May 23, 1996
Dear Everyone:
So, it’s Tuesday
afternoon and I’m sitting in my San Francisco office, on the phone with
“Greg” in Technical Support because the RACS printer has suddenly
decided to take a short vacation, when the room starts to move.
“Are you feeling an
earthquake?”
“Uh, no.”
“Greg” probably
didn’t feel it because he was on the second floor of an older building
elsewhere in the financial district.
Whereas I was on the 30th floor of a newer building
that’s designed to sway in a quake (i.e., bend, don’t break).
At the time, we thought it might have been the wind as it was
very windy that day. But
someone had a radio on and in a few minutes the news was working its way
down the hallway: That
was a quake.
So I jump out onto
the Internet and hop
over to the Web Site of one of the local TV stations and, sure enough,
they already have the news on-line:
4.7, near San Jose, 1:50 p.m.
But what catches my
attention is the graphic that they have on their Home Page.
It’s flashing the word “EARTHQUAKE”.
And I’m thinking, “How do they get it to
flash like that?”
As you know, my
little Team (“Wilbur” and “Kent”) and I are hard at work on the
“Livermore” Home Page. We
have a couple dozen sub-pages in the works that will tell interested
parties how much it costs to store boxes and forms in “Livermore”; how
to order supplies and boxes (empty boxes to fill with records, or boxes
already filled with files); who to contact for this, that and the other.
All the informative stuff.
But what makes Web
pages fun is the graphics.
The little pictures that you can click on to go to another area for more
information. These little
pictures come in different flavors, but the most common is called
Graphic Image Format, or “GIF”
for short. When a Web
Browser sees a gif, it knows to display the picture, provided the
graphic and the Browser are compatible.
Trouble is, we don’t
know much about gif’s. We
know that a gif file is called “something.gif” and the “.gif” is what
tells the Browser that it’s a gif.
But we don’t know how to
make gif’s (yet). Just
calling something a gif isn’t enough.
Just like calling my coffee table
Mount Everest
won’t make it any taller.
I’ve tried
converting some of my Clip Art into gif’s, but so far, it hasn’t worked.
So, for now, we have to make do with whatever gif’s we can find.
We have a few that came with a software I got for developing Web
pages. It’s mostly colored
lines and balls. We want
something more interesting.
That’s where “Wilbur” comes in.
Some people “surf”
the Internet.
With “Wilbur”, it’s more like trawling.
He goes out gif-hunting and comes back with double-armloads of
the little critters. Dumps
them into a directory called, appropriately, GIF.
Then we try them out on a Web page to see what they look like.
Sometimes they’re just as boring as lines and circles.
Sometimes they’re cute (love the little red devil), but not
perhaps appropriate for a business site.
But we keep plugging away at it.
Speaking of boring,
I finally got “Jeannie” over to play
Myst with me.
As it turns out, Myst
is not a “dungeons and dragons” action game.
Instead, it’s more like some enormous puzzle (which stays neatly
and conveniently inside your PC instead of all over the dining table).
You wander around on an island, looking for clues and pieces of
the puzzle. Like, where did
all the people go?
After about an hour,
“Jeannie” declared that Myst
was “boring and frustrating” (aren’t all puzzles?) and decided to play
Hangman
instead. She won 5 out of 6
games and went home. I
haven’t had time to play Myst
since then. Maybe with the
3-day weekend coming, I can go back to the island and try to find more
clues.
Love, as always,
Pete
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