December, 2000      Diablo Blue      Page 3

Mr. Walt P. (DVPC's official curmudgeon) was in such hurry to get a comment about my use of his good name in his recent article that he misspelled my name, not once, but twice, though it was nice he did not substitute a four-letter name!
In regard to my excursion into the Win ME OS (operating system) world, and the fact that my HP scanner was not compatible, I have acquired a new scanner.
The choice was influenced by my tryout of the FireWire/IEEE1394 interface. There are several implementations of FireWire coming on the market, but most are in the expensive category.
The scanner that I acquired was a UMAX model called Astra 64500. So far I am quite pleased with this machine. One of the advantages of this scanner is the ease of installation. Just plug it in, run the software, and you are in business [of course you must previously have the FireWire card installed, but one card covers all of your FireWire peripherals]. And I did not have some of those glitches that I have had with setting up a USB device. A real plus of FireWire over SCSI is that there's no stiff cable to hook-up, no ID number, and no termination set up. This scanner is much faster too, but if you only occasional do scans this might not be much of an advantage.
The  scanning software furnished is called VistaScan. Since this is my forth scanner, the learning cure was at a minimum, but it seems strange doing the same thing again for the fourth time, but using a different approach. UMAX also included Adobe 5 LE, but since I have been using CorelDraw, and CorelPhoto, I gave that program to a family member.

As a service to a long time sponsor I am sending this special offer to all members of the Diablo Valley PC User's Group who may be interested.
Adobe Systems is currently offering LiveMotion for only $99 to any of our members who have an Adobe or competitive Web product. That's a savings of $200. This special offer ends February 28, 2001. Qualifying products include Adobe^® Premiere^®, Photoshop^®, Illustrator^®, GoLive(tm), After Effects^®, Photoshop LE, PageMill^®, ImageStyler^TM, or ImageReady^TM, or Macromedia^® Flash^TM, Dreamweaver^®, or Fireworks^®.
Adobe LiveMotion lets you rapidly create vector-based Websites with motion, sound, and interactivity. With this innovative software, you can unleash your creativity, enhance your productivity, and streamline your workflow through superior integration with Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and GoLive. LiveMotion is a must-have for creating cutting-edge, sophisticated Web graphics and animations.
DVPC members can order Adobe LiveMotion at:

Or phone 800-967-7853 and mention offer 71405.
Don't miss this opportunity to add Adobe LiveMotion to your Web design toolset for only $99.