Stamp Column Archives

The Glassine Surfer Column Archive

This column originally appeared in the American Philatelic Society's monthly magazine, "The American Philatelist." Since then some of the information may be out-of-date depending on how far back you're reading.

May 1999

Perhaps the most exciting stamp collecting site for kids is the Scouts on Stamps Society International.  If people collect topically, then this is the right place for beginning collectors.  It's a big site with over 40mb of files and lots of changing content.

Scouts on Stamps Society International at
http://www.sossi.org

In the future stamps may only be a colorful reminder of a slower age and an artform of the handcrafted epoch, and despite our best intentions, we can only be prepared to do our best.

Babelfish

Systransoft produces language translation software for professional use, and has a free online service, called Babelfish, hosted by the Alta Vista search engine.  Type in the words, select the languages and hit "enter."

Bablefish translates only a fixed amount of text for each entry so for longer texts you may have to enter and retrieve text several times, but it's fast and bi-directional in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Portugese.

Bablefish is perfect for straightforward prose, but when I used it to decipher a German movie review, the English was rather silly.  Though Bablefish is a little rough, it will convey the gist of what may otherwise be gibberish to you.

One helpful feature is that Bablefish can display a web page's text in the language you select, revealing links and contents online and browseable.

Bablefish at
http://babelfish.altavista.com

Systransoft at
http://www.systransoft.com

Collecting in Portugal

Carlos Pimento of Portugal is a regular contributor to the Clube Nacional de Filatelia's "Filatelia Portuguesa" and its journal "O Jornal de Filatelia." He contributes a regular section titled "A Filatelia e a Internet," as well as maintaining a hefty directoy of Internet stamp resources at his own site.

If you are looking for an outstanding source stop in and look around at stamp collecting from a Portugese point-of-view, and if your Portguese is not what it ought to be, then copy the URL below into Bablefish et voila! Bablefish will show the page in English.

Filatelia em Portugal at
http://www.caleida.pt/filatelia

Was Freud Right?

One computer expert says the Y2K thing is a math problem, another says it's all in your head.  James Gleick says in "The New York Times Magazine" 24 Jan 99 that "The one genuine risk confronting the world now is that people will take seriously the terrifying millennial forecasts and get even more panicky than they are: hoard cash and groceries, sell all their stocks and arm themselves with crossbows or worse... But dawn will break on Sunday, Jan. 1, and the Western calendar will turn to the year 2000 C.E., and the sky will not fall."  

Copernic 99  

If you search the 'Net get Copernic 99.  This Net freeware search application sits on your hard drive and coordinates searches of 10 search engines.  After a search is done, it intergrates the results and displays them in a manipultable database table.  

Each search can be saved, updated and refined.  Individual entries and searches can also be deleted.  The table then can be viewed by URL, page title or relevancy score, ascending or descending.

Many features are just mouse clicks.  "Highlight" indicates exact phrase matches of your search.  "Summary" toggles the entry's metatag description.  Clicking on an entry will open it up in your PC's default browser.  "Browse" sends the result table to Copernic's browser.

Copernic 99 has the look and feel of an Explorer-Word hybrid, and database work is fast.  For power, performance and for free you can't beat it.  

Copernic 99 at
http://www.copernic.com