--------------- FIDO MESSAGE AREA==> TOPIC: 238 VISUAL DISABILIT Ref: EAD00005Date: 06/08/97 From: ANN SABONAITIS Time: 03:39pm \/To: ANNE PAGE (Read 1 times) Subj: Hi hi anne. can you print out 5 sheets of my name and address lbels? i'm almost out. you hve my new address in your computer. if youost it email me at ann`chamber.worcester.ma.us for it--i wont put it here. not safe. --- TriToss (tm) Professional 11.0 - #66 * Origin: Keystone BBS * Shrewsbury, MA * 508-753-3767 (1:322/743.0) --------------- FIDO MESSAGE AREA==> TOPIC: 238 VISUAL DISABILIT Ref: EAD00006Date: 06/08/97 From: TOM PERRY Time: 09:54am \/To: ERIC HINDS (Read 1 times) Subj: Re: Anyone receiving this Yo Eric: -=> Quoting Eric Hinds to Tom Perry <=- LB> If you are reading this message please reply. (Thanks). EH> Yup Tom, I read you in Ottawa Ontario. EH> You're doing something right lad. But it's the zillion things I'm not doing right that that drive everyone batty. Did I say I was from Peterborough and used to live in Basseville in 1962? My sister Jo-Ann Moody lives there now. Tom. ... DOS never says "EXCELLENT command or filename"... ___ Blue Wave/DOS v2.30 [NR] --- Platinum Xpress/Win/Wildcat5! [TESTDRIVE] v2.0TD * Origin: Joe's Computer (ZyXEL Elite 2864) -=128K,V120,V34=- (1:253/100) --------------- FIDO MESSAGE AREA==> TOPIC: 238 VISUAL DISABILIT Ref: EAD00007Date: 06/08/97 From: VICKIE CROUCH Time: 07:13pm \/To: ROBIN BROWN (Read 1 times) Subj: Re: Apologies for reply! Dear Robin: Must admit I was shocked to learn you are a male. Robin is predominantly a female name here in the US. However, I decided to give it a shot and reply. Was glad to hear from you and take the tour by proxy of Scotland! I got into my field in 1974 after my first marriage ended, deciding if I wanted to eat I should work, to paraphrase a line from a famous old book. I have a great love of medicine and it seems to run in the genes of my family, as I my grandmother was a nurse as well as my cousin and I have yet another cousin who is a medical transcriptionist too. Yes, I like to think I am a caring person, some would even say a little too nuturing, and perhaps that is what attracted to me this profession. I do love it though and it has made me an excellent living--well, at least enough to survive and raise some children. I couldn't help but notice you were born under the astrological sign of cancer,as was I--so, you must have a few of the same likes and dislikes as I do. Music for example, I love all types of music also. I am fascinated by the life of Beethoven and yet I really love country music, especially way back when it was first evolving. I also have a "Zydeco" tape or 2 in my collection, which is a type of Cajun music from Louisiana here in the US. Life in Colorado is very nice, as the weather is never too hot or too cold for long. We have a saying, "If you don't like the weather, wait for a minute and it will change"! This is true! We have lots of beautiful hiking trails and mountains to explore. I would like a little more greenery, as the landscape oftentimes looks like the prairies the early settlers crossed in covered wagons; I am not sure what the average amt. of moisture we get is, but I don't think its much. I have read a "crab" is the happiest in a cool climate near a body of water--which I am! I work for a group of 7 ear, nose and throat specialists. There are 3 of us in my department. I have been the transcription supervisor there for 13 years. As well as typing clinic notes and correspondence, we do a lot of executive secretarrial work for our physicians, such as typing manuscripts, completing society applications, maintaining article indexes and so forth. I am in fairly good health, except my vision which is somewhat worse than it used to be, but still not too bad I guess. I am very happy with my life in general and look forward to the future. I read a lot, anything from the life of Mark Twain, a great American humorist, to Rosamund Pilcher, an English writer, to Robin Cook a medical nystery author. I have a few select TV programs I like, but to tell you the truth I would rather watch Public Broadcasting or one of the cable shows. I much prefer to be learning something while I am viewing TV than simply entertained. For recreations, I have an great group of friends who also have different levels of vision and have similar interests. We go to the Rockies baseball games in Denver, barbeque at their house, hike nature trails together,or travel to Washington DC to lobby on blindness issues. I have a full life. Well, enough about me. Good talking to you. Write anytime. TTYL --- Maximus 3.01 * Origin: Colorado Springs Central Net (719)550-9599 (1:128/187) --------------- FIDO MESSAGE AREA==> TOPIC: 238 VISUAL DISABILIT Ref: EAD00008Date: 06/08/97 From: VICKIE CROUCH Time: 07:40pm \/To: JIM ALDRICH (Read 1 times) Subj: Blindness, NFB Hi Jim: Sorry about your loss and the work you are doing to get matters taken care of. Just fun to get a little bit of mail when you view your BBSs, isn't it. I don't believe I asked you where you are writing from. I, of course, am in Colorado and we have had so much rain lately it appears to be England or Seattle, WA! I am a medical transcriptionist, mother of 2. For recreation my friends and I hike and listen to all type of music, barbeque, and read. I am stil perfecting my braille skills by touch. When I went to the Deaf and Blind school here in Colorado Springs in the second grade, I should have paid more attention to the braille then I did playing, but that's a child for you! I have some vision, so don't work as hard at it as I should I guess, but I have promised myself I will. That's all for now. Good to chat w/you. :) --- Maximus 3.01 * Origin: Colorado Springs Central Net (719)550-9599 (1:128/187) --------------- FIDO MESSAGE AREA==> TOPIC: 238 VISUAL DISABILIT Ref: EAD00009Date: 06/08/97 From: WILLIAM WILSON Time: 05:12pm \/To: ALL BLINKS AND WINKS! (Read 1 times) Subj: Electronic Publishing Article Forwarded from VICUG-L@MAELSTROM.STJOHNS.EDU from the New York Times June 6, 1997 Digital Nation By JASON CHERVOKAS & TOM WATSON Bio Electronic Publishing Alters Very Definition of the Book W hen Amazon.Com -- the avatar of online booksellers -- set up display spaces at the American Booksellers Association Book Expo show in Chicago last week, many folks in the book business took it as the harbinger of a new era. The Chicago show is traditionally where publishers show their wares for sellers, not the other way around. But in the button-down world of the book business, times have changed dramatically. Once frightened by the prospect of hawking books online, publishers are now embracing the Net for retail and marketing purposes. Offering a book online was once thought to threaten traditional relationships with retailers and to lead to mass piracy. Now publishers have even begun offering fans advance chapters of blockbuster titles over the Net. But away from the headline-grabbing clash of titans -- Amazon.Com vs. Barnes & Noble -- a quieter but more radical brand of Internet booksellers has gone to work. Blurring the lines between publisher, packager and seller, these companies offer digitized versions of publications --everything from science fiction novels to textbooks to cook books -- in plain text, portable document format or hypertext markup language (HTML). Some of the books are licensed from big publishers. Some are published electronically for the first time. Some of these electronic publishers are making available work that has long been unavailable. And, perhaps most radically, some of these new electronic publishers and booksellers are offering consumers the opportunity to create their own books -- picking several chapters from one cookbook, linking them to several chapters from another cookbook from an entirely different publisher, and paying piecemeal for a downloadable, custom-created cookbook that need be printed only if the consumer chooses to print it. It's the kind of publication-on-demand system that the book industry has been mulling for years, one in which publishers either shift the cost of printing to the consumer or only pay for printing at the time of sale. And it's a trend that could change the nature of how we define the word "book." Either way, it certainly gives new meaning to the phrase "out of print." "We are literally building a new distribution channel from scratch," said Glenn Hauman, founder of BiblioBytes, a New Jersey-based company that has been offering downloadable books since 1993. Where Hauman has been most successful has been in niches that cross over most closely with the demographic profile of the Internet surfer -- science fiction in particular. In fact, BiblioBytes recently brought back into availability The Glass Teat, the sci-fi cult writer Harlan Ellison's musings on the impact of television on American culture. Hauman's electronic reprint found an audience in part because there is an active Usenet fan discussion group devoted to Ellison's work. "Every lifestyle, every niche with a Usenet group seems like it has a corresponding book," said Steve Potash, president of OverDrive Systems Inc., a Cleveland-based company that packages electronic books and offers electronic editions of books for sale through its six-month-old BookAisle site. The fragmenting, and increasing niche focus, of the publishing industry has actually played into the hands of the electronic book packager/publisher/seller, Potash said. While the Net can be a useful marketing tool to sell Tom Clancy or John Grisham titles, it can also be a viable distribution platform for making niche books profitable by reducing the cost of production and promotion. BookAisle offers titles from big publishers like McGraw Hill, but it also allows small publishers and authors the ability to sell books in formats like Adobe Acrobat's PDF or even the Web's HTML. "If someone wants to put out a book title they can upload an HTML edition at almost no cost," Potash said. But both Potash and Hauman -- and other pioneers like J. Neil Schulman, who sells his own books and other titles through his Pulpless.Com -- realize they're still in the extremely early days of the book's radical electronic evolution. And there are major hurdles to be leaped if printless text publishing is going to move from protozoan to pachyderm. Take Hauman's BiblioBytes for example. Business has been a struggle for his small, homegrown, undercapitalized company. Hauman negotiates a straight, old-fashioned rights acquisition for an electronic edition of the book. The rights acquisition is complicated by the fact that often no one owns the kind of rights Hauman is interested in acquiring. Then either he or the publisher has to do the equivalent of a prepress design job from a hard copy of the book or from computer desktop publishing files. For books that only exist in print form, scanning and optical character recognition software help, but books still need to be proofread and packaged for one or more electronic system. It sounds like reinventing the wheel, and in some ways it is. But by shifting production, publication, distribution and marketing of books online, these pioneers are shifting the economics of the book business. With lower costs, the number of books that authors or publishers need to sell to make money is relatively low. Further, paperless publishers can offer services to publishers, authors and customers that traditional publishers and retailers can't provide. For example, BiblioBytes will soon offer authors password-protected access to online royalty statements calculated in real time every time BiblioBytes sells a book. OverDrive will soon offer an interactive version of John Wiley & Sons' CPA examination training books. Accountants in training will be able to quiz themselves and get answers in real time. OverDrive is also already offering "componentized" books. Right now, educators can buy parts of different books and educational resources when they're assembling course materials from certain publishers. OverDrive's Potash looks forward to a day when consumers can assemble their own books, buying component parts from different books from various publishers at the price of a few dollars per component. If all this sounds like a radical reinvention of the book and a grave challenge to the old-fashioned publishing house model, it is. And while computer hobbyists have shown a willingness to buy titles and download them from the Net, it remains to be seen whether a broad consumer base will want to download books and print them. On the other hand, a decade ago few publishers would have been willing to admit that any kind of electronic online publishing and sales would ever become a mainstay of the book business. "I had these exact same conversations 10 years ago with legal publishers," Potash laughs. " 'If I put that book on diskette it will affect my print sales,' they said. Now they have the books in any form they can. They just see it as additional bottom-line revenue." Jason Chervokas & Tom Watson at nation@nytimes.com welcome your comments and suggestions. ______________________________________________________________ Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company ... Have you smooched your pooch today? --- Via Silver Xpress V4.3 BT006 * Origin: BlinkLink - Perceiving is believing! 412-766-0732 (1:129/89) --------------- FIDO MESSAGE AREA==> TOPIC: 238 VISUAL DISABILIT Ref: EAE00000Date: 06/08/97 From: WALTER SIREN Time: 04:28pm \/To: ISAAC OBIE (Read 1 times) Subj: sears sends braille bills In a message Isaac Obie typed to All IO> Call 1-800733-0815 to request your sears bill in braille! Since discover card is a part of sears, does that apply to discover card bills also? Walter --- msged 2.07 * Origin: The Turning Point -- New Orleans, LA (1:396/1.9) --------------- FIDO MESSAGE AREA==> TOPIC: 238 VISUAL DISABILIT Ref: EAE00001Date: 06/08/97 From: WALTER SIREN Time: 04:30pm \/To: EDUARDO GOMEZ (Read 1 times) Subj: Re: skyclub list EG> Walter: This is the welcome message I received from Skyclub. I think EG> the command to subscribe is the obvious. Hope this helps EG> "If you ever want to remove yourself from this mailing list, EG> send the following command in email to EG> : EG> unsubscribe EG> Or you can send mail to with the following EG> command in the body of your email message: EG> unsubscribe skyclub-l Eduardo_Gomez@vision.tattle.net That does it fine. Walter --- msged 2.07 * Origin: The Turning Point -- New Orleans, LA (1:396/1.9) --------------- FIDO MESSAGE AREA==> TOPIC: 238 VISUAL DISABILIT Ref: EAE00002Date: 06/08/97 From: WALTER SIREN Time: 04:47pm \/To: ANNE PAGE (Read 1 times) Subj: information Ann, do you still live in Houston? If so, could you call a cab company, and get an idea of how much they charge from the bus station to the Adams Mark hotel 2900 Briarpark Dr. I already found the cab fare from the airport, but my syster-in-law is coming there for our convention in July, but she is coming on the bus. So I told her I would try to find out the cab fare for her. I would appreciate it if you could do this for me. Walter --- msged 2.07 * Origin: The Turning Point -- New Orleans, LA (1:396/1.9) --------------- FIDO MESSAGE AREA==> TOPIC: 238 VISUAL DISABILIT Ref: EAF00000Date: 06/10/97 From: ANNE PAGE Time: 10:13pm \/To: WALTER SIREN (Read 1 times) Subj: information Yes, Walter, I live in Houston. I called Yellow Cab Company which is the largest one serving Houston. There are others, of course, but I think the rates are uniform under city ordinance. If you need me to check further, I will. The lady at the rate quote desk told me that to take someone from the bus station downtown to the Adams Mark would be in the range of not less than $22,80 to not more than $25.80. If that is not in line with what you were quoted from the airport to the hotel but seems to be higher, I think the difference would be because the roads from the airports are high speed like freeways and then it is freeway or toll road the rest of the way, but the bus station is located in the south end of downtown Houston and the cab has to traverse city streets and wait at traffic lights and pause at stop signs for the first ten minutes or so of travel time before getting on a freeway. If, on the other hand, this quote is lower than what you got for yourself, the difference would be because mileage-wise the hotel is probably closer to the bus station than to the airports once the cab gets on the freeway. If you need it, Yellow Cab's phone number is 713-236-1111. Anne Page * SLMR 2.1a * Everyone has a photographic memory; some just lack film! --- QScan/PCB v1.16b / 01-0075 * Origin: PSL Online Houston, TX 713-442-6704 @psl-online.com (1:106/6256) --------------- FIDO MESSAGE AREA==> TOPIC: 238 VISUAL DISABILIT Ref: EAF00001Date: 06/11/97 From: ANNE PAGE Time: 01:32am \/To: WALTER SIREN (Read 1 times) Subj: information Okay, Walter, turn about's fair play. Now I want information. If you or someone else here can provide it, perhaps I can meet some of you in person. First, what are the dates of the convention at the Adams Mark here in Houston and, second, are there any social events to which non-participating guests of particpants can go. Alternatively, which would be better for me with my razy schedule, are there designated free time hours during which participants can go out with friends or go sight-seeing and not miss convention activities? I do not live or work or play bridge near the Adams Mark but I do go there several times a year for bridge tournaments at that hotel, so I am very familiar with it. From my house via a route that covers four different freeways and toll roads, it is a drive of about forty minutes. On the other hand, it is only fifteen minutes from my bridge club to the hotel. On weekdays, I get off ork at 4:30 p.m. and, if I were to schedule an evening bridge game, it starts at 7:00 p.m. except for Friday nights which are at 8:00 p.m. Or, on the eekend, even if I were to play a double session at the club, I would have a break on Saturday from about 5:00 p.m. until 7:15 p.m. when I would need to be back there for a 7:30 p.m. game. If there isn't enough time free of convention activities to warrant my skipping a bridge game one evening or weekend afternoon to get together with some of you at the hotel, what are the chances of a reasonably long supper break? There is a large shopping center "next door" to the hotel. I put "next door" in quotes because the way the building is constructed that backs up to the hotel parking lot, it is not possible to walk straight across. One must go to the end of the hotel parking lot and around the end of that building in order to get into the shopping center proper which is composed of numerous buildings of varying sizes. In addition to the stores, there are tons of restaurants. It is not the kind of shopping center with a big department store as an anchor. These are small specialty type stores and entertainment facilities. I frequently eat at the Chinese nd Mexican restaurants during the tournaments and have also tried Chili's (general fare), the soup and salad place, and one or two others over the years. So we wouldn't be limited to the expensive diningroom in the hotel and wouldn't ave to drive anywhere if the group is willing to take a ten minute hike each way. Let me know if there are any possibilities in this regard. I know she hasn't been posting much lately, but Laura Mulraney is reading the echo pretty regularly I think. Anyway, as you and some of the others may know, she is my saleslady for Avon products and also does some transcribing work or me from time to time on articles for my canine newspaper that I get from club newsletters which don't lend themselves well to scanning. So she and I talk on the phone fairly often, and I recall she told me last week that she couldn't take any dictation for a few days around July 19. So I think that's when the convention is, but I'm not sure. I do vaguely recall her telling me she is planning to attend, but I don't know if she will be there for the whole ing. Anne Page --- QScan/PCB v1.16b / 01-0075 * Origin: PSL Online Houston, TX 713-442-6704 @psl-online.com (1:106/6256)