 The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group Editorial Ash Nallawalla ash@melbpc.org.au |
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In my last editorial I said, "Please participate in this user group, either
electronically in our newsgroups or in person at our SIG meetings." I should have added, "Please attend our
monthly meetings." If you have stopped going to the monthly meeting for other than personal reasons, please
send your feedback to meeting@melbpc.org.au. If you have never
been, then check it out on the first Wednesday of each month (except January).
A Lack of Backup
I used to back up my PC regularly, or so I thought. I seem to have one good crash every two years and usually
I look forward to it because reinstallation of Windows on a PC gets rid of a lot of orphan files and minor,
inexplicable problems. I have two physical drives: one contains the operating system and applications; the
other, my data. As sure as eggs, I crashed my application drive, which I don't back up.
At some stage in the past I forgot that my e-mail and address book (Microsoft Outlook) programs stored their
data on the application drive and I had forgotten to back them up manually for some months. I lost five
months' worth of e-mail and recent changes to my address book. My e-mail also contained unanswered messages
from PC Update readers and contributors, so if your contribution appears to have been ignored, please write
to me again. I now use a batch file to copy my Outlook data to the other drive once a day.
Over the next few months you should see a gradual change in this magazine both in appearance and in content.
If you wish to write for PC Update, please send an e-mail to
pcupdate@melbpc.org.au with a proposal. We do not pay our authors, but reviewers usually get to keep the
product.
PC Update Index
Many readers have commented on the lack of an annual index for PC Update. John Monsant of Clonbinane (country
Victoria) has supplied not one, but six versions! They are in plain text (ASCII), Microsoft Access, Lotus
Approach, dBASE for Windows, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft Works 2 formats. You can find them all through a
link from the PC Update home page: www.melbpc.org.au/pcupdate/. They cover the
period June 1996 through September 1999 but John says that he has been updating the index and will send me
the updated files soon. Thanks, John!
Employment
Over a year ago I wrote an article in this magazine about my 15-month period of underemployment and
unemployment (post age 45). It generated the highest number of comments we have ever seen at PC Update. We
started a small networking group consisting of people looking for work and some who were employed but were
looking for fresh ideas. Check out our e-mail list at
melbpcnet.listbot.com/ and send a message of introduction to the list after you have signed up. There is
no cost.
I'd like to convey some personal news that might interest some members who are interested in Internet-related
occupations. I changed employers in December and am now with an American E-commerce company (www.selectica.com/). It may sound hard to believe, but I found this job and
the previous one by "mistake". I was trying to sell myself as a marketing person but landed a pre-sales job
in both cases.
I had underestimated my knowledge of Web technology. Somehow, I had assumed that there wasn't much demand for
someone who can code HTML with a text editor. This turned out to be the job clincher in the recent interview,
even though I won't be coding entire sites by hand - the experience will be useful in my new role. I should
add that I had been communicating with the company and commenting on its Web site for the past 18 months. The
moral is that breaking into a Web-related career may be easier than you may imagine.
I telecommute from home through the company's Virtual Private Network (VPN) and work with colleagues in three
countries on international projects. I will have been in San Jose for a month when you read this and hope to
write a follow-up article about life as a road warrior.
Reprinted from the February 2000 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
