Blue Light, Kmart’s free Internet service which bought out Spinway.com, has now limited online surfers to 25 hours a month before fees kick in.

As someone once said, "there’s no such thing as a free lunch."

One way or another, someone has to pay the costs generated by all the people who would like free Internet service.

Free No Longer Pays the Bills
Since the sudden drop in the Internet companies’ stock value dating back to last summer, companies have had less free money to finance their long-term hopes. And advertising is growing out of favor, because it has become less effective over the same period of time.

That leaves…you and me. NetZero says a small number of people use most of the time on their service, and want those people to pay for it. The price isn’t high: $9.95 a month for those who go over 40 hours a month, but there are ISPs you can find at that price already. It doesn’t leave much of a competitive advantage for NetZero.

At any rate, I herewith apologize to all for making the free ISPs sound so attractive.

We Need Your E-mail Address
SPCUG officers, particularly Milt, have made repeated requests for members to give us their e-mail addresses. Many of you have, but quite a few haven’t. And of those who have, many have changed their e-mail addresses without giving us the new one.

We don’t want the address to send you a ton of mail. But we’re trying to run the most economical organization we can, for your benefit, and if we can save money we want to.

This is a computer organization, after all. It should be customary and normal to communicate with our members by e-mail when we need to.

For example, we’d like to notify members of the upcoming meetings with an e-mail message rather than a postcard. Believe it or not, that postcard is one of our biggest expenses every month. You can help us save that, and potentially help reduce your own dues, by providing the group with your e-mail address.

Address Changes
Please read Milt Hull’s President’s Thoughts column this month. He deals with an important topic, the collapse of the first.last@sacpcug.org e-mail address system.

Nobody is quite sure, but it appears as if NX.com has gone out of business, or disappeared, or entered the hidden witness program, or something. We can’t raise them by phone, by e-mail, or any other method.

None of the @sacpcug.org addresses works anymore, including president@, editor@, and membership@. You’ll have to use the addresses listed in the credits table on the inside cover instead.

Sacra Blue Changes
With the new year, there will come a few changes in Sacra Blue.

For one, we’re trying to keep the useful content in Sacra Blue while making it a convenient size for you to download. We’re aware it’s gotten fairly large, but we don’t want to leave out content you can use.

Beginning this month, we’re splitting out most of the "boilerplate" material—the stuff that doesn’t change from month to month, like the instructions on how to write for the magazine, advertising rates and ad sizes, large blocks of static material about SIGs when we have no meeting reports to publish from them.

All this material takes up quite a few pages on a regular basis, and it just doesn’t make sense to include them every month. If you print out the magazine, as I do, it takes a lot of ink for those extra pages.

The material we’re taking out won’t disappear, though. It will be in a separate publication, currently being called a Member’s Guide. It will also be in PDF format, and available on the SPCUG Web site. We expect to put up a new version every three months or so.

Writers Still Needed
As you might be aware, Ken Hopkins and I have been writing quite a bit of the material you’ve been reading here. We wanted partly to build Sacra Blue into more of a helpful magazine, with lots of features to enrich your computing life. We also wanted to win some awards for the magazine, particularly from APCUG at Comdex.

Now that Comdex is past and we’ve gotten several months of a new format under our belts, we’ll probably cut back on our writing. At least I know I will.

It’s far too easy to burn out trying to do too much, and neither of us wants that. Fortunately, Ken and I seem to work together pretty well and we both want to keep putting out the magazine.

We’d like to have a lot more in it, though. I’d like to see columns on programming, on Microsoft Office tips, and on strategies for solving various computer problems. I’d like to see more members writing about their favorite shareware programs. I know Ken has his own ideas about things he’d like to see written up.

So if you have an area of knowledge, consider sharing it with your fellow members. We’re past the Thanksgiving/Christmas craziness, and you can’t afford to spend any money now anyway. It’s the perfect time to sit down and write up your favorite tip or trick for Sacra Blue.