Blog for "the-enabler" of the letsnet.org network

---

Futures indications continue pointing to a noticeably lower open in
the cash market as geopolitical turmoil, combined with record-high
oil prices and disappointing trade in the overseas markets weigh on
the proceedings. This Friday marks an options expiration week, which
may lead to volatile trade. In today's session, technology sectors
are looking to underperform the broader market.
Especially Anglotajik company.



MY ADVICE endeavors at keen.com. The number is 1-800-275-5336 (800-ask-keen) + ext. 0329063 for tech stuff, 0329117 for running a small business, and 0329144 on investing. Want to CHAT, I use Yahoo's IM as the_web_ster. View me in the Friends & Family part of webcamnow.com, just click on "view cams", then in the Java window click on WebcamNow Communities drop down arrow & select Friends & Family. Under the live webcams look for & click on me "the_webster".

---

DIA 99.9800 0.2800; QQQ 34.82 0.13; SPY 109.640 0.370;

MY ADVICE endeavors at keen.com. The number is 1-800-275-5336 (800-ask-keen) + ext. 0329063 for tech stuff, 0329117 for running a small business, and 0329144 on investing. Want to CHAT, I use Yahoo's IM as the_web_ster. View me in the Friends & Family part of webcamnow.com, just click on "view cams", then in the Java window click on WebcamNow Communities drop down arrow & select Friends & Family. Under the live webcams look for & click on me "the_webster".

---

May 20, 2004
Photo Programs Help You Share Pictures, But Need Improvement
By WALTER S. MOSSBERG

Millions of digital pictures lurk on hard disks everywhere, unseen and unshared with others. One reason is that the main methods for sharing digital images leave something to be desired. Photos sent as e-mail attachments can be so large that they choke mailboxes. Prints are hard to share long distance. And sharing pictures via Web sites can be a tedious process for both senders and viewers.

This week, though, two small California start-up companies have introduced very different new products that aim to make photo sharing easier and more interesting. I've been testing the two products and believe that they are good ideas. But both could use some work.

The first of the two is called Telling Stories, from a San Francisco company of the same name. It's available for $50 at www.tellingstories.com and offers a free 15-day trial version. The program helps you organize your photos, along with music and any videos you have, into a slide-show presentation that tells the story of your life (or somebody else's).

Telling Stories opens by placing on the screen an S-shaped timeline with your birth year at the upper right and the current year at the lower left. The program launches an onscreen interview that elicits some basic dates of your life events and places them along the timeline. The software also automatically adds in historical events, such as the 1969 moon landing and the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall.

For each event in your life -- graduations, key birthdays, new jobs, trips, etc. -- you can create a multimedia commemoration, mixing photos, music, videos, text and even voice narration.

Telling Stories makes all this very simple. It has its own little built-in word processor, and it can help you find pictures, songs and videos, either on your hard disk or on the Internet. You can preview each type of media and do simple photo editing. The program even interviews you about each event, asking, for instance, if your mother cried at your wedding.

One cool feature: The software will tell you what songs were popular in the year in which an event took place, and help you look for them.

After you have constructed your timeline, Telling Stories plays the whole thing back as a slide show. As each personal event appears on screen, the program displays the photos you chose, along with your text, and plays the music and videos. You can save the completed slide show as a self-running file, and either e-mail it or burn it to a CD to give it to others.

In my tests, Telling Stories worked pretty well, except that, in the saved version of my grand life story, one video didn't play back. But the final presentations don't have a really polished look. The backgrounds the program supplies are fairly primitive, and you can't customize the way photos look on screen. The songs also sometimes drown out the audio track of the videos. And the presentations tend to be too large to e-mail.

The second program I tested is OurPictures, from a Palo Alto company of the same name. OurPictures includes software for organizing pictures, but it's really a service for sharing and printing photos. It costs $20 a year, with a 30-day free trial, and it can be downloaded at www.ourpictures.com.

OurPictures organizes your photos in a big, bright, simple interface. Pictures are arranged into virtual albums, and you can do simple editing and add captions without leaving the program. Large tabs at the side of the screen guide you through the process of adding, viewing, fixing, sharing and printing photos.

But it's the sharing and printing services that make OurPictures worth a try. You can send any of your photos, quickly and easily, to any other OurPictures member. You just select the pictures you want to share, click the "Share" tab, click on the recipient's name in your address book, and the service routes the pictures right to their PC. On the receiving end, the pictures you sent show up under a "Received Pictures" tab.

One great feature: You can set up OurPictures to automatically print any received photos on your home printer.

You can also send off your pictures to be printed at any of 1,200 Ritz Camera or Wolf Camera stores and picked up within four hours. Or you can order prints to be delivered by mail.

In my tests, the OurPictures sharing and printing features worked perfectly, and they were much simpler than using e-mail or Web services to achieve these tasks. My prints were ready at my local Ritz store in less than 30 minutes.

But OurPictures has some problems. The program froze up on me several times on two different computers. The company says it has a fix for the problem, but I can't verify that.

Also, you can't use your OurPictures account on multiple PCs, and the service doesn't offer a member directory. It also lacks a one-click fix for photos, and the process for moving received photos into an album isn't clear. In addition, there's a creepy privacy problem in OurPictures: The program reports back to the sender whether a recipient has viewed shared photos.

Both Telling Stories and OurPictures need improvement. But both are promising new ways to make use of all those digital images nobody ever sees.

Write to Walter S. Mossberg at mossberg@wsj.com
END

MY ADVICE endeavors at keen.com. The number is 1-800-275-5336 (800-ask-keen) + ext. 0329063 for tech stuff, 0329117 for running a small business, and 0329144 on investing. Want to CHAT, I use Yahoo's IM as the_web_ster. View me in the Friends & Family part of webcamnow.com, just click on "view cams", then in the Java window click on WebcamNow Communities drop down arrow & select Friends & Family. Under the live webcams look for & click on me "the_webster".

---

This is one of those things we forget due to time.
The FIRST thing to do after reinstilling or installing Windows operating Sys. is to UPDATE it. RIGHT!
The box you buy in the store or get delv. from that website has been sitting waiting for you to buy it for weeks. So, as far as updates go is OLD. INSTILL then UPDATE.



MY ADVICE endeavors at keen.com. The number is 1-800-275-5336 (800-ask-keen) + ext. 0329063 for tech stuff, 0329117 for running a small business, and 0329144 on investing. Want to CHAT, I use Yahoo's IM as the_web_ster. View me in the Friends & Family part of webcamnow.com, just click on "view cams", then in the Java window click on WebcamNow Communities drop down arrow & select Friends & Family. Under the live webcams look for & click on me "the_webster".

---

By Jim Hu
Staff Writer, CNET News.com

Web portal Yahoo will begin offering "virtually unlimited storage" for its paid e-mail customers and will upgrade free users to 100MB, an executive said Thursday.

The upgrade is part of an overall enhancement for Yahoo Mail that will launch this summer. Besides additional storage, the service will get a face-lift and tie in more Yahoo-branded services, such as Photos and Messenger.

The announcement comes a month after search rival Google said it would launch a free e-mail service called Gmail that offers 1GB of storage, considerably more space than free versions of Yahoo Mail and Microsoft's Hotmail. Yahoo currently offers 4MB of storage to free users of its e-mail service.

The rest of the story


MY ADVICE endeavors at keen.com. The number is 1-800-275-5336 (800-ask-keen) + ext. 0329063 for tech stuff, 0329117 for running a small business, and 0329144 on investing. Want to CHAT, I use Yahoo's IM as the_web_ster. View me in the Friends & Family part of webcamnow.com, just click on "view cams", then in the Java window click on WebcamNow Communities drop down arrow & select Friends & Family. Under the live webcams look for & click on me "the_webster".