November, 2001      Diablo Blue     Page 7

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Ron traded updates on prices and features. Charlie said he is contemplating the one he has in his home. This seems to me like a golden opportunity for the Club. In honor of his years of membership and service to DVPC, I recommend we sell Charlie the club’s current machine, heavily discounted to our dear friend to about $3500 or so. Then we can take the money and buy a new one for the club at around $2000, and beef up the treasury a bit. Charlie could take expense as a tax write-off to a non-profit organization and everyone would be a winner!

More video:  Nick had his marvelous digital still-and-video camera with him. He showed it to Charlie and they began talking a foreign language: something about “distribution medium of choice”, “hack to regionalize your DVD”, “doesn’t transcode”, “bandwidth”, “phlangicize the blodgett”, and so on. Again, being technically challenged, I lost the gist of that conversation.

So! There I was, sorting my email to eliminate the Spam, and there was a message from Mr. R.O. our tireless Editor, asking if I cared to review a new version of the shareware program “Cookie Pal”. Playing no favorites, he sent the message to the writing litterateurs of Diablo Blue. I sent a quick “Maybe”, then downloaded Cookie Pal v1.7 from www.kburra.com/cpal.html. In the words of their home page “Cookie Pal is a complete Internet management tool”. Well, it does this job OK. In a perfect world, there would no need for a program like this, but there are enough Nasties out there, thus the need for some kind of control to monitor them. Some cookie control programs will zap all cookies, but this is no answer, ‘cause if you do much on-line purchasing those companies save cookie data that facilitates a repeat sale on your hard drive. If you do not make Internet purchases that’s OK, but some web sites will not respond correctly if you don’t accept cookies. If you don’t shop on-line, Washie is a program that can be configured to accept all cookies, but the next time you boot up it zaps all the cookies, so you start with a clean slate. Find it at www.webroot.com/washie.htm. In summary, “Cookie pal” is a solution that lets you accept those cookies you want or need. By the way, I might have a more negative view of “Cookies” than or Editor Mr. R.O., but it would take a whole column to explain my bias. [OK George, start writing that column! - Ron]