in this issue Views From the Top From The Font Upcoming Meeting Topics Don Talk Special Interest Group (SIG) Board Minutes & Election News Programming Corner Behind the Web Web Potpourri

February ProgramThe first steps in readying our Community Service Computers. This is will be a two meeting project. See what is inside and how to replace it. Good information and experience for all as well as doing something good for the community.

Views From the Top

Richard Kinkel, President

A funny thing happened at the last board meeting: We didn't have one. We tried, but we were iced out. The ice storm caused us to cancel the meeting. I hope everyone had a nice one or two day vacation. I mention this because I won't have much club business to report.

We did have some fun Saturday 1/31/04. About 10 of us met at Bill Barnes place of business to pick up about 15 computers, keyboards, monitors, mice and related stuff. These are the computers that the club will cleanup and reformat at the next two general meetings. This is a PCCC club community outreach project that will involve club participation. At the next two meetings we'll bring these computers, and from the help of our members, we'll clean them, reformat them and install new software and operating systems with your help. This is going to be really fun. I have one of these computers at my house right now and it's a Compaq and it works and it's really cool. And I'm having fun playing with it. Actually I'm trying to mess up the operating system. I'm doing all the things to this computer that I'm afraid to do with mine. After the computers are refurbished we will donate them to a worthy cause. So if you want a treat, and want to make a contribution to a good cause, please come to the next two meeting.

Additionally, if this isn't fun enough, visit our forum: pc3.org and you can have a chance to get in on board discussions, and get to post your technical questions. If you have a computer problem go to the forum and post it. We look at the forum all the time. Get into the habit of checking out the club forum, its fun. Secondly, The PCC Club calendar year ends at the end of April. In order to stay a member and be able to attend the SIGS you need to renew your membership. It's easy, check out the club newsletter to renew your membership. We'll probably increase the club dues from $5/yr to $10/yr. We'll make that decision at the next board meeting.

Well that's all I can think of for now. Happy computing and I'll see you at the next meeting.

Now back to the Compaq, and let me see what damage I can do. Ha, ha, ha.

Go to the PC Club's Website

	From The Font
Keith Wales, Sr. Well here we are with January under our snowy icy shoes. Hope everyone made it thru the bad weather alright. Pam and I got two days at home because our drive and road were glare ice. On Wednesday I went to Rocky Mount, NC, above Raleigh. They had 5 to 6 inches of snow and them freezing rain on top. Every where you looked it was a solid crust of ice in the field and yards. We really did duck the bullet on this one. One victim of the ice here was the executive board meeting. Richard cancelled the meeting in the interest of safety and the fact that probably no one was coming. We promise to get back to work next month to continue to improve Your Club. As you hopefully remember this month's meeting is going to be starting on the rebuild of our Community Service Computers. Everyone who comes is going to get a chance to help taking them apart and putting them back together. This should be a lot of fun and hopefully informative to many in our group. It is a good Community Service Project to be sure. Remember that the March meeting along with the finalizing of our computer rebuild will be Election of Officers for the next year. The list of those presently nominated appears later in eBytes and Bits . As always if you or someone you know is interested in a position contact Ted Hessberg at the address at the bottom of the article. I hope to see many of you at the February meeting and in fact I hope I can make it. See you here next month. Service Project UpdatePlease check the forum at pc3.org for the latest details on your assignment to help us out with the service project. PC3 Forum »

	Upcoming Meeting Topics
February We will start our computer rebuilding. March Election of New Officers We will complete our computer rebuilding. April To Be Determined What would you like to see

	Don Talk
Don King Editor's Note Don has changed his normal light hearted look at computers and computer people this month to cover a very important subject of a new Worm that is out there. This is MUST READ article! This column is your PC3.0rg place to ask questions, which will not always get the thought they deserve. Technical data is usually gleaned from maintaining computers for Grandchildren and surfing the Internet. It is usually written under duress because I hate deadlines. It lacks research because I throw out all of my old PC Magazines. This is not always the serious stuff this club is known for, and nothing is planned too far in advance of publishing date. Copied from Reuters SEATTLE (Reuters) - A new computer worm called MyDoom, which is spreading across the Internet via spam, can potentially allow attackers to gain unauthorized access to personal computers, security experts said on Monday. The new worm, also dubbed Novarg or Shimgapi, doesn't take advantage of any software flaws or vulnerabilities, but rather is designed to entice recipients of an e-mail to open an attached file and run programs contained in the attachment. "Mailboxes at large corporations are infected and reporting multiple infections throughout their entire organizations," said David Perry, global education director at Trend Micro Inc. <4704.T> The mass-mailing worm that arrives as an attachment with an .exe, .scr, .zip or .pif extension and can have a subject line of "test" or "status." Users who receive the worm and simply ignore or delete it will be able to avoid any damage. The most common attachment type appears to be .zip, experts said. "There's a bit of a twist in that in this case you have an attached .zip, and for the attack to succeed, the user has to open the attached .zip file, and then run one of the executables(programs) that appear," said Christopher Budd, a security program manager with Microsoft Corp.'s product support group. A .zip file is a widely-used compressed file format used to send and store large files. MyDoom also mails itself out to addresses in the victim's computer and is clogging mail servers and degrading network performance at companies, experts said. Budd said the fast-spreading worm, which targets computers running Microsoft's Windows with any e-mail program, had not appeared before Monday afternoon. Security experts said they were still analyzing the virus to discover what it does to the victim computers. Some are reporting that My Doom, once fully activated, instructs Windows to load it every time Windows is started and prepares to receive instructions from another computer. The worm appears to have a random sender's address and subject line and sometimes contains an error message such as "The message cannot be represented in 7-bit ASCII and has been sent as a binary attachment." MyDoom is also known as Novarg, and can contain attachments other than .zip files, computer security company Symantec Corp. said in a statement. The worm was discovered on Monday afternoon and spread so quickly that Trend Micro, Network Associates Inc., Symantec and other anti-virus companies were rating it a "high" outbreak. (With additional reporting by Elinor Mills Abreu in San Francisco)

	Special Interest Group (SIG)
Special Interest Group Next week will be our SIG week and we will have several during that week. The schedule is as follows: Database/Graphics SIG -- aka PIG SIG Will meet at a new time Our regular General Meeting Night February 12, 2004 at 5:30pm At Ole Smokehouse, 1513 Montford Dr. Office SIG Monday, February 16, 2004, 7:00pm CompUSA, South Boulevard and I-485 Digital Camera SIG Tuesday, February 17, 2004, 7:00pm CompUSA, South Boulevard and I-485 Internet SIG Thursday, February19, 2004, 7:00pm CompUSA, South Boulevard and I-485 Keep watching the SIG Listings for the announcement of the beginning of the NEW: WEB DESIGN and GRAPHICS SIG Coming soon to a location near you. SIG Calendar »

	Board Minutes & Election News
January 2004 Board Minutes No Executive Board meeting was held due to the Ice Storm. PC3 Sports Full Slate Ted Hessberg Elections are coming on March 11, 2004. As you can see below, we have a full slate of nominees for the elected positions and still are in need of an Assistant Treasurer. Also, please note the number of positions filled by your fellow members. It is our desire to spread the responsibilities of running a club over the members. Note, that although Bill Barnes never complains, he fills three slots. I suspect he might welcome some assistance. And I still am accepting nominees. The current slate of nominees is as follows: Office..........................Nominee President...................Richard Kinkel Vice President.............Bill Barnes Secretary...................Patrick Rogers Treasurer ...................Pam Wales Newsletter Editor.........Keith Wales Please contact me, to nominate someone for any position. Nominees will be accepted and qualified right up to the March 11th, elections. Traditionally, other Board members are needed to run the club. These Board members include: Office.....................................Designee Membership..........................Bob Carraway Webmaster...........................Dewey Williams Assistant Treasurer.................TBA Forum Director.......................Virginia Host SIG Director............................Bill Barnes Database/PigSig/Word...............Bill Barnes Digital Photography...................Richard Kinkel Internet Sig.............................Paul Reiss Club members interested in assisting as a board member should also contact Ted Hessberg. To contact Ted use the link below. January Treasurers Report Beginning Balance............................$2552.51 Income (From Memberships) ..................25.00 Expenses (Newsletter)...........................25.00 Current Balance...............................$2552.51 Submitted By Pam Wales Nominate a Friend »

	Programming Corner
Bill Barnes, PCCC Keeping multiple backups of vital files No, don't run. This is programming that anyone in the club would be interested in and should be able to do. I had 2 needs: I needed to open two spreadsheets simultaneously and in a particular sequence. Meanwhile, I wanted to make a backup of the spreadsheets so I could recover an earlier version if something should go wrong. Actually, I wanted several successive backups since I might not notice the flaw until I had worked on it more than once. Finally, everything "I" need to do above really refers to someone else who might not be careful about doing several steps in the correct sequence. After a little experimentation, I discovered an easy and effective way to open 2 spreadsheets with one command. I created a shortcut that started Excel with the two spreadsheets as my argument. Make a shortcut by right clicking in the data folder and choosing New | Shortcut. In the first window of the wizard where it asks "Type the location of the item", I entered "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office\EXCEL.EXE" lookup.xls attendance04.xls. The sequence in quotes starts Excel and then opens my two spreadsheets: lookup.xls and attendance04.xls. The command that starts Excel needs to be in quotes because it has spaces in the full path. My next task involved writing a DOS batch file to make my successive backups. To create a batch file, you type the commands in Notepad to be sure you're saving a plain text file, then give it a name with an extension of .BAT. The simple commands you need are: copy oldfile newfile, rename oldfilename newfilename, and delete filename. Although most Windows batch files will accept long filenames, for our purposes keep everything simple: 1) keep all your files in the same folder as the batch file. 2) be sure you don't have any spaces in any paths or filenames. Here's enough of my batch file for you to get the idea. This program saves a new backup of the file attendance.xls every time it runs. It preserves 4 successive backups named attendance.bk0 through attendance.bk3 (Lines that start "rem" are remarks.) @echo off rem batch file to back up and open spreadsheets delete attendance04.bk3 rename attendance04.bk2 attendance04.bk3 rename attendance04.bk1 attendance04.bk2 rename attendance04.bk0 attendance04.bk1 copy attendance04.xls attendance04.bk0 call openboth.lnk First I delete the oldest backup (.bk3). Then I rename the next oldest to the oldest (.bk2 to .bk3). After renaming 3 files, I copy my master file as .bk0. The last line tells Windows to execute the shortcut I created above. Write Bill »

	Behind the Web
Dewey Williams PCCC Many of us use the World Wide Web every day; checking email, searching for information, reading the news. On our computers, web pages come in fast, or slow, links take us where we want them to, usually, and the text and pictures look much like what we would see in a magazine. How does the browser produce this content for us to read? Web pages are written in a scripting language called HTML (Hypertext Markup Language). This language uses codes to indicate various aspects of the text surrounded by the code. For example: "p>... " is the code for a paragraph; any text placed between the two tags will be formatted as a paragraph. HTML has gone through a number of versions, the most current being HTML 4.01. XHTML 1.0 is the cutting edge language that is the successor to HTML. Many current web browsers do not completely understand XHTML, but the most common ones will treat XHTML pages as standard HTML pages and be shown correctly. Many web pages also use another language that works with HTML: CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). Where HTML tells the browser how to format the text, CSS tells the browser what fonts to use, what color and style to utilize; it sets the 'look' of the page where HTML sets the layout. To create web pages, many designers use text-editors so they can work with the code. Several HTML editors are available that provide built-in help files, importing to a browser to see your results and other useful tools. Here are some links to free HTML editors: http://www.htmlkit.com/download/ http://freeware.acehtml.com/download.html Also available are WYSIWYG editors which allow you to design your page graphically without knowing how to code HTML. These are usually quite expensive; however FrontPage is available in versions of MS Office. There are many other aspects of web page design; JavaScript, graphics design and optimizing, content management and CGI programming are just some of the things a web designer must consider when running a website. The Web Design SIG will be starting soon. If you have a desire to learn more about creating web pages, please join us on the forum and at the SIG. Links to Free HTML Editors »

	Web Potpourri
Converting Vinyl Records to Digital Dewey Williams If you are like so many of us beyond 30 and then some you probably have a library of old Vinyl Records. Well here is how to convert them to Digital on your computer. Send me your favorite sites and you to could be in the spotlight next month. Convert Music »

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