ON THE WEB

The current maturity of the Internet is changing our hobby as well as the rest of the world. Although it seems that only about twenty percent of our club's membership is currently "wired," I will explain one way to allow access to those of you who have not yet made the plunge. Since mail order changed the local hobby shop scene years ago, we have become used to mail ordering our supplies. Indeed, this is one of the joys in reading the monthly magazines. Now, shopping is a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week proposition on the web. Most of the stores we usually do business with now have their own Web pages. The problem with this is that you can shop late at night when the wife is in bed and you are too tired to trust your skill at covering. What is wrong with that you say? Well, there you are, drink in hand after a long day, scrolling through the section on the new lightweight servos. You really need some, don't you? Sure you do! All you have to do is click on quantity and enter your credit card. Presto, you bought it. Hope you can explain the charge when the bill hits!

My favorite use of the Web is in communicating with the interest groups. There are several ways to do this. The most simple is to "subscribe" (it's free) to a newsgroup such as rec.models.rc.air. The newsgroups, there are 35,000 of them, are a forum where people post messages and others, who read the messages reply. So there are worldwide groups with members numbering in the thousands who respond to these messages. The content consists of anything and everything! The newsgroups are accessed usually through your E-mail provider. Anyone who has such access can read the messages whenever they log on. A similar but tighter group of people "subscribe" to a list server such as Eflight, Freeflight, or Slowflight. To do this you send a message to an address specified and the response is that you receive e-mails to your E-mail account. In the case of Eflight, there may be up to one hundred E-mails a day although you can get them in digest form. These E-mails work much the same as the newsgroups but it is more exclusive because it is harder to find them! As it turns out, many of the heavy hitters in each area subscribe to the lists. You can get world-class advice in hours. That is the real advantage of the Web is that the information flows in hours worldwide.

The third area where the Web can help us is in research. Say you want to build a model of the JU-88 (I do!). The Web has several "search engines" which will follow your every command. Get into Yahoo and type search for JU-88 and you will be presented with a long list of web sites which have some form of reference to the JU-88. Amazing. One click of the button and the information flows.

It also works another way. If I took some pictures at the Arizona Jet Rally (I did) and wanted to make them available to everyone, I would post them to a web site. Anyone with access to the web can not only view them, but can also download them to their own computer.

So, eighty percent of you don't currently have Web access. Well, you don't need it to do what I have described. You can do it at your local library (or web cafe). Go to your library, have them log on for you, then go to Yahoo. Yahoo will let you sign up for free E-mail and you will be able to access it from any computer connected to the Web. This will allow you to subscribe to the interest groups I discussed above.

You do it by sending an E-mail with the word subscribe in the message to one of the following addresses.

• ElectricFlight--   Eflight@ezonemag.com
• Soaring--   soaring-request@airage.com
• Slow Flight--   SFRCML@adc-lists.apple.com