Brian Smither admits to yet having found his ‘stride’ in publishing Sacra Blue. Sometimes just Sacra Blue is released, sometimes both the PDF version and eBlue, the web-based version, are published simultaneously. He reports that the May eBlue was just finished today. Recall that Sacra Blue comes in one PDF file, usually between one to four megabytes in size. eBlue, on the other hand, is one web page per article – easier to read in intermittent online sessions.

Brian also states that he is transcribing the meeting recordings for a summary article that is published in the newsletter. The questions and answers asked, if not fully answered at the meeting, are further researched and the results are published in the meeting summary article.

Dennis Duffy, the group’s Training Coordinator, gave a run-down on the excruciatingly good deal offered by New Horizons Learning Centers. He asked that members who are taking advantage of the program summarize their experiences so that Dennis can fine tune our relationship with New Horizons and other associated businesses. Dennis states that fully 10% of our members signed up that night when New Horizons made their presentation at the April meeting.

New Horizons has committed to a year-long test to determine the turnout from organizations such as ours if offered discounts on the prices of certain training packages. The discounts are substantial and are offered to SPCUG members only. Members can sign up at any time during this year-long test and the program takes the form of a 12-month subscription to their Online Anytime web-based training programs.

Don Mongeau, Scholarship Chairman, presented the 2003 scholarship awards. The SPCUG scholarship program was started in 1993 with one $250 scholarship being awarded to a student at Center High School. In the past eleven years we have awarded $7,200 in scholarships to nineteen students. Applicants and recipients come from all over the area we serve and plan to go into a diverse range of careers.

This year the program was funded for two scholarships of $500 each. Notices were sent to all schools in the area and posted on our web site from which we received 41 valid applications from nineteen schools.

Scholarships awarded this year were to Tyler Geivett and Nu Vang. Both were very appreciative of being awarded our scholarships. It will help each of them immensely.

Tyler attended River City High School in West Sacramento. He intends to study Psychology and Social Behavior. He wants to be a Criminal Psychologist and has extensively researched the subject through the Internet already. He is active at school as captain of the varsity baseball team, is on the soccer team, participates in the Link Crew program, and is involved in several leadership roles at the school. Outside of school he is a volunteer at an elementary school and in various other community activities.

Nu attended Valley High School in Sacramento. She intends to pursue a career in Education. Nu is active at school in student government, as a supervisor in the Student Store and in the G.A.T.E. club. Outside of school she tutors Jr. High students, volunteers in community activities and holds down a part time job. Nu has two older sisters who are successfully completing their college education at this time. Her father works with the school district by helping struggling families.

While the specifics are generally not released to the public, there are three major ways Internet access can be speeded up: compression, pre-loading, and modem-bonding. A proxy server is installed that intercepts your requests for web pages, sends that request to a different server, that server then gets the requested page and compresses it as much as possible. The compressed page is then sent to you and the proxy decompresses it. Even with the additional overhead, the smaller page size means less time to transfer. An example of this type of speed up is WebWarper (server side) or DSL Buster (client side). Browsers from the time of Internet Explorer 4 and later know to automatically decompress web pages.

After having downloaded a page, usually with links to subordinate pages, and while reading the content of that page, the proxy could be downloading other pages and images and having them ready for you. An example of that type of speed up is NetSonic and Net Accelerator (read a review here).

Modem bonding uses two modems and two phone circuits. Each phone line runs at full speed, thus effectively doubling the transfer rate. There are issues involved, such as whether your ISP will allow you to be logged on twice, and how the bonding program is configured (read an article about it here).

Also, if you realize that there are parameters for the transport protocols, one set of parameters are optimum for dial-up and another set are optimum for networking. There are programs, some free and some not, which can verify that the correct settings are in use. If the wrong set of parameters are currently controlling the internet connection, the transfer rates will be less than maximum.