Fun and frustration.

When I finally got the Christmas lists from my children last year, I was surprised that my then 12-year-old daughter had included a CD burner among her wished-for items. This seemed a useful item that all could use, so among the presents unwrapped Christmas morning was a CD-R/W player and recorder.

A few days later I installed the new device. It went surprisingly well, although I had to unplug the old CD player to have a connection for the new hardware. After installing the new CD drive, I recorded some files onto a rewriteable disk and was able to open them up again from the disk. Things were looking good--too good.

The next step was to try the disk on another computer. The other computer, with a standard CD player; would not even recognize that there were files on the disk. It was then that I began to discover some of the quirks of this particular technology and different types of CDs. It soon introduced me to other quirks associated with loading and recording music and video files. The lesson is that technology can he wonderful when it works, frustrating when it doesn't, and educational either way.

Terry Bliss, one of our Editorial Board members, has also been experiencing the fun and frustration of computer technology. What he--and we--have learned as a result should ultimately benefit other TAPPI members and those using the TAPPI web site.

As an Editorial Board member, Terry helps coordinate reviews for a portion of the research papers considered for publication by TAPPI. We send papers to him by email and he has been downloading and printing papers from the web site. He has served as a good test case because he has been using both new and old equipment and, since DSL and cable Internet access are nor yet available in his area, he uses a slower modem to access the web site.

You can correctly assume that it takes more than a few minutes for Terry to download some files. He has also encountered some problems printing portions of some files when using an older printer. In addition, "my cat is the only IT support I have," Terry notes. "If she can't fix it by walking across the keyboard, she just walks away. The average member who must access the Internet from home has no better IT support."

In response to Terry's feedback, and feedback from other members, we are making a few improvements to electronic files posted on the web site. One is simply to do more to limit the size of the files by using a newer version of the PDF conversion program and then listing the file size with the contents information, we are also asking authors to do more to limit the length of their papers (3800 words or less is preferred) and the size of image files. The layout for 2002 papers will match that of pages in the new TAPPI JOURNAL, which will take fewer pages to print from the web files, also.

We hope to include an article in a future issue of Solutions! to help readers overcome some of the quirks of the various equipment and services available for using the web site, accessing files, and printing papers. Admittedly, some problems will only disappear as users upgrade their equipment or be diminished as faster access modes become available.

Our goals are to make TAPPI's web site a valuable resource and to make it easy and convenient to use. That may never be the case for some members, and for some needs and uses print is still the best medium. Recognizing that, we will launch the new TAPPI JOURNAL in March as a print vehicle for the full text of peer-reviewed papers. Check TAPPI's web site (www.tappi.org) or your membership renewal form for information on subscribing to the new journal, or contact Member Connection at 1 800 332-8686 (USA), 1 800 446-9431 (Canada), or + 1 770 446-1400.