME HELP

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Click on HELP

EMERGENCY

RESPONSE

TEAM

John Abbott….424-0537

Val Barron……519-2319

Harold Buechly.519-7375

George Kelly…584-7349

UPCOMING EVENTS

Monday January 13^th 2003, 9:30 AM New Users Lesson, By Corinne Higbee

Monday January 13^th 2003, 10:30 AM General Meeting, By Val Barron – Harold Buechly

Monday January 20^th 2003, NOON Pizza Sig By Corinne Higbee

The Pizza SIG will meet the third Monday of each month throughout the season at Mr. Gatti’s

Last Monday’s guest speaker, Charles Jones, Regional manager for Awesomenet, presentation was rewarding for those attending. His subject matter included how well it works to the occasional problems we all have and thier causes. He invited us to visit their site at http://www.awesomenet.net/indexNEW.htm , click on support then on software then on AGV 6.0 to link us to a free anti-virus program that they found works good.

I downloaded the installation program in under 30 minutes.

Barron's Bytes

By Val Barron valbarron@att.net

Happy New Year

I hope everyone has had a most joyous Holiday Season and is now ready to start using the bathroom scale once again. As you may know, the New Year saw Jan’s mom falling and breaking her hip on Thursday, January 2^nd. After surgery on Saturday she is now sitting up in a bedside chair and eating real food again. I know you will all understand when I say we will be staying in Houston for a while and are unsure of our return date.

Happy 20^th Birthday To A Good Friend

You all know this friend well and would be very sad if you could not visit this friend often. Can you name this friend?

Try to name this friend before you click here for the answer.

The Week After Christmas

Those of us who need additional RAM memory often order online from Crucial.com. Among the many newsletters I receive via e-mail is Crucial News. The following item was included in a recent mailing.

T’is the week after Christmas

And Guess what I need?

More memory from Crucial

For power and speed!

This digital camera is certainly nice.

But without Crucial flash

It’s a worthless device.

And that game—oh, so cool.

Those graphics so real.

But on my poor computer

There’s just not the thrill.

But what to my wandering eyes should appear?

It’s Crucial.com to start the New Year!

With prices that rock

And products galore

And free tech support

And oh so much more.

Now desktops, now laptops, now servers, now scanners.

At Crucial we know it’s performance that matters.

So order today and we’ll ship it for free.

Memory. It’s crucial. For you and for me!

I would have preferred to present the following lengthy item at a meeting but unfortunately I can’t be there so here it is.

Explore The News With Google

The Web thrives on news—instantaneous, constantly updated, detailed, and exhaustive on most every topic imaginable. Sites that deliver news crowd the Web; now there’s yet another, with a twist.

Google, one of a small handful of sites to which many users turn to make sense of the Internet, now attempts to make sense of the news. Google’s news page (http://news.google.com), like Google’s search page, relies on sophisticated computer programs to put together an index of Web pages. Google’s computers constantly paw through 4,000 news sources from Internet sites around the world and rank stories automatically according to where and how they appear on various pages.

All The News
Browsing around the main Google News page, you’ll see headlines divided into standard categories as on many other news sites. However, every story is really a group of stories. News items about the same topic but drawn from many different sources are displayed under one heading. You can click the headline to read the main story or click one of the various subheadlines or news organization names to get a different perspective.

Most stories also include a green Related link at the bottom of the story blurb. Clicking here takes you to a page filled with dozens or even hundreds of stories on the chosen topic, sorted by default in order of relevance. On the Related page, you can click the Sort By Date link to put all of these stories in order according to age.

Of course, Google is best known for searching, and one of the key aspects of its news site is the ability to search a diverse range of publications for the news you need. Google News includes articles published only in the last 30 days, so you won’t be able to use the site as an archive for ancient history. It does, however, provide a unique free service for getting the scoop on recent events.

To begin a search, head to the news page and look for the familiar search button at the top of the page. Type a few keywords into the blank space and click Google Search.

Search Serious

For more advanced searching, you can add some special commands to your keywords. To limit the search to terms appearing in the actual text of an article as opposed to the headline, type intext:. For example, “intext:pandas” will find stories that mention pandas but do not include that word in their headlines.

Similarly, Google’s Intitle: command lets you look for stories that include certain words only in the headline. The search term “intitle:nice pandas” tells Google to look for stories with “nice” in the title and “pandas” anywhere in the story. To find stories with more than one specific word in the title, use the Allintitle: command (“allintitle:nice pandas”).

Google News searches also support the plus and minus operators used in standard Google searches. The plus sign (+) should precede common short words, single letters, and numbers that Google might otherwise leave out of a search. A minus sign (-) before a word tells Google to return results that do not contain the marked word.

If you’d like to search only for news from a particular publication, you’ll have to leave the Google News page. The Site: command can limit searches to keywords found at a certain Internet address, but site: is not supported for news searches. Try it on the main Google page if you know the Web address of the publications that interests you. For example, “pandas site:washingtonpost.com” is the best way to look for panda info from the Washington Post.

Details At 11
Although the capability to search across thousands of news publications makes Google a useful tool, the more interesting reason to just drop in and visit Google News is to see how different stories seem to be playing around the world according to the site’s algorithm. Sometimes the experiment seems to have gone awry, but for information hounds, Google’s quirky addition to the news lineup is front-page material.

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