SeniorNet Eastern Bays News

As we complete the last of our courses and monthly meetings for the year it is timely to reflect on our year and what is ahead of us in 2012:
Our membership has remained steady at the 250 level.
We have renewed our lease for another 2 years.
We continue to have good demand for our new learner courses and lesser demand at the more advanced level.
We held several very successful and interesting monthly meetings with good presenter topics.
Most of our members are using our updated website and hopefully appreciate the weekly information updates from Wayne.

We are trying something different for 2012 and have prepared a Course Schedule for the 1st Term of the year setting out the courses scheduled and dates they will run. There is an emphasis on learner applications to attract new members. Other courses will be scheduled as the need arises and these are set out on the web site and bookings should be registered accordingly. You may see this Course Schedule inserted in a SeniorNet colour brochure in local libraries, sports clubs and retirement villages and other community notice boards. A promotional card has also been prepared for local supermarket notice boards where they are not set up for brochures. Distribution is by committee members and if you belong to any other organization that has members who could potentially be interested in joining SNEB please Email Us and we will get brochure to them.
We are also planning to reinstate the Q & A monthly sessions in the new year for beginners only.

As a member of the Federation of NZ SeniorNets – the feedback of them is to get more involved in new technologies such as Smart phones and portable devices - Ipad which we will inevitably need to embrace in the near future. At Regional Meetings with other LC’s we see more ideas of how we can promote these through “Awareness/How To” sessions as apposed to a Teaching Course.

Being a voluntary organization we are indebted to our tutor and organising team for their efforts and time spent attending to our success – special thanks to the tutors, course organiser, web master, committee and all the other helpers.

Best wishes and a happy and healthy festive season to all our members and hope to see you enjoying our offering in the new year.

Noel Thompson - Chairman

Just use the Email Us button for non-enrolment matters

As a check of the main menu at left shows, the program formerly called "Contact Us" has now been renamed as "Enrol Me". That is to reflect its predominant use both for enrolling new members in SNEB itself and for enrolling existing and prospective members in courses or adding them to waiting lists. To contact SNEB about any other matters, just click on the Email Us button and compose and send a pre-addressed email or leave a phone message at 578 0994.

Latest Features of the SNEB Site Explained

As the menu at left shows, there is now a new "Site Guide" page. It seeks to explain the more recent and powerful features of this site. Used correctly, all these features make both using and maintaining the site an easy, time saving business for both members and officials.

To visit this new page, click on the new menu button or here. Articles will be constantly added or removed with the most topical at the top. This "first edition" leads with the new Email Us and the "Log In" features.

XP, Vista and Windows 7 all catered for

Each SNEB computer can now be booted up with XP, Vista or Windows 7. That means Tutors can present lessons based on any of those three operating systems to exactly match those of individual students.

Recent e-Newsletters have not reached everybody on our list. There are a number of reasons for that and I'll go into the main one below. However, it should serve as a reminder never to rely on just the e-Newsletter (for this an other sites, generally). This website is always the most up-to-date and comprehensive guide for what's happening and you should get into the habit of checking it regularly.

One reason that many of you did not receive the last newsletter and perhaps several before that is also the same reason you might not have received quite a number of important emails from old friends and business sources: - they are being wrongly tagged as spam by your ISP and trapped in a folder at their end. If you fail to visit your webmail box within a month of this happening, they get deleted and you'll never know they were ever there. Yes, really!

One way around it is to get into the habit of visiting your webmail box on a regular basis. It's good practice for when you might be on holiday and need to use that method to see your email. But you shouldn't really need to do this when you're at home. Its much simpler and surer to have that faulty ISP spam filter removed. Each ISP has its own particular "click recipe" for doing this but why not just phone them up an tell them to do it for you. Note that you should still keep their **Malware** filter going. That's the one which intercepts the viruses, Trojan Horses and other truly dangerous stuff.

Consider the analogy of the traditional post office "snail mail" system. You'd want them to intercept letter bombs but you wouldn't want them to open all your letters, read them and decide which ones you need to see. Big Brother? Straight out of Orwell? But this is exactly what **does** happen to your email!!

Yes, you'll pay a penalty for claiming back your freedom and privacy. You'll receive a continuous stream of Viagra and similar adverts. However, each only takes a second (literally) to delete and, in any case, you can set your own local spam filter to intercept them. The big difference from your ISP's Orwellian spam filter is that you can easily see exactly what your local one is doing and immediately rescue and read any wrongly binned emails.

I've said and written all this before ...

Wayne Power

XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) support will end on July 13th

For everyone running Windows XP: Right click on My Computer and select Properties. Ensure that the General (default) tab is showing and look for the reference to Service Pack. If you've been allowing for automatic updates it should be showing Service Pack 3. If it shows Service Pack 2, you'll need to upgrade. Click here.

Note that XP, even with SP3, won't last forever and we'd all be best to migrate to Windows 7. The full story is here.