Howdy fellow Commodore Users!

Don't forget to mark you calendars for this month's meeting on May 21, 2000. We will be nominating and electing the officers for the 2000-2001 calendar year. The current officers have been renominated to continue with their current positions, but there is not been any challengers to make it an interesting election. Maybe you would like to be among the few, the chosen (to borrow a phrase).

On Saturday, May 20th, the CCCC's will be having a couple tables set up at the Lansing Area Commodore Club's Expo, held in Okemos Michigan. Since it's too early yet to relay any information on who attended or what was seen there, a full report will be given at the May 21st meeting. Roger and his wife, and myself, are the only ones confirmed to attending, as of this writing.

You would think that as Commodore Users, our headaches of the recently publicized I Love You virus would be minimal. Quite to the contrary. On Thursday May 4th, I tried to log onto my internet service provider to get my email. I could not get the user identification and password to go through. I then tried one of my other ISP's, with success, but could not access my email from this ISP or any other ISP on my list. Normally, I can retrieve my mail from a variety of options, but that day, I was being denied for reasons unknown. It wasn't until I listened to Paul Harvey at noon, that I realized that the I Love You virus had internet providers shut down their networks to minimize the effects on their subscribers! Even though the virus would not affect my computers, the bogdown of the activity the virus would create, would cause a tremendous strain of the provider's resources. So, they did what needed to be done. At work, the administrators scanned all of the email that was currently on the server's awaiting delivery to the individual computers. (Hopefully, there wasn't any confidential information in any of my emails that were on my own ISP's.)

This latest scare might make you take a look at your own email practices. Are you sending email to lots of people? Are you receiving mail and sending them to other persons? Is that message being forwarded on to other people and so on? Remember to keep your fellow addressee's private from hackers, by including them as blind carbon copy. This shields everyone from seeing any address but their own. Also, delete those nasty "forwarded from" addresses. Do we really need to know the email started by someone we didn't even know? It's important when quoting copyright material, but not when forwarding email.

I have a nice summary that was emailed to me from a concerned friend, but didn't forward it on. If you would like to see that, just email me, and I'll forward it on to you. Keep in mind, I will follow the lessons it preaches.