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WebSkulker attended a birthday party last night.  One of the guests was a jr. skulker who owns an African gray parrot.  She told us stories about its large vocabulary and its ability to imitate voices and household sounds perfectly; even phrases that she has no idea where it picked up.  She bought an iMac and unpacked it on the kitchen table with the parrot watching.  When the machine came out of the box, she swears the parrot said "Oh my God."  WebSkulker doesn't know whether the parrot was shocked that she made such a foolish purchase, or whether it actually liked the machine.

http://www.winlinux.net

ftp://ftp.winlinux.net/pub/WL2000FB.EXE

http://linuxpr.com/releases/406.html

For you jr. skulkers who are bored with Windows and want to try a different OS, don't get your parrot upset with an iMac; try Linux instead.  You no longer need to devote a separate machine to Linux and go through all the installation hassles.  A company called JRCP yesterday released the final beta test version of WinLinux 2000, a free version of Linux that installs on a Windows machine as easily (they claim) as any other Windows application, and then starts up as a Windows application.

The first link above is to the official site for WinLinux and has complete information about why you might want WinLinux instead of the traditional versions.  Click on the second link to download the free WinLinux to your machine, but warning: it is 138MB.  The WinLinux site is very busy.  If you can't get through, the third link is a press release with some details.

http://www.dslreports.com

In yesterday's issue we discussed DSL service.  Jr. skulker Ron Gibson submits DSL Reports as an additional resource about DSL.  That site contains news, editorials, discussions about ISP's who offer DSL (including user feedback), discussion forums, maps, and tutorials.

If you already have DSL or a cable modem, or want to see how your modem compares with these services, try the bandwidth speed test at:
http://www.computingcentral.com/topics/bandwidth/speedtest50.asp

This page calculates the actual transmission speed of your Internet connection by taking a timestamp, downloading a fixed amount of data, taking a second timestamp, and calculating the speed for that download.

http://www.pagoo.com

Pagoo used to be a free service, but they now charge after the first 30 days so it may not be worth keeping, but is fun to play with for the trial period.  You download the Pagoo Call Watcher program and keep it running all the time.  Pagoo assigns you an id number which would normally be your 10 digit phone number, and you build an outgoing voice greeting for your mailbox.  There are three ways to use the service:
(1) Tell people to call 800-PAGOO-44, punch in your Pagoo id when prompted, they will hear the greeting in your voice, and they will leave a voice message.
(2) Forward your calls to a special 800 number Pagoo will give you.  When people call your number and get forwarded, the Pagoo system will use ANI to recognize that this call was forwarded from your number and will immediately give them your outgoing greeting and record a message.
(3) Subscribe to the phone company feature "busy call forwarding" so that calls to your number when it is busy will be forwarded to the special 800 number.  When you are online and your modem is keeping the phone busy, people can call your number and leave a voice message.

The Pagoo Call Watcher program will notify you immediately when a message has been recorded and you play it back over your PC speakers.  The phone number of the person leaving the message will be shown, even if they block caller ID.

Pagoo might be useful and cost effective for someone who has only one phone line and wants to be able to receive messages while they are on the Internet. The problem is that Pagoo charges $3.95 per month if you pre-pay for a year, more if you subscribe only for six months.  You also need the "busy call forwarding" feature from your phone company which might cost around $3.50 per month.  They point out that this is cheaper than a second phone line.

By the way, the 30 day free trial is totally free because they will reimburse you for the phone company installation fee and a month of "busy call forwarding" if you cancel Pagoo.

http://www.cnn.com/US/9908/26/fringe/tattoo.update

If you didn't catch this on the news last month, be sure to see this hilarious video about a young man who ordered a tattoo that was supposed to include the phrase "everyone else does", but the tattoo artist misspelled this as "everyone elese does".  Click on the link above, then look under the picture for "Video" and choose an appropriate download speed, either 28K or 80K.

Today's joke was submitted by jr. skulker Uncle Brucie who wrote it himself:

A telephone man joined the Army.  As part of his basic training, he went out on the rifle range.  He fired 99 shots at the target, and missed the target with every shot! His Drill Instructor tried to find out why.

"What's the matter with you?" asked the DI.  "Why can't you hit the target? What were you in civilian life?"  "I was a telephone man," replied the new recruit, "and I don't know why I can't hit the target. Let me see..."

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This newsletter is copyrighted 1999 by The WebSkulker.  You may use any material in this issue for any reason provided that you attribute it to the WebSkulker Newsletter and include the URL to our web site: http://www.webskulker.com .