Sunshine for Women WHM 2002, ToC | Home

To My Faithful and Loyal Readers,

         Please forgive my absence for the past month: I had some unavoidable personal problems to attend to -- nothing serious, just things that took time, energy, and *money* to resolve. Among other things, my computer was stolen and I have been off-line while finding a replacement. Consequently, I was unable to update the web page to allow you access to each day's biography. I had uploaded all of the entries to my ISP so all was not lost. As you can see, I have posted the complete menu for the month of March 2002. Unfortunately, my backup tape broke, so I lost a lot of my other intellectual work. Fortunately, the best stuff I had posted to my web site :-), but I lost a lot of notes. My stone-age traffic counter continued to function during my absence and it has shown that you have not abandoned me in my time of trial and tribulation and that Sunshine for Women remains popular, despite my absence.

          I would have loved to see my burgular's face when he turned the old jalopy on and Windows 3.1 came up. Even though my collegues have told me for years that the only thing my home computer was good for was being a boat anchor, it served my purposes - I had a Works word processor for writing my web pages (yes, I did all of the html files at Sunshine for Women by hand), Eudora for e-mail, Netscape for a browser, Cute FTP for uploading files to my ISP, a few games and that was about it for commercial code. I never worried about anti-virus protection - who wrote viruses for Windows 3.1.

          But I did have all of my files about women on it, including 17 biographies that I had already written for next year's women's history month presentation. If I ever get my hands on the crumb who stole my computer, I will make him read all of my computer files, read the shelf and a half of books that I read to write the 17 new biographies, then write and rewrite and polish the 17 biographies which he stole until they have been written to my satisfaction. That's what I call feminist justice. :-)

          I also lost the inventory of my personal library - about 1,800 books. The crumb can replace that, too. He can take each book from the shelf, enter the information into the computer, then go through the 4 inch pile of receipts to match the receipts with the books. I intend to donate my collection of books to a library someday and I need the file for tax purposes. It wasn't such a big chore when I cataloged each book as it came in with the reciept and book together, but now it will be a big job having to sort through all of the reciepts for the entry for each book.

          So now I have this brand new computer, a Gateway 1.3 GHz, 40 GByte hard disk with 512 MByte RAM, CD RW ROM burner, and all the standard trimmings, a new color printer, and a scanner (which I have wanted for a long time. Be prepared to see lots of new pages at SfW. With that scanner and my library I am going to be "hell on wheels" ;-) ). I have been saddled with Windows XP and Office (if any one can tell me how to read an HTML file into Word as text or ascii - I don't want Word writing my html code for me - I'd be much obliged. I got so frustrated trying to turn the Word HTML editor off, I wound up doing this file on Notepad.). But, once again, I have Eudora. I still have to install the printer and the scanner and download / purchase some more software (like Netscape); but as you can see, I have my new computer together enough for it to be functional.

          Well, now I have to figure out how to upload this file to my ISP on this new-fangled device. Things were so much easier using FTP under DOS. You just gave it the command, pressed "Return," and it either did or didn't do it. Now you have to figure out which button to press to give the command for you. It was really much easier to just type the command in and press "Return", although in time I did learn to like the pointing at the file I wanted to edit or upload and clicking on open or upload, as appropriate, and I have come to like cut and paste, my spelling checker, and the plot capabilities in Excel.

          Once again, I would like to thank you for your patience. I hope you didn't think I abandoned you permenantly by doing something like falling in love after the second date and eloping. I did, however, in my time of need, discover once again what wonderful neighbors and friends -- women all (well, almost) -- I have been blessed with.

Affectionately Yours in Sisterhood,

Sunny

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