OT - Internet and on-line booking questions for the group

Richard Russell wrote:

Everytime I think I would like broadband at home, I realize that every
month that is going to cost me a half-hour of flying time.

With three of us using computers for an hour or more nearly every day, we would
need a second phone line if we used a dial-up connection. At a little over $37,
our DSL service is cheaper than having a second line and contracting with an
internet service provider like Earthlink.

George Patterson
The desire for safety stands against every great and noble enterprise.

"Jose" wrote in message

The business owner and web
designer think they are cool. Nobody else does. I skip them totally.

Your personal feelings towards these types of sites does not reality make.
I've seen plenty of well done, flashy, java-ed sites and have designed
plenty as well. One of my (and a lot of other folks) faves is
www.space.com. You may loathe it but I think it's a very well done site for
the type of material it is devoted to.

A side-line of by business is web design. The site owners - my customer -
sees the flashy stuff out there and wants it. My designers must accommodate
the customer's wishes.

We sometimes try to talk customers out of certain things like flash intros,
pop-ups and ESPECIALLY playing a sound on page load (I hate that crap!) but
the customer wants flashy stuff sometimes and flashy stuff is what he will
get.

What we usually end up with is a decently clean, uncluttered, quick-loading
site that has a little flash and mostly HTML (example at www.fpard.com).
Then there are customers who want nothing but flash because of the perceived
cool-quotient and won't be convinced otherwise. I gladly provide it.

It is simply reality that most of us small-time authors could care less what
the end user wants. We aim to please the person who is footing the bill.

--
Jim Fisher

Your personal feelings towards these types of sites does not reality make.
I've seen plenty of well done, flashy, java-ed sites

You mean my opinion doesn't control the world?

Yes, flash and java have their place. Just not on the front page. Of
anything. So often I got to a movie home page and it's flashed to the
hilt; I just skip it. I want to (say) read a synopsis, not watch a PR
piece on the movie company (and when I do want to watch a trailer, I'm
happy to click the "trailer" button and do the flash thing if that's
what it takes)

A side-line of by business is web design. The site owners - my customer -
sees the flashy stuff out there and wants it. My designers must accommodate
the customer's wishes. [...]
the customer wants flashy stuff sometimes and flashy stuff is what he will
get.

.... and that's what I'm saying. It's all about the business owner, or
client, not about the visitor.

Jose
--
Freedom. It seemed like a good idea at the time.
for Email, make the obvious change in the address.

You have to have cable before you can hook up to it, besides I'm still using
windows 95, Have to get my money's worth out of this thing.
Clyde

"Jay Honeck" wrote in message
news:QiFtd.157408$V41.134990@attbi_s52...
I turn once again to you, the great internet gurus of aviation, for
answers
to the mysteries of the web...

Yesterday NPR announced that only a third of internet users are connected
at
high speed, using either DSL or cable. This truly surprised me, and I'm
absolutely amazed that so few people have made the jump to high-speed
internet -- I could never, ever go back to dial-up, and have been on cable
modem for years.

Because of this rather shocking statistic I instantly redesigned our
webpage
so that the home page is smaller and opens more quickly. (According to
what
Frontpage was telling me, it would have taken several minutes to open over
a
28.8 modem!) It never dawned on me to design the page for dial-up,
because
I thought slow connections were on there way out!

WEBSITE QUESTIONS for the group, if you please:
**************************************************
1. Does anyone know what the average speed modem is being used by the 70%
of
people still using dial-up?

2. I hear people say that Java is "evil" all the time -- yet it seems that
every cool effect on a webpage requires Java. What is bad about Java
scripting? How about "Flashmedia"?

3. I have pared our opening page back to practically nothing, yet it STILL
seems to be taking too long to open. I added a new "hit" counter
yesterday -- could that be slowing it down so much? (It's
www.AlexisParkInn.com if you want to take a gander at it.) How long is
it
taking to open on your computer?

4. I tried to look at the page from Mary's computer (which has the screen
resolution set to "Mr. Magoo" settings) -- and it locked up her computer.
I
re-booted and checked on the Microsoft website, which showed that she had,
like, ten "critical updates" to Win XP that she had not installed -- so I
installed them for her.

Now the page runs normally, but I'm worried about having a website that
might actually freeze someone's computer. Can anyone see anything on the
page that could have caused that? Or was it just a glitch in Mary's PC?

An ON-LINE BOOKING question for the group, if you please:
**************************************************
I am about to sign a contract with a company that will provide us with
real-time, on-line reservation and GDS support for hotels. This will
completely change the way we do business, and will add a significant cost
to
our operation.

How many of you guys actually make real-time, on-line hotel reservations?
My gut feel has always been that we would eventually have to jump on this
band-wagon, because more and more people are booking on-line. However,
this
newly released figure, showing such low high-speed internet usage, really
makes me wonder if people are actually using on-line bookings much, or if
this is a tiny minority using it only occasionally.

Thanks for your help! (Your reward for helping me is getting to view
this
goofy new video, forwarded to me by a British pilot. It's yet another in
a
series of bizarre ads for Ford automobiles that apparently works to sell
cars in Britain. See it at:
http://alexisparkinn.com/photogaller...rd_sportka.wmv Here's
another one from the series, almost aviation related:
http://alexisparkinn.com/photogaller...s/BirdGone.mpg )
--
Jay Honeck
Iowa City, IA
Pathfinder N56993
www.AlexisParkInn.com
"Your Aviation Destination"

You have to have cable before you can hook up to it, besides I'm still
using
windows 95, Have to get my money's worth out of this thing.

Well, Clyde, I have no idea why you dredged up this ancient thread, but I
must admit that I find it amazing that anyone is still using WIN 95. That
was truly the most horrible, buggy GUI in history, and I truly admire anyone
with the gumption and fortitude to make it work.

Incidentally, with thanks for the input received from this group, we FINALLY
(like, two days ago) went on-line with real-time reservations. It's costing
me an arm and a leg, and it's a HUGE pain in the ass to administer, but we
received three reservations in the first 36 hours that we most assuredly
would NEVER have received any other way.

So, I guess it's paying off.

If you're interested in seeing how it works, check out
http://alexisparkinn.com/reservations.htm .

(Or just go to Expedia.com, or Orbitz.com, or Lodging.com, and see how the
blood-suckers, er, I mean "lodging websites" are portraying us.)
--
Jay Honeck
Iowa City, IA
Pathfinder N56993
www.AlexisParkInn.com
"Your Aviation Destination"

In article HCsId.21270$OF5.10352@attbi_s52,
"Jay Honeck" wrote:

Well, Clyde, I have no idea why you dredged up this ancient thread, but I
must admit that I find it amazing that anyone is still using WIN 95. That
was truly the most horrible, buggy GUI in history, and I truly admire anyone
with the gumption and fortitude to make it work.

I take it you never used windows 3.1, eh?

--
Bob Noel
looking for a sig the lawyers will like

In a previous article, "Jay Honeck" said:
must admit that I find it amazing that anyone is still using WIN 95. That
was truly the most horrible, buggy GUI in history, and I truly admire anyone
with the gumption and fortitude to make it work.

No, Windows ME takes the crown for that. What a piece of ****. It was
****ty, even by Microsoft's low standards.


--
Paul Tomblin http://xcski.com/blogs/pt/
Like most computer techie people, I'll happily spend 6 hours trying
to figure out how to do a 3 hour job in 10 minutes.
--Rev. James Cort, ASR

Up until eight years ago when I had a house fire, I had Windows 1.0
running on my Toshiba T1100+.

In article , jsmith
wrote:

Up until eight years ago when I had a house fire, I had Windows 1.0
running on my Toshiba T1100+.


On heathkit I had, windows 1.0 lasted long enough for me to "launch" it,
hate it, and delete it.

That fire was a mercy killing.

--
Bob Noel
looking for a sig the lawyers will like

Jay Honeck wrote:




Well, Clyde, I have no idea why you dredged up this ancient thread, but I
must admit that I find it amazing that anyone is still using WIN 95. That
was truly the most horrible, buggy GUI in history, and I truly admire anyone
with the gumption and fortitude to make it work.

WIN ME sucked even more than 95.