The most notable aspect of this week is the heat. Summer has really arrived. After an extremely cool Spring, this week we’ve had temperatures close to 100 degrees in town. Fortunately, out here in the trees it never gets that hot. When I drive home from town, as soon as I begin to ascend to our higher elevation, the temperature starts dropping. Additionally, our house is built into a hillside. My office is in a daylight basement, which really never gets above about 70 degrees even on the hottest days. (It can actually be sort of embarrassing to talk to the UPS man when it’s 90 degrees outside and I come running upstairs to answer the door wearing long pants and a woolly flannel shirt.)
The heat also woke up dormant carpenter ants. I won’t rant on that topic again. Suffice it to say, the bug man is stopping by on Monday.
In more nerdy news, I realized that CC Tips is a year old! The first CC Tips went out to a few dedicated Computor Companion supporters at the end of June last year. We’ve had almost 500 people subscribe, which is quite satisfying since it is completely a "word of mouth" or technically a "word of e-mail" type thing.
One of the primary things that has always appealed to me about the Internet is the ability for people to share information. Before the Internet, it was extremely difficult to find information on many subjects. For example, when I was first struggling to learn PCs, I had very few resources that I could turn to for help. Support lines were expensive or non-existent and there was no such thing as online help. It’s a good thing I like to read because I had to wade through lot of really tedious user guides to glean even the most basic answers to my questions.
Now, people can ask questions easily and get answers with a click of a button. Newsgroups and support forums are filled with people in the know on a myriad of subjects. In a world that often seems less and less "personal," that ability to just ask a knowledgable person a question and get an answer for FREE is a powerful thing.