This has been a month with lots of changes, for the TPC and for me, personally. We've negotiated a new place for monthly meetings: starting with the May meeting we'll meet at the Tokyo British Club, in the Oak Room in the basement. Although the room is a bit smaller than the church's hall, it's a fully equipped theater, has a good sound system, has a bar in the room itself as well as a pub upstairs, and is available for more than two hours longer in the evening. The room rental is almost the same as what we were paying the church, nijikais will be less hassle, and we have been assured that our reservations will have priority. Please read TPC President Kevin Ryan's Prez Sez column, for more details.
I've been a member of the British Club since last summer or so (yes, they take Californians, too), but it was David Bernat who first thought about approaching their very hospitable, professional, and cooperative General Manager, Mr. Mike Marklew, with our proposal. The ExCom had already had a couple of meetings there, and several TPC members are fairly regular visitors; TPC Sysop Frank Tone Angstead plays there with two bands (XLH and The Hit Men) and as a solo act on occasion, too. It's a very nice venue, convenient and friendly, and we are still working out several more ways in which the TPC and the TBC can be of use to one another.
We have several new Execs in the ExCom (please look at the list in Kevin's column), as we've made official the positions of several people who have been contributing time and expertise on a continuing basis to the TPC. I personally owe all of them a lot of gratitude for advice and help since I've been a member, and I'm happy to be working with them. I haven't had a chance yet to work out with each of them whether they want their names and contact information shown in the AJ, nor have I worked out yet with Paul whether/where/how we could fit them into the Exec list on the inside cover. I'll try to get this done by next issue. Meanwhile, though, please join me in wishing them a very sincere "Welcome Aboard!".
On a more individual note, I finally succumbed to the impulse to install Windows 95 on The Beast. Being prudent (rather unusual for me, actually), I set things up so that most of Win95 resides on my D: drive, a 1GB SCSI Quantum Empire drive which I do not trust at all. We had trouble with it and its replacements on the BBS, and on The Beast it doesn't respond quickly enough to be recognized by the system on boot-up, maybe 30% or so of the time. I left Windows 3.11 pretty much intact on my C: drive (a steadfast Western Digital Caviar 540MB IDE drive), so I can start the system using a floppy boot disk and have my original Win 3.11 configuration, or without the floppy and get into Win95.
So far the experiment is working fairly well.... Win95 is at least stable enough that when it crashes it does so gracefully, hardly ever bringing the whole system down, generally just the application that I was working on at the time, leaving all the rest, and the OS, unscathed.
So far, so good, but I'm in the midst of gathering advice from TPC's resident experts on how properly to get Netscape Gold working under Win95. As soon as I get done with this issue of the AJ, I'm going to see if I can get it running right. I caught pneumonia this last week, and it slowed me down some, so I haven't been able to devote much time to it. If it still doesn't work, I'll try another version of Netscape I downloaded today. If that goes well, I plan to start a project to produce a homepage for myself, for which purpose Darren Cook's article should come in very handy. Maybe I'll have good news to report next issue.
Finally, let me call your attention to the inside cover, with more telephone and fax numbers where you can reach me.
Algorithmica Japonica
March 1996
The Newsletter of the Tokyo PC Users Group
Submissions : Editor Mike Lloret