Well, it looks like most of us survived Y2K. Although some people said it was just all hype, I would like to think the reason it looked like such a nonevent was because so many of us worked so hard to be sure there wouldn't be any major computer-related catastrophes. Here at the College, we downed all of our systems on New Year's eve then I brought all the systems back online New Year's day after I was sure the power grid for the campus appeared to be stable. As each server booted up and I watched the date display the year 2000, I breathed a big sigh of relief. Our Y2K preparations included upgrading all of our server operating systems, migrating all of our users to a new email system, checking all workstations for compliant hardware, applying Y2K patches to all Windows operating systems, upgrading our spreadsheet and database applications, and checking documents for data fields performing date functions to be sure they would not encounter any problems. We began our preparations over a year ago and it looks like it paid off. If it was all hype, I don't regret the effort since we realized a multitude of efficiencies and new features from all of the upgrades anyway.

Christmas roared down upon me like freight train but somehow I managed to get everything done before the big day. Like most people, I shopped a lot with my mouse. My grandson got his Darth Maul double-sided light saber and Naboo fighter with action sounds custom wrapped from ToysRUs.com within just a few days of my order. My brother-in-law got his "Groovemaker" music creation software from Softwarebuyline.com before Christmas even though there was a little confusion about their little town's zip code being a valid zip code. I had previously bid on several other gifts at Ebay so had them ready for shipment in plenty of time. I received a slide scanner from my daughter that had been direct shipped from the vendor in time for it to be under my Christmas tree and my husband's DVD of Patton arrived in time too. The only thing that is a little confusing with direct shipments is the identity of the giver. Many online vendors don't offer gift identification tags or gift wrapping. I had notified my sister about a package coming for her husband that I wanted her to intercept and wrap for him but when it arrived she wasn't sure if it was from me or from one of her husband's brothers since I didn't tell her the contents (I didn't want to spoil the surprise).

I had to make my annual New Year's trip down to see my elderly parents a short one so I could be back to Eugene in time to bring the servers back on line New Year's day. My father plays the keyboard like I do (our family has always enjoyed music in various forms) and each year I try to find a book of music for him that he doesn't have. This year I found a collection of Classic Country Songs (he's an old square dance caller so he loves songs by Eddie Arnold, Tennesse Ernie Ford, Hank Williams, etc.) at the appropriate difficulty level (Easy Piano) so he can enjoy the music and not struggle so much with reading a lot of complicated notes. I always take his music books to the local copy center and have the bindings cut off and spiral comb binding added to make the books lie flat and make it easier for him to turn the pages while he plays. It was such a pleasure to watch him finger each page of the book singing bits and pieces of the songs and watching his eyes light up as he recognized almost every song he encountered. He said he had music for some of the songs but not in such a nice easy format. It's times like that that make it seem worthwhile after all.

Like millions of other people, I enjoyed watching the millenium celebrations in all the different countries, especially the fireworks over the pyramids, Moscow, and Paris, and the release of the doves over Bethlehem. I also enjoyed watching the genuine pleasure on British prime minister Tony Blair's face as he linked arms with his countrymen on the bank of the Thames, laughing and singing. He celebrated like a citizen of the world - no stuffy posturing or politics like our president. Queen Elizabeth looked out of her element but Tony Blair looked like he was just having a great time. The 25-hour continuous broadcast on CNN certainly brought home the issue of social globalization.

I started off the new millenium with a bang, attending a Star Trek convention in Portland on Saturday, January 8. Robert Beltran, Chakotay, was the featured guest but I also met Grace Lee Witney (Yeoman Rand) and bought her book which she personalized for me (although I must admit I didn't find her very personable in person). I also met the actress that played Yeoman Landon in "The Apple" (the VAL story) who obtained her PhD and has authored two books on cat and dog nutrition, and the actor that played Apollo in "Who Mourns for Adonais?". He was very interesting. He now does a lot of voice work supplying English translations for Japanese anime. I even met June Lockhart (the original "Lost In Space").

I was disgusted with some of the young people that were there though. They have absolutely no social graces whatever. While I was talking with Robert Forest ("Apollo") a teenager came up to his table and said (pointing at one of his episode pictures) "THAT was YOU?" Mr. Forest just quietly said "Well that was over thirty years ago." I told him it's been over thirty years for a lot of us and smiled to make him feel better. After all he's probably in his sixties now. I notice Grace Lee Witney will be seventy this year!

Movies: I saw an excellent biography of Anna Leonowens, the real "Anna" in "Anna and the King of Siam". She certainly led a dynamic, interesting life. It's too bad, however, that she slanted her recollections of her experiences in Siam with an emphasis on slavery to appeal to post-Civil War American readers, although I do understand that she had to sell her work to survive and support her family and like any good writer she had to write material that was targeted to her audience. She invented the personna of Anna Leonowens after her husband died leaving her a widow with two young children to support in Singapore. She moved to a city where she wasn't known and changed her name to a combination of her husband's middle and last names and convinced people to hire her as a teacher. As it turns out she was a natural teacher and soon word reached Siam about her talents. There apparently was no romance betwen her and the king - that was an invention to sell stories - and while she was on a leave of absence from Siam to visit her daughter in England, the King died (no, he didn't die in her arms). She was never invited to return so she was once again in the position of a single Victorian woman trying to raise two children and had to use whatever resources she had. She sold enough stories of her adventures to earn a reputation as an author. In fact, she later was asked to go to Russia and report on the political situation there after the assassination of the czar. She also moved to Canada and led the Canadian women's suffrage movement.

Readings: I finished reading Grace Lee Witney's book this week. Based on her descriptions of her rather uneven career and personal foibles, it sounded to me like she was an extremely self-centered, obssessive compulsive person. She talks about coming on to directors and producers as a means most actresses including her have used to get ahead in Hollywood on one page then indignantly writes about how traumatic the alleged "assault" by a Star Trek "executive" was for her as a "good" Jewish girl trying to protect her virtue a few pages later. (she won't name "the executive" but the entire last chapter of her book is a diatribe against Gene Roddenberry) She writes all about how she essentially began drinking and sleeping around at the age of 13. I don't see how she had any virtue left by the time she joined Star Trek at almost forty years old. Her entire life seemed to be self indulgence from beginning to end. She has even embraced religion with the same compulsiveness that she exhibited with alcohol, drugs and skating (she took up skating and became so fanatical about it she would rollerblade all over town at the wee hours of the morning) She may be sincere but after reading her book, it sounds like her crusade to "help" other alcoholics looks like just another "look at me! look at me!" attention getting antic. I felt as if I had been reading a drawn out article in a grocery store tabloid and that is not the kind of material I care to read. Too bad really, because she had so many wonderful opportunities that most aspiring actresses would have given their eye teeth for.

I listened to the audio tape "The Law of Love" by Laura Esquivel. Boy, that was way out there! Soul transfers, a spare body black market, characters being reincarnated into different genders so in one reincarnation the character, Rodrigo, is a Spanish conquistador who rapes one of the other characters, an Aztec princess. Then in the next reincarnation, Rodrigo is a woman who is raped by her brother-in-law, the reincarnated Aztec princess. Esquivel tried to blend, unsuccessfully in my opinion, fantasy, science fiction, and a touch of "Anne Rice" but only succeeded in producing a mish mash of poorly developed characters in a complex, outlandish social structure with almost no plot. I also noticed how ethnocentric it was too. Everyone in the universe seemed to be Hispanic and apparently all Catholic too since a universal social practice was to visit the shrine of the Lady of Guadalupe. It was strange enough to keep you listening but the ending seemed like the author just decided it was time to quit writing and just wrapped everything up in a couple of paragraphs, sort of like a short prologue.

I did like "From Fields of Gold" by Alexandra Ripley although it did deal with the early history of the tobacco business. The characterizations and background detail were not as strong as John Jakes' but it is an interesting tale set in post Civil-War America.

As I continue my resesarch on Julius Caesar and Roman Society as material for my virtual Caesar project, I am now listening to "First Man In Rome" again since it has been so long ago since I heard it. I wanted to be able to move on more coherently to "The Grass Crown", the next novel in the "Masters of Rome" series and the only one I have not read yet. (I was finally successful in bidding on a copy of "The Grass Crown" up on Ebay) I was researching Julius Caesar up on the web over the weekend and found a review of the book "Memoirs of Cleopatra" by Margaret George that sounded intriguing. It said that even though it is supposed to be a book about Cleopatra, the profile George draws of Caesar is intricately detailed. I checked at Smith's Family Bookstore to see if they had a copy and they didn't have one here on campus but did have a hardbound copy at their downtown store that they sent over for me to review. I'm trying to plow through "Caesar: A Biography" by Christian Meier but like most academic works it's really dry. I'm almost 100 pages into it and I haven't read a direct discussion about Caesar the person yet at all - mostly background information about Roman society in general which I realize is important but without human example it seems so intangible it's hard to relate to it. I am also confused by some of the differences in events compared to those related in Colleen McCullough's books. Meier obviously does not admire or respect Gaius Marius and makes only passing references to him even though Marius changed the course of Roman history with his renovations to Rome's military structure. Meier spends a great deal of time talking about Sulla, however. I think it is an elitist thing because he condescendingly mentions Marius as a "new man", rough and uncultured, not a noble. But goes on and on about Sulla's patrician background. Perhaps, as a German, Meier also admires Sulla because Sulla disguised himself as a Gaul and lived with the German tribes for two years as a Roman spy, proving himself to be an admired warrior and even advanced to the rank of a minor thane. Meier also blames the blood bath surrounding Marius' last consulship on Marius' unbridled vengeance not Cinna. However, other works I have read claim Cinna was responsible for the brutal repercussions and Marius actually put an end to it. It will be interesting to see what McCullough has to say about it in "The Grass Crown". I also want to check the bibliographies of McCullough's "Masters of Rome" novels and read some of the research sources. The review of "Memoirs of Cleopatra" mentions that one of the really neat things about the book is the explanation at the end of the book that indicates which events are documented history and which were created for the sake of narration. However, I must say that the events portrayed in McCullough's books seem to reflect accurately the accounts in most of the historical documents I have read. MIT has a classics website that includes Caesar's commentaries so I have read some of them. I also found an interesting German website that seemed to have comprehensive articles about Caesar. I'm going to try to translate them at http://www.babylon.com/. I also found a riveting article about Alexander the Great (Caesar's idol) by a professor in Pakistan, Faisal Khalid.

Technology:

I finally received the Mimio ( http://www.mimio.com/ns.html ) I ordered while I was at Comdex. It is a peripheral that converts a common whiteboard into the equivalent of a "smart" whiteboard (traditionally costing in the $5,000 range) for only $499 ($429 at Comdex). Using patent-pending Stylus Tracking Technology?, a combination of infrared and ultrasound, it records everything you write on the whiteboard to a time-based computer file that can be played back at any point in the discussion - even items erased (with the electronic eraser provided). I've been too busy to try it out yet, however.

I've be struggling with java applets. I purchased a transitioning ad/announcement applet from a company that apparently had never checked the applet on any MacIntoshes. Unfortunately, the applet uses java.awt which causes a security violation in any Netscape MacIntosh browser older than the current version 4.7. Although I am a Windows person myself, I cannot incorporate applets that don't perform properly on MacIntoshes into our main web site because our environment at the College still contains about 25% Macs. The ad banner applet (I was using it as an announcements tool) caused a number of our older Macs to actually hang when they loaded our main page. I also discovered that the artificial intelligence applet I am using to create a virtual help desk also shares the same problem. However, it is not as critical since I can advise Macs before they attempt to access the product that it requires Internet Explorer 4.x or Netscape 4.7 to function properly then provide them with a link to update their browser.

ASPs (Application Service Providers) continue to pop up, offering different online applications. This month I explored http://www.bitlocker.com, an ASP that offers a free online database application. The application appears to be targeted to the consumer market for developing lists of items. The report functions were designed to perform simple filtering and offered no ability to create calculated fields. I sent an e-mail to the contact address and asked about calculated fields and received an e-mail back asking what calculated fields were - obviously their database knowledge is extremely limited. However, for simple "recipe card" databases, it works and provides server storage with the implied backup and security that accompanies server-stored data. I certainly hope they don't intend to charge much or anything for it after it gets out of beta though, since the benefits are marginal and most machines come with something like Microsoft Works on them which also provides a fundamental database application.

An ASP I am impressed with is http://www.zoomerang.com. It offers an online survey development platform that includes integration with email lists and more sophisticated reports. You are limited to a survey with only 20 questions but they offer a type of question called "Name and Address" that provides all the fields for a name and address but count it as only one question so that leaves the remaining nineteen to cover specific information. It lets you have multiple options like bullet fields - one choice only, drop-down lists - one choice only, bullet fields - multiple choice, rating fields with designer specified values, etc. The questions and value lists are very easy to edit. The only thing that bothers me a little is the rather slow screen refresh that is required each time a question is edited. I was also concerned about whether the product had the ability to export data. I emailed them and received the reply that data export is being added in the near future.