íEíCfÃçü       Initializing Media      electronic means. You will be        able to download each ANN disk from your local ADAM BBS, if        there is one. The disk will also be available on Compuserve and        Genie.                If your local SYSOP doesn't carry the disk, let us know; we'll        make arrangements with him or her.                Those wishing to continue receiving the ANN disk by mail should        advise Robert Bair (me) in writing by May 15, 1996 at the        latest. Forward $25. US along with your letter toFIRST DIR  Uªÿ BOOT       DIRECTORY  ØANNletterAA€ANNgleanA BlahsA    HDDS-VA   Int-FAQA  INT-mailA .IntronetA 0€KeeneA    6€ReadmeA   8readme01A :BLOCKS LEFT<dBLOCKS LEFT<de public domain software written by our        members. You can order the articles in EOS or TDOS format.        Whenever we can, we will also provide information from the        remaining ADAM distributors about various offers they are making        from time to time.                We would like you to remain a member of the ANN family, whether        you choose to receive your monthly disk electronically or by        mail. More than ever from here on in, we'll need your support to        keep thÌ1 ×73      From the ANN Treasurer,      Kendallville Indiana      April 3, 1996        I am currently the Treasurer of the ADAM News Network. l'd like        to remind you that there has been a change in the manner in        which ANN disks will be distributed. The change takes effect on        May 15, 1996.                At a meeting of ANN staff during last July's ADAMCON 007 in        Waterloo, we deciced to eliminate subscriptions for the monthly        disk and move to distribution by  cover mailing        costs for a year's worth of disks.                The ANN mailing staff now consists of Bart Lynch, Bob Slopsema,        Bob Blair, Ron Mitchell and Jerry Vrancks. I will be continuing        as Treasurer and subscription co-ordinator.                 As you know, the ANN monthly publications provide you with        original articles as well as the "best of the best" articles        gleaned from ADAM newsletters in the US and Canada. From time        to time we also distribut
e network going. Your letters and articles are essential        to the production of an interesting and worthwhile disk.                 Our distributors and the entire ANN staff are volunteers. They        are dedicated people interested in seeing to it that ADAM owners        continue to have a central place where information about the        ADAM computer can be obtained. Without your input and support,        the efforts of these individuals will be wasted.                Again, if you wish to nitor.Check to ensure that power management functions in computers and printers are turned on and set for the most efficient operation compatible with office procedures.  Potential savings: up to 50% of energy consumption. If you are purchasing new computers, ask for the most efficient model that will meet your needs.  Computers that are Energy Star rated are available from most suppliers.Turn off printers and plotters at night unless they are needed for after-hours operation. Contrary to some opinions,Ì1 ×67      GLEANINGS by Dave SandsGleanings is written for subscribers to the ADAM News Network and ADAM newsletter editors. It is a column of information, rumour, opinion and quotation drawn from exchange newsletters, Fidonet correspondence, computer magazines and miscellaneous sources. All opinions not within quotes ("")  are those of the author and are not necessarily those of the ADAM News Network. Interjections within quoted material are in square brackets: [ ].  Newsletter editors may edit, deletentriguing factoids--average age of Microsoft employees is 31.2 years, for example--)often funny, occasionally thought- provoking and certainly different graphically than your average novel. Some may find the level of emotion and action too contemporary, but it made the Gleaner wish he was young enought to take part in it all--hell, I'd like to be 31.2 again.Ah, the trials of those who serve us.  In the 'alt.folklore.urban' or AFU newsgroup on the Internet, two writers share stories about the hopeless userm.    Switch off your computer if you will be away from it two hours or more.  Even if you have a screen saver, switch off your monitor if you will be away from it for more than an hour. In the case of computers that must be left on after hours, turn off the monitor. This will not affect the program. Potential savings: between 30 and 60% of total computer energy consumption.Use a screen saver program that darkens or blanks out the screen. Potential savings: 10 to 15% of the energy needed to power the mocontinue receiving the ANN disk by mail,        send $25. US to:                Robert Bair,        6552N 400E        Kendallville, Indiana,         USA        46755        Make cheques payable to the ADAM News Network.                        Yours truly,                        Robert Bair,        Treasurer,        ANN         :::::::::::>::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::>::::::::::::::: turning laser printers on and off does not shorten their lives, as long as they're off for at least one hour.Edit documents on screen and preview them before printing.Network computers to share printers and modem. Use electronic mail and fax modems. From 'Keeping Current for Business', BC Hydro, Fall/Winter 95.Recommended Reading (SP!) Microserfs, by Douglas Coupland (HarperCollins 1995) is a first-person narration novel of life as a code-writer (programmer) in the modern software industry. Full of i, fold, spindle and mutilate Gleanings as necessary to make it fit.    Now your power company wants you to conserve the stuff. Well, I remember quantity discounts and grants and other deals to use more, but now, electric companies have discovered economy.  So,since you shouldn't be forgotten, here are some power saving tips:    Shut off all computers and monitors at night and on weekends, except equipment needed for after-hours operation. Potential savings: $44 a year for each computer and monitor systes who phone them:"Steven Tuttle (NEW137B@prodigy.com) wrote: >or I write in our laptop directions: >"Type call Filename, hit return to >access file' They type 'c-a-l-l >f-i-l-e-n-a-m-e' and hit >return...nuttin happens.Personally, my favourite of all these stories is the one about the Canadian user who calls an American support line. The techie keeps telling the befuddled Canuck to hit Control-A, and the Canuck gets more and more frustrated. 'Look, I hit "Control" eh?  And it still doesn't work, eh? Likalthough nothing for ADAM owners on this echo to excited about, I suspect. The company has apparently never heard of the Coleco ADAM, or assumes nobody else has, and hence the name will not cause confusion. But, of course now you can impress your friends that $24,000,000 was invested in ADAM Software in 1995 alone!"And I can't help notice that this happened on Dec 12, just before the first item about Microsoft. Anybody want to speculate on what was happening with the stars, or the earth's magnetism, or maision Network by buying half their stock. Since Channel 3 is an NBC affiliate, the business reporter explained they would then change to Channel 3.1" I checked the date, it was Dec. 13; should have been April 1.And Kevin Hinshaw did some political science on his piano and came up with this ditty, also a post on rec.humor.funny.Sing it to the tune of 'The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire)."Sex nuts posting on an open wire Sick thoughts dripping from their prose Dirty pictures showing rtBASIC 1.X, and presently finishing ADAMServe, a program that will allow ADAM owners to use an 'IBM' or MS-DOS computer as a 'server' or support computer.  One of the links on Drushel's 'Official ADAMCon VIII Home Page' is to the ColecoVision Homepage.  ColecoVision is a whole separate enthusiasm, and its adherents have their own view of history:. "For many fans, the ColecoVision represents the best of the early home video game systems because of its selection of games, the actual gameplay, and the accurmany times, many ways 'Let us censor for you'And humor is where you find it. Gil Parrish found it in the Wall Street Journal, not the first place you'd think of looking. Here's his message on the ADAM Echo:"On December 12, the following 'tombstone' ad appeared in the Wall Street Journal:      2,000,000 Shares      A.D.A.M. Software, Inc.      Common Stock      -------      Price $12 Per Share      -------...and it went on to list the participating brokerage firms. I find this amusing, e, nothing happens, eh?Barbara "NOW WHAT AM I BLOODY WELL SUPPOSED TO DO, EH? Hamel.And the inter-name quote in the ladies name is some kind of new AFU tradition--they all seem to do it.Casting a wider Net: it's getting harder to find ADAM-specific items for the column. So we go farther afield occassionaly. Such as for these items:From the newsgroup rec.humor.funny:Dan Zerkle swore this was true: "Today, Sacramento's Channel 3 News reported that Microsoft is considering a merger with the NBC Televybe what they were smoking on Wall Street?A little more relevant and still online: there are at least two World Wide Web sites for the ADAM. I know I don't have to explain the WWW to anyone reading this column, or for that matter to anyone else in the world--the people at Kay-Tel couldn't have sold anything better than the hype has done for the Internet.So, use your browser and go tohttp://junior.apk.net/~drushel/adamcon8.htmlThis page is the work of Richard Drushel, well known for his work with Smayoung girls for hire And men dressed up in women's clothes Everybody knows That mountains of pornography Have been appearing left and right Tiny tots with their eyes all a-glow May find the ones with sheep tonightWe know that Satan's on the Net Along with all the creeps and perverts he could get Enticing every child to try his luck At finding pictures of people who fundamentally undermine the morals of societyAnd so I'm offering this simple phrase To kids from one to ninety-two: Although it's been said acy in translating video games from the arcade.  The ColecoVision system's innovativeness was focusing on playing other sytems' cartridges (it had an Atari 2600 adapter and an Intellivision adapter on the way) adding on new hardware for more and newer games ( i.e. driving wheel for Turbo and the roller controller for Omega Race and Centipede), and giving the playing public the Super Action Controllers, the best joysticks ever made until gamepads.Its downfall, like Mattell's Intellivision and Atari's 2600,ions of the world, and the Gleaner is busy shifting with it; madly trying to catch up, more precisely. :We in the ADAM niche of the cosmos are keeping in touch via networks, not paper, by email, netmail, forums and usenet groups. It ain't long ago that ADAM newsletters bemoaned the fact that ADAM owners didn't use their modems, didn't call ADAM bulletin boards, didn't care about what we today call networking.  Today, it's pretty obvious that if you are an engaged ADAMite, you reach out and touch someone wwever, it was caught up the the tidal wave of destruction, only to be spared temporarily by its popular Cabbage Patch Kids (and even screwing that up as well :()."So there you have it: the ADAM as Homewrecker. It's one more interesting take on the the sorry story of the life and death of the former Connecticut Leather Company.And Dale Wick, one of the organizers of ADAMCon VII, has an ADAM WWW page athttp://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/u/dmwick/adam.html Wick is also the list-admin (don't worry, all of this jan the conversation on the Compuserve ADAM Forums, and here's some of the news:Jim Notini says he's back. (NIAD is not back, despite what you may have read here many years ago). Notini told Ron Mitchell "Thanks, Ron, and it is good to be back. I did miss the ADAM world when I was on my little hiatus. I will not go into details why I spent so long away from the community, but let's just say I was REALLY AGGRAVATED by some events that transpired. Anyway, the past is the past, and the present and future is whop of the keyboard; B: lots of tiny pictures and a moving arrow; C: a choose-one-from-Column-A system; D: all of the above. Right again.  (Another CP/M fanatic newsletter is The Z-Letter.) The Gleaner does not know whether it is possible to access the Net via a CP/M program, but CP/M is on the net at;Http://www.psyber.com/~tcjalthough some of its ADAM references are now out of date, it's still a place to start if you want to keep in touch with your roots.There's a major shift in the form of communicat was sealed in the video game crash of 1984 because of its mismanagement.  Coleco lost focus from trying to make a great video game system (via the new Super Game Module) to entering a young PC market with the buggy ADAM Computer.As Joe Huber says in the ColecoVision FAQ, if Coleco would have released the Super Game Module, it would have been the system of choice for the 1980's and would've kept the home video game market centrally located in the United States (not necessarily production, but control). Hoith your fingers--on your keyboard. The newsletters are just about history; Gleanings used to be entirely quotations from now long gone nl's.  Today, I pick out quotes from the screen, string together bits of files, read the words of the ADAM enthusiasts who get together on the ADAM Echo, the Compuserve ADAM Forums, the Usenet groups and the result is distributed on disks and printed on your screens. No nl prints Gleanings any more, and I'm not surprised.Okay, thanks to Ron Mitchell, the Gleaner can strairgon will soon be part of everyday conversation) of the coladam- list@calum.csclub.uwaterloo.caand you get on that list by sending an email to coladam- admin@csclub.uwaterloo.ca and asking Dale to subscribe you to the list. When the Gleaner gets successfully subscribed, he'll bring you great moments from the coladam-list.Further Nettings: For CP/M and TDOS fans, The Computer Journal is one of the few mags still devoted to an operating system that doesn't use: A: a set of Roman Numbered keys across the tat counts."And the same Notini tells Bart Lynch;"As far as if I still own an ADAM -YOU BETTER BELIEVE IT! I have my two systems with tons of little goodies still and I will never part with them!As far as articles, anything that I write will be posted on here [Compuserve] for anyone to use as they will. Thanks for the offer on the ANN disks, I appreciate it, but it is not necessary at the time.  However, will be subscribing to ANN in the near future."The articles Jim mentions will include an ADAM sof:::::::::::>::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::(::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::(::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::(:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::ks, CIS ADAMania, 11/05/95.And now to our testimonial of the month club. From the same source, Compuserve's ADAMania forum, this observation by Gregg Noblett to the forum sysop, Rob Freidman:"...I've got Windows v3.1 & OS/2 Warp on my PC at work, and Windows V3.1 on the [IBM] Thinkpad and it seems all I DO on them is fix configuration problems, chew up hard disk space and try to figure out how to do what I want with them.  Conversly, I never had these problems on my ADAM!...I've used up [about] 430 megidents of Canada's west coast where liquid precipitation falling from the sky is sufficient to convince large segments of the population that life is coming to an end.While most men will argue that the term 'blahs' applies only to symptoms exhibited by women, there is no positive proof that this is in fact the case. The truth is that men have displayed just about as much ill-temper, cynicism, and pessemistic behaviour (the chief symptoms of 'blahs') as their female counterparts. Men who do not display thene what libraries, real book libraries, could do with an extra $3 billion? Just displaying my bias, I guess.Last words dept.     :::::::::::>::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::>::::::::::::::::::::::::::>::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::¿:::::::::::::::tware list from his extensive collection, he said."To date I must have over or near 300 disks of PD 'wares (the entire NIAD collection, etc.) and once I have it all organized the way I want, I'll make it available for everyone.  Spending a lot of time testing and getting proper documentation available. If I make it to the next ADAMCon, I'm gonna bring an IBM portable that NIAD used to make all its disks copies (takes about 20 seconds per disk) so that ADAMites can run off copies at will." (Notini to VrancÌ1 ×74Is That All that's Troubling You Buckie?(An Ode to the Winter Blahs)by Ron MitchellWinter 'blahs' is a condition known to occur in various parts of North America. It is most often manifested simultaneously with the occurence of low temperature, freezing or frozen precipitation, and defficient sunshine levels all of which frequently combine over the eastern half of the North American continent during January, February and March.  A similar set of climactic conditions has been known to affect res of a 544 meg hardrive at work and have about 100K of user data (if that). The 40 meg hardrive I have connected to my ADAM is [about] 75% freespace & I've got more games, programs and databases than you can shake a stick at on it!"Factoids From Hell: From the December 95 Wired magazine, one of the few good new magazines spawned by the Web and Internet: "Video rental is a US$11 billion business, but $3 billion of that is in late fees - Andy Grove" I don't know where Grove got his numbers, but can you imagise behaviours are more than likely keeping it all inside and will die off from some stress related ailment before the age of 35 thus lessening the incidence of the 'blahs' in males and distorting the statistical picture.Since women live, with or without the 'blahs', longer than men, it is probably safe to conclude that their tendency to externalize feelings reportedly caused by the 'blahs' is probably a good thing... not for the men who must live with them and deal with these expressed feelings, but more  Among those reported as totally unsuccessful in addressing the problem are:1) Increasing alcohol intake.2) Murder for sport.3) Putting the kids or significant others up for adoption or sale, or    both.4) Loud swearing in front of the family.5) Yelling "I can't take it any more." with a bullhorn from the front   step of the family home.6) Spending money.7) Framing your significant other for sexual harassment.8) Whining to the boss.9) Blaming government. 10)Sobbing uncontrollably in ths made without cash. It used to be fur coats, but    that is no longer politically correct. Current purchases involved    some more acceptable item, usually about as expensive; cars,   jewellry, uncut diamonds. Shoplifting may be involved.6) Screaming and other forms of socially unacceptable activity.7) Aggressive behaviour involving flying plates usually aimed at    spouses and children.8) Long periods of dead silence.9) Talk of getting away, particularly when the credit cards have been    maxyoung girls for hire And men dressed up in women's clothes Everybody knows That mountains of pornography Have been appearing left and right Tiny tots with their eyes all a-glow May find the ones with sheep tonightWe know that Satan's on the Net Along with all the creeps and perverts he could get Enticing every child to try his luck At finding pictures of people who fundamentally undermine the morals of societyAnd so I'm offering this simple phrase To kids from one to ninety-two: Although it's been said nths of each year, between Christmas and March Break indicates that there are also significant feelings of guilt generated by the syndrome, both in the sufferer and in those who must do business with the sufferer. In short, everyone involved tends to loose it and jump off the deep end in one manner or another.         Successful strategies for coping with problems generated by the winter 'blahs' have not been clearly identified. The subjective nature of the condition tends to make easy fixes unsuitable.probably for the women who express them.  Gender bias aside, the 'blahs' represents a serious phenomenon in our society wherever it occurs. It may be easily recognized by one or more of the following behaviours.1) Vehement denial when confronted about bad temper.2) A glassy, straight-ahead stare when assistance or empathy is offered.3) Talk about travel to Florida, Hawaii or California.4) Frequent accusations that significant others are spoiling things by   being in a bad mood.5) Major purchasee closet.These coping stragegies have proven less than effective in most cases. It is difficult to know what else to propose. Jogging into oncoming traffic on the local freeway, swimming nude in shark invested waters, and thinking of nice things to say about the person you hate the most have proven equally couter-productive.In all, on the subject of the winter 'blahs', there are more questions than answers.Submitted respectfully for your consideration:ed out by too much Christmas spending.10)A new, less favourable, and more realistic assessment of jokes told   by the significant other in an attempt to improve the situation.     In addition to the foregoing red flags, all highly indicative of the onset of winter 'blahs', there is a marked tendency on the part of the sufferer to place blame for the condition on just about anything but the emptiness of his or her own cookie jar. The dramatic increase in psychotherapy referrals during the first three mo