April 2007, Week 4 -- Ping Me Again

   You can leave a spoken message for one person or a hundred using a free service called Pinger, available from Pinger.com.

   For instance, you might want to tell everyone in a group that “We’re meeting at 7 this evening instead of 6.” Most people don’t check their email all that often but many people – especially young people – often check for messages on their cell phone. Pinger is a lot faster and more personal than sending their phones a text message.

   But how does Pinger.com know the names and numbers of your friends and associates? Well, you get an account when you sign up at Pinger and you can import all your  contacts -- from sources such as Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail, and Outlook Express, to that account (they are not available to anyone else), or manually type them in.

   We called our special Pinger account number from a $30 “Virgin Mobile” cell phone (the cheapest one we could find) and spoke the name of a contact. The voice recognition software at the other end had no trouble locating that person’s number and sending a message to that cell phone. We also tried sending a message to an entire group: All we had to do was define the group first, at the Pinger website, by selecting names from our private list. Then we called our Pinger number, spoke the group name, and off went our message.

   Finally, we tried sending a Pinger message to someone without a cell phone. They received an email message asking them to call “858-2pinger” and enter a special access code. They then heard our message.

   The Pinger service is free for now and a spokesman for the company said it will likely remain so for most users. Heavy users will have to pay a fee but no pricing has been set yet. (“Ping,” by the way, is an old Internet programmer’s utility and stands for “Packet Internet Groper.” It is used to test a computer’s connection to the Internet. The author of the utility named it that because of the “ping” heard in searches made by underwater sonar devices.)

FrontPage Moves to the Back Page

   Microsoft has dropped “FrontPage,” its program for creating web sites, and replaced it with “Expression Web.” The look and feel is so much like the old FrontPage that you wouldn’t notice the change unless somebody poked you in the belly with a sharp stick, or something like that. As Yogi Berra once observed: ”It’s like déjà vu all over again.” The  reward for changing to the new Expression Web is more features.

   Buying Expression Web is $99 as an upgrade to FrontPage; Expression Studio, a four-program suite combining tons of professional design tools is $600.

   Microsoft offers lots of tutorials and “webcasts” for the new programs and you can find these at Microsoft.com/events.

The Ergonomics of it All

   Joy has been working with an eye aid from ExerciseYourEyes.com  the past few days. It’s $200 and a lot of people think this would be of questionable value since they don’t think it works; we don’t know yet if it will work or not. Many people think eye exercises have no effect on changing near or far-sightedness but a few people think they do have an effect (Aldous Huxley was a believer, for example).

   Be that as it may, most people who use a computer or terminal for any extended period worry about their vision and their comfort. Bob thinks the most important consideration is the chair. Have a comfortable chair and lean back in it once in a while. The standard advice for chair height is that when you are looking down at the keyboard it should be about waist height. Most office chairs have height adjustment; if yours doesn’t, use cushions.

   In the matter of vision, the most frequent advice we’ve read over many years is to change focus as you work. We have an outside view and Bob looks from the screen to the outside frequently without thinking about it. Joy does not and this may account in part for her vision problem. Changing focus in an office cubicle is more difficult but you can still look up from the screen to a bulletin board or the part of the wall where you posted the cartoons.

Internut

   Marketocracy.com  lets you create a portfolio of stocks and trade and track them. Joy has read the two books Bob wrote on investment software and advice but didn’t really get into it until she bought some virtual stocks through this web site. (She’s up 5 percent in the first week.) You can invest up to $1 million of virtual money. If you create a dud portfolio, dump it and start over. (Some brokerage firms also allow you to create test portfolios and track them, by the way.)

That's Entertainment

    All right, we're hooked. It's called "Peggle," $20 for Windows, from PopCap.com. At first we thought it was boring. Then after a while we thought it might have some interest. Now we're thinking of checking ourselves into gamer rehab. Boy, is this thing addictive.

    The game is a series of short shooting puzzles, kind of a cross between the classic "Little Brick Out" and pinball. Each level takes five minutes or less. This suits the game tolerance of a most people. We've noticed the popularity of adventure games and shoot-em-ups tends to attract people who like long play time. The short timers like Solitaire. This is in between.

NOTE: Readers can search several years of On Computers columns at our web site: OnComp.com. We can be contacted by email at JoyDee@OnComp.com and BobSchwab@gmail.com.