WACCI 137 Index - Home Page www.wacci.org.uk

Thanx & Stuff

The best-laid plans of mice and men aft gang agley. And you don't get much more embarrassingly agley than this

Ooops

Ok. This issue of WACCI was ready on time - give or take a few days. Plentiful (well, a few) articles from you lot. Fair Comment from Philip. No indication from Brian of how many pages the Aktiv ad would be, but this is par for the course. A few more evenings' work, and it'd be ready for the printers.
  At this point, my lovely 20in Mac monitor decided that ganging agley sounded fun and it ought to try it. Having asked Rob Scott to repair my various computers for free once too often, I thought I'd do the decent thing and pay for a repair at a local computer specialist. So off it goes to G Electronics in Bicester. A few days later, they phone to say they can't figure out the connection on the back, and could I drop the Mac in, too, so they could test it? Sure.
  Anyway, about a month later, they phoned to say it was far too agley for them to fix. So this issue of WACCI has been finished using a 14in screen borrowed from work. This might sound fairly good on the CPC scale of things, but Mac programs tend to have floating control windows, menus, and that sort of thing all over the place. It's like editing WACCI while looking through a letter-box, though with less chance of being arrested.
  Still, you might even be able to read the text, as I've even bought a new toner cartridge specially for the occasion. (Laser printers are wonderful. With inkjet printers, you have to buy a new cartridge every two weeks, and end up remortgaging your house to pay Mr Epson. But this is the first new cartridge I've bought for my laser printer in five years.)
  Another one of the nice things about CPCs is that they don't run Microsoft Word. Around 10% of the work for this issue has involved persuading Word to read Word documents, which you wouldn't have thought was too much to ask. For those of you with PCs - and I know it ill behoves a WACCI editor to be picky, but still - please, please, please don't send articles in Word format, or even Word-generated RTF, as Microsoft appear to have done their best to mangle that, too. Use 'text only' (i.e. ASCII). Or a piece of paper. Or cave paintings. Anything. Philip has started going on about carrier penguins, but he's a bit odd in the head.

The great inscrutable

Apologies to all and sundry, by the way, for not printing my phone number in the magazine. It's nothing personal - just that I'm generally too busy doing one thing or another (playing the church organ, editing various websites, drawing maps, restoring our old wooden narrowboat - even working, believe it or not) to spend hours on the phone to CPC users every night. Sorry. But do send me (or Philip) a letter.
  And I'll let you know if I ever manage to get Widor's Toccata licked.

www.wacci.org.uk

has the contents of this issue on it once again. Tell your friends.

Blast from the past

"He also worked on the design of an extranet broker connectivity trading system which was later implemented and has been running successfully as a core component of Schroders Salomon Smith Barney's business." Alan Scully, apparently. It's amazing what you can find on the Internet.

My brain hurts

You will have noticed there are lots of techy programming articles in this issue. That's because it's all anyone has sent me (except for the next part of 'SCART Connections', held over until next time). If you'd rather read something else - have you all really given up on Protext? I didn't think so either - then you know the routine. And once again, thank you to everyone who's contributed this time.
  The next one will be ready in two months. Even if I have to use PowerPage.

Dear committee

Please could you tell me how many pages you would like for the Aktiv ad, ideally before the magazine is meant to come out, not three weeks later. It kind of helps in laying out WACCI. Thank you very much.

Anyway, I'm off for a week's holiday on a boat in France. Hope you like the issue.
 Richard Fairhurst

WACCI 137 Index - Home Page www.wacci.org.uk