Love, As Always, Pete

The Weekly Letters, by A. Pedersen Wood

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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