The big news of the week was that Terry started the quilt class we were talking about last week and she is so excited. As I told you last week, this is something she has been wanting to do for a very long time. There are only two other people in the class which will allow a lot of individual instruction. She will be making a sampler quilt with 12 different patterns included within it. We, yes I said WE, picked out 3 real pretty fabrics. She wanted my input on the fabric choices. This week she has to have all of the 12 patterns cut out and ready for Saturday. As I write this in the middle of the week she has about half of them cut out, but she has plenty of time to finish. We'll keep you posted on the progress of the quilt.

Last Friday my boss and I attended an Internet Marketing seminar at InfoMart. Linda and Val, the owners of the print shop I manage, are a bit overwhelmed at all of this online stuff. The seminar brought up some very good points but it's pretty basic for me. It was great for Linda to get exposure to some of the marketing possibilities that the Net has to offer. I'm a firm believer in the future of the Net and what it can do for certain businesses. In one of the breakout sessions, I also picked up a few pointers on designing commercial sites. Overall the seminar was well worth the $99 fee. I guess I am making headway at work, because I've now gotten the go ahead to get our company name registered with InterNic.

Also on Friday evening Terry and I swung by CompUSA to check out some of the deals they were offering. They were celebrating the grand opening of their new Dallas location with some pretty good bargains at all their locations. Last week I told you about the problem that I was having with my sound card and CD ROM. Terry and I decided to take a chance and see if CompUSA had any of their advertised specials left. In the paper they had a 4X CD ROM for $49.00 and a 6X for $99.00. I figured those items would go quickly and they did. I was standing around trying to make a decision on one of the higher priced drives when a salesman put one of those $99 CD's right on the shelf in front of me. He told me they were holding it for someone who never came back to claim it. The drive called out to me and I grabbed it plus a new Sound Blaster. That salesman made me one happy camper!

Both of the products were supposed to be "plug and play," but technology still isn't without it's problems. After some fiddling around with all of the settings, and calling Sound Blaster technical support, the ole computer is whizzing away like it should. Everything is working now and I am ready to experiment with WebPhone. Later on, we'll do a column on that very subject.

To access this wonderful and educational site, point your browser to:

http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/tut/

Today there is a new breed of search engine on the Web that is much more "user friendly" than the tools mentioned above. Search engines on the Web grew out of necessity. With the Web growing by leaps and bounds, it was practically impossible to find what you were looking for. Well, enter the search engine. With search engines, you CAN find what you are looking for. There are hundreds of search engines available for you to use on the Net, so which one should you use? Your best bet is to use several and compare the results or use one of the new "All-in-One" search pages that are cropping up. Next week I'll talk about one of these in particular.

There are a couple of thing that you should look for in a search engine.

1. A "user friendly" interface. If the search tools' interface is hard to configure, you're not likely to get the results you are looking for. On the other hand, if the interface it too simple, you won't have enough options to customize your query to pinpoint what you are looking for.

2. The results delivered. The engine must deliver the results you are looking for. If you have entered a particular subject, it is nice to get 500 or 600 "hits" where the information can be found. It's not nice to find that 400 or so of the hits just aren't exactly what you are looking for.