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 Since then some of the information may be out-of-date depending on how far back you're reading.

August 2002

CensusScope

The 2000 U.S. Census is massive, and from time-to-time people try make sense of it, only if it's just to know how many more people live in town, or where  our money buys the most house. Now the Social Science Data Analysis Network at the University of Michigan has set up CensusScope to help you find answers more easily.

There are sections for charts, maps, and rankings, each with exportable data if you need it, and it is very easy to use.

CensusScope
http://www.censusscope.org/

Newspaper Stamps

The Newspaper Stamps site is all about United States newspaper stamps and run by Doc. M. Pepper, who has also written two books on newspaper facsimiles and forgeries. It's a broadsheet style site, meaning it's a wide format page meant to be read from top to bottom with links to other pages with more details sprinkled throughout the text.

Pepper covers regular issues, special printing, facsimiles, counterfeits, postmarks, specimens, as well as plate and trail color proofs.

Newspaper Stamps
http://www.ghg.net/dpepper

Unsolicited Commercial Software Detector

Over the past few issues, I've mentioned adware, stealth-ware, and their cousins. I hope you've educated and inoculated yourself about these *-wares, but if you haven't, now you can visit the doxdesk site and see if any of this parasite software is your system.

These Internet parasite programs are designed to work without you knowing it. Otherwise, their makers know you'd get rid of them, but the doxdesk webmaster has written a simple script that can report their activity when you visit his site.

If it detects a parasite, it will tell you it did. It won't try to remove it, or sell you a service that does. In fact, the site is loaded with free data on the source of and solution to these stealthy programs.

If you don't have any unsolicited commercial software running on your system, you'll just get a simple message: "Your browser has been checked for parasites. None were found."

Unsolicited Commercial Software detector
http://and.doxdesk.com/parasite/

The current solution to the parasite problem is Lavasoft's Ad-aware program, which scans your memory, registry and hard drives for known spyware and can remove them if you'd like.

Ad-aware
www.lavasoftusa.com/

Blog Page

Blogs, being those online journals, are everywhere and will probably start to morph into something else again in the near future. Just remember that very few things stay the same on the 'Net. Even Yahoo! went and redesigned their main site.

But, back to the point, the BlogPage is just one page about blogs, blogging and bloggers that could satisfy your curiosity should it be piqued. It's actually a local newspaper source, so you know blogs are moving up from the post-a-note stage.

The Blog Page
http://www.honoluluweekly.com/BlogPage.html

And if you ever find yourself wondering what's new in the WWW, this is a good place to start running the 'Net for ideas.