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 Since then some of the information may be out-of-date depending on how far back you're reading.

June 2001

Back in the USSR

The fireworks are over, and only the smoke remains.  The Net's money bubble went bust in 2000, and 2001 looks like the Year of Pasteur, the homogenization of form and content by marketing agencies.  What's left of the BigNet has opted to ape AOL and MTV and seems destined to become an big e-Mall.

But before investors and IPO's, the Net was like samizdat, the Cold War era Russian underground freedom press, and in that marketplace of ideas everyone had a say whether or not they were backed by an advertiser.  

That RealNet is still there because it thrives on people's thirst for answers; stamps and otherwise.  It's only the business domains that now are being processed into Swiss cheese, and the RealNet of people and ideas is doing just fine because it's not what it looks like that counts but what's said that matters.  

The Web's been that all along, and the best-looking Web site is still just a pretty picture.

Don't Pass Me By

I didn't know anything about Italian philately until I read Andrea Mori's "Pagine Filateliche" or "Philatelic Pages."

The site features Mori's own Italian philatelic studies, along with the official pages of the Unione Filatelica Subalpina.

Mori's interest in Italian stamps is decidely classic and well collected.  The "De La Rue" issue, Italy's first defintive series was named after the London printers, was just 10 demoninations of 15 stamps, and Mori augments his presentation with a study of the Italian postal rates in effect at the time.

His next online collection is "Siracusana,"  the rather commonplace Italian definitive series of the late-'50's and early-'60's.  The stamp's design, a woman's face in profile, comes from an ancient coin from the city of Siracuse in Sicily.

Mori's last lesson in Italian phialatley is called "Roma", and it's a study of the post offices of the city of Rome.

His write-ups also explain the in's and out's of the formation of Italy and the various quirks evident in each country's early postal system.

The site is written in Italian and English side-by-side, which seems to be the best solution to the multiligual site that I've seen.

Andrea Mori's Philatelic Pages
http://www.geocities.com/Colosseum/Arena/8345/index.html

Maybe I'm Amazed

We all need image viewers, but often we wind up with graphic editing programs or some home remedies.  There are a few picture viewers out there, but the good ones cost money and the freebies usually are a waste of time.  Until now.

Irfan Skiljan's IrfanView is a tiny piece of freeware that might be the best free graphics viewer I've ever seen.  It's job is simply to let you see the files and it does it with a click.  

The first version came out in '96 and has been tweaked and expanded since then.  There are no .dll files, nag screens or banner ads.  It's free to home users, but he'd like commercial users to register a license.

If you don't have a viewer that's simple and easy, or even if you have one, you should download IrfanView 32 and take it out for a test drive.

IrfanView 32
http://www.ryansimmons.com/users/irfanview/

The current version is 3.3 and it's still freeware.  If Microsoft tinkered with this program it'd be seven times the size and eat up memory and resources like a ravenous virus.

Thanks for reading the "Glassine Surfer."