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The HAPCC general meeting is on 4th Sunday of each month. The next general meeting will be Feb 28th meeting time
7:00 - 9:00pm. The HAPCC has a meeting place at: Maritime Museum of the Atlantic 1675 Lower Water Street ,
Halifax, NS.
Parking available in the nearby Government parking lot or in the Museum parking lot. Access to the
building is via the Night Entrance Doors, located just to the right of the regular front doors. If door is
locked, use the bell on upper left side of the Night Entrance Doors.
The meeting room is on the second floor and has a theatre type of layout. Washrooms are located close by.
Elevator service is available. Coffee served.
The introduction topics will be Bill Marchant on an item of interest on Windows and Rob MacCara who will look after the Q&A secession
Feature Presentation
The featured presentation by David Potter, will be on the Internet.
Bill Marchant - Scraps, a tip
Bill Marchant - A confusion of backups
Henry Hill - The Millennium Bug
General Information
A word of thanks to guest speakers and the their web suites
Newsletter Information
Meeting Schedule for the year
Here is a little known but possibly useful technique. Selected pieces of text from WordPad and WordPerfect, and
possibly other word processors (MS Word?) can be placed on the Desktop with the title 'Wordpad
Document Scrap' or just 'Document scrap'.
These scraps can be used like data sent to the Clipboard, with the advantages that:
(1) They survive the shutdown/reboot processes of your computer
and
(2) Making a new scrap does not kill the old one, as with Clipboard. You can create, save and recover as many
scraps as you want.
To make a scrap, highlight the text,and then with the left mouse button down, drag it to the desktop. That’s all!
To recover the scrap of text, you may drag it back into your word processor, or right-click the desired scrap and
select OPEN. This latter procedure will replace the scrap in the application which created it.
You can also with some limits, place scraps created with one application, into another application. Since I do not use
Microsoft Word, I have no information on it,but I assume Microsoft would have made scraps a part of it’
scapability. My experiments with scraps showed the following results:
Wordpad makes scraps, Accepts scraps originating with Wordpad Accepts scraps originating with WordPerfect.
Notepad cannot make scraps. If you put a scrap from WordPad or WordPerfect into Notepad, you get all the control codes
that go with it. It looks and is very messy. WordPerfect makes scraps, Accepts Wordpad scraps Accepts WordPerfect
scraps. Quickview and Quickview Plus cannot accept scraps.
You could use scraps to leave notes to yourself or other users of your computer. You might make a folder for
scraps, to avoid cluttering the Desktop, but on the other hand, you might like to leave the scrap icon on the
desktop so it does not get forgotten.
There is probably more to this than I have discovered. It may be a fruitful area for more exploration by anyone so
motivated.
In this issue
Remember in the days of DOS, when the DOS Backup Utilities were so bad? And remember how the Backup for each version of DOS was almost always incompatible with every other version? Well, now that the world of Windows is upon us, nothing has changed as far as Microsoft is concerned!
A friend of mine had the latest WordPerfect update file
(some 14 Megabytes in size, which would have required nearly two hours for me to download.) To save me some time,
he offered to put a copy on tape for me. And this he did using Microsoft’s Windows 98 Backup Utility.
I put the tape in my Windows 95computer, and flashed up my Connors tape back up program. As I expected, it did not
recognize the file on my tape. I then tried the Windows 95 backup program, which I fully expected would work I got the
following message:
"Microsoft Backup cannot read this vendor specific backup set. To restore data from
this backup set,use the application that was used to write it. Adding backup sets to this tape may corrupt existing
vendor specific backup sets."
So much for the experiment. Anyone who cares will be interested to know that
I later asked my friend to make a tape image using his obsolete Connors Backup utility. My own Connors system had no
difficulty in copying the file to my system.
Didn't anyone ever tell you that Beta is Latin for "it doesn't work yet?"
The Millennium Year Well just before
We are in the New Year, not quite the millennium bug year or the computer bug year now but we are getting there.
It is known by the acronym Y2K. It is a computer problem that will happen in the year 2000. These are not the bugs that
have been featured in several animated movies nor are they undocumented feature of computer programs, but a problem
created when computer programmers were working under limited operating memory restraints in the '50s and '60s.
The memory limitations dictated using two digits to represent the year i.e. '98 instead of 1998. A side bar issue is
the leap year problem. The problem is what will happen in the year 2000, with computers and a multitude of other
electronic devices. There has been doomsday hype and guarded optimism regarding this problem.
Here is a web site that gives a look at both views:
The Doomsday Viewpoint
The January issue of Windows magazine has feature article on how to assess the Y2K problem as it relates to your PC,
your applications and your data. It includes an over view of the problem and a five minute test you can do on your
PC to see how it will perform at the end of the year. It also has URL's to software sites where you can obtain
programs to check how your PC will function and general information on theY2K problem. The government of Canada,
sent to home owners a brochure on the "Millennium Bug" with information on things to check and web sites
to visit.
There are two clock systems that control how your PC and its operating system work. They are on the
lowest level "the real-time clock" ( RTC ) which is a battery powered clock , time and date, on a chip.
This chip is interactive with the BIOS and a software system clock that runs when your system runs. This is the
hardware problem, but there are problems with your software if it uses date fields.
A free hardware test is available from the National Software Testing Lab's YMark2000 This program was developed
for the Canadian government and has been adopted by numerous hardware suppliers. This program tests the PC's
clock and BIOS to see if there are any Y2K problems.
Here is another link: Y2K News
But just to brighten up your out look here is a little humor
Vacation Pay
Jan 1, 2000
Dear Valued Employee:
Our records indicate that you have not used any vacation time over the past 100 year(s). As I'm sure you are aware,
employees are granted 3 weeks of paid leave per year or pay in lieu of time off. One additional week is granted for
every 5 years of service.
Please either take 9,400 days off work or notify our office and your next pay cheque will reflect payment of
$8,277,432.22 which will include all pay and interest for the past 1,200 months.
Sincerely, Automated Payroll Processing
In this issue
Chairperson David Potter
Vice-Chair Bill Marchant
Treasurer Rob MacCara
Web Librarian Thayne MacLean
Newsletter Editor Diane Smith
Membership Promotion Pat Conen
and the following members who assist in planning our monthly
meetings: Norman DeForest, Henry Hill, Ken Gilmour,and Colin Stuart.
The HAPCC has two kinds of meetings. Firstly the regular Sunday night meeting which most members attend regularly,
secondly the monthly (approximately) planning meeting which organizes the business of the Club, including what
happens on the Sundays. The planning meeting is held on Monday, a week after the regular meeting in which all
members of the Club are urged to attend. At the planning meeting, we discuss feature speakers for regular meetings,
finances, membership, training,and other computer related subjects.
....Bill Marchant
In this issue
Our guest speaker at the March meeting was Mr. David Baxter, Product Specialist at MT&T for the MpoweredPc service.
His multi-media presentation showed us how far the service has come, and in which direction it is heading. MpoweredPc
was being officially launched on April 7, 1998 and it promises to be a serious contender in the high-speed
internet/software on demand arena. More info can be found here:
Mpowered. Once again, Thank you to MT&T and David
Baxter.
Our guest speaker in February was Sgt. Bill Cowper, Internet Communications Officer of the Halifax Regional
Municipality Police Department. He gave a history of how and when the police department started using the Internet.
They were the first police department in Canada to be on the Internet. Sgt. Cowper is continually receiving
calls from all over the world looking for assistance. The presentation showed how well the department and the
officers in the patrol cars are versed on getting the criminals off the streets. If you would like to check-out
their web site the address is: Halifax Regional Police Service
gives an idea of what an "Internet Cybercop" is all about.
In this issue
Newsletter Articles.... We are almost always in need of good articles. If anyone has something that they feel
would make a good article, an interesting story to tell, or even a good meeting topic, please don't hesitate
to pass it on. Articles can be submitted in almost any format, ASCII text, AMI Pro, MS Word, Windows Write,
WordStar and of course WordPerfect.
The newsletter is mailed to all paid up members and to anyone who has attended a meeting within the past three months.
Yearly membership dues are $15.00.
Club Mailing Address -
P.O. Box 29008, Halifax N.S., B3L 4T8.
In this issue
We decide the meeting dates for the upcoming year at the last planning meeting of the season. The dates for
these are listed below. As in previous years, the December meeting is moved to the early part of January due to
Christmas Eve being near the fourth Sunday of the month.
The planning meetings are normally held on the second Monday (8days) after the general meeting.
They are currently held at a members home and the address is announced at the meeting prior to the planning
meeting. Anyone is welcome to assist in the planning of future meetings or events.
Meeting dates for the 1998/99 season:
Mar-28 Apr-25 May-30 June-27
Any changes to the scheduled dates will be announced where possible at the regular monthly meetings and/or in this newsletter.
