November 21, 1996
Dear Everyone:
This is my last day
at work before
Thanksgiving as I am taking tomorrow off so I can ferry “Jeannie” to
the airport. She’s spending
the week with “Marge” and “Richard” in beautiful
Kansas, leaving me to
my own devices (of which I have quite a few).
I have a new
addiction, or perhaps merely a vice.
I haven’t tried to live without it yet, so I can’t be sure.
It’s the “Daily Q” on
America Online
(AOL). When I first started
with AOL, it was to see if people outside of Company, mainly service
station dealers, could order supplies from “Livermore” by sending an
email over the Internet. The
short answer is: No they
can’t, because they can’t fill out an electronic form and send that as
an attachment to an email.
AOL uses SMTP (Simple
Mail Transfer Protocol) and,
frankly, the form isn’t simple enough.
The long answer is:
We’re still working on it.
In the meantime, I
still have a subscription to AOL, which Company generously pays for
(it’s only $9.95/month for the first 5 hours of on-line time).
And part of my “mission” is to find out what other useful
features AOL has. So I
decided to check out the “Reference Channel” (everything is channels on
AOL). And promptly stumbled
across the Daily Q, a trivial question contest.
Each day, someone
called Jamie posts the daily question.
If you don’t know the answer, it’s guaranteed to be available
on-line, provided you can figure out where to look for it.
Answer the question correctly, and you win a point.
At the end of the week, the person with the most correct answers
wins. The prize is more free
time on AOL. Which you use
up looking for more answers.
Clearly, it’s a vicious cycle.
The first question
was dead easy: On what
island was the
Minoan
civilization founded? You’re
asking an anthropologist this question?
Especially one who cut her teeth on
Greco-Roman
mythology? Think...King
Minos. Think...The
Minotaur.
Think...the island of Crete.
I didn’t even need to look this one up.
Second question:
What arsenal did John Brown attack, sparking the beginning of the
American Civil
War? (Also known as the
“War Between the States”, or the “War of the Northern Aggression”, my
personal favorite.) This one
required looking “Brown, John” up in the encyclopedia before I
remembered that it was
Harper’s
Ferry.
So far, two for two.
Looking good.
Question number
three: What Pakistani
cardiac surgeon is rumored to be
Princess Diana’s
latest lover?
Huh???
Not gonna find that
one in no encyclopedia. AOL
has three on-line encyclopedias, frequently updated, but none of them
are quite that current.
Instead, I tried a news search on the word “Diana”.
Turns out there’s a company named Diana which has been having
some kind of trouble with its stock lately.
Turns out there’s also a princess named Diana who’s been hanging
around a lot lately with some guy named
Hasnat Khan.
You can see how
easily one gets sucked into this thing.
It’s the thrill of the hunt.
Plus all the useful information that you find out, like that
Diana company and
Wisconsin being the first state to open a
kindergarten in
1856. And who wrote the
novel
Andersonville; and what’s the highest
mountain in
North America.
This month, I
actually went over my allotted 5 hours.
But I may get one back because I submitted a possible question;
and if they use it, you get a free hour.
The question?
Who was Richard
Nixon’s
running mate in the 1960 Presidential election?
You can find the
answer in
Compton’s
Living Encyclopedia.
Love, as always,
Pete
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