Today's pile......

......of things to go through included a 1" stack of printouts from the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.comics, from between December 1987 and January 1988.

That was my seventh and final year in college. I believe I was going part-time at that point. I didn't have enough free time to read the articles online, and didn't have ready access to a PC, so I went to the spool directory, and essentially did a "more * | lpr" to print out the articles for later reading.

( Here it is, 16 years later....looking back at my Usenet addiction. )

So, looking through the articles, I marked the ones I wanted to save, and made an Excel spreadsheet with the key header information. But when I went to Google Groups to get electronic copies of the ones I wanted to keep......they weren't there. The rec.arts.comic newsgroup have since been subdivided, and there are no threads saved for the main newsgroup.

Looks like I'll have to prepare these articles for scanning, since I don't want (or need) to store them in paper form anymore. I'd love to run an optical character regognition (OCR) program on them, but previous tests of mine have shown that line-printed output doesn't OCR very well. So I'll scan them in and save the images as either TIFF files or PDF files, which take up a lot more space than the plain-text files.

( As for the articles I want to save..... )

Grumble, grumble.........

I dial in. I download my email to Eudora. While I wait, I bring up IE to check the latest doings on my LJ-friends' list (aka "the regular crowd"). Then it happens: I get a "drop carrier". (I suspect a burst of line noise and the connection can't be renegotiated.) Argh! Then Eudora crashes. Double argh! And the "This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down." pop-up message.....and it won't go away. I click on OK and it keeps coming back, at the top of the window stack. (I have to reboot in order to clear it.) Triple argh!

So I move the pop-up window out of the way, reconnect, restart Eudora, and find that the filters that move messages to different folders have only copied them. So I select everything in my inbox and run the filters manually, and find that the index files were corrupted and need to be rebuilt. OK, no problem. Then when I try to download email again, the server has locked me out for approximately 10 minutes. No biggie. While I wait, I'll go back to IE and my LJ-friends list. Then after the 10-minute timeout expires, I check mail again. So now I have three copies of these messages in my mailbox. Sometmies I can view cut-tagged entries and comments. Other times, I can't because the LJ webserver can't be contected (or is too busy).

What I'd like to know is what is causing these drop-outs while the connection is active and downloading. I don't have a Sniffer handy, and I really doubt my ISP's customer support is going to be that helpful in solving the problem. Any ideas?