[Bill Murray]

I have been on the internet since late 1998 and now belong to an amazing number of boards such as this one.

Never have I learned so much in such a short time as I have on this board, and particularly on this thread, about how a website works and how best to follow a few simple common sense procedures to make the experience more valuable for the users and less costly for the host. Most sites either ignore the problem or give you some smart ass reply to questions about "how to do this" or site posting protocol.

We are indeed a very interesting and tightly knit band of brothers (oops, and sisters too, sorry to Vets Dottir). Hope to be here for a long time.

Now to my progress report for today. Believe it or not, I found a driver disc for my printer that was stuck in a drawer in a desk in the storage room at my store. So, printer is up and running. So far prints text just fine and being a laser printer, very quickly. Picture quality is not that great yet as it is rather "grainy" but perhaps I can adjust that out. I am very spoiled with the HP printer I have upstairs regarding photo reproduction and can print very high quality pics on photo stock on that one. If I cannot get the Brother to do a good job on photos I still can use the upstairs printer for that task.

Regarding the posting protocol issues, my thoughts are sort of like this. If I have "unpublished" photos or a rare book or magazine to copy from, I will most likely post it here and hope to size it correctly. If I find something on another enthusiast site I will probably either give a link or give the web address so you can look at it if you want.
In the case of sites which are essentially photo repositories such as the Australian War Memorial Photo library it might be best to give lists of photo numbers and the subject in short form.

I am sure Hanno, for one, is well ahead of me on this but I could give the web addresses of probably 100 or more sites that in one way or another deal with our fields of interest.

On two such sites, Axis History Forum and Feldgrau.net, I have succeeded in starting a "Soft Skin Vehicle Photo Repository" thread where only softskin photos are posted. You would be surprised at what shows up there.

For myself, I don't use the PM thing very often, preferring to stick with Email and I never use quotes from others which I have been told takes up extra bandwidth (same thing posted two or more times).

Well, must go for now. I will try to install the scanner next and then I have a lot of work to do to move all the stuff from my upstairs office back down here. As soon as everything is functional I will be back.
Bill