Stamp Column Archives

Glassine Surfer November 2003

Philatelic Air Age

The world seemed much bigger back when "long distance" and "air mail" meant something, and though first class letters are now old-fashioned, air mail is nothing but a memory. The USA issued stamps for air mail service from 1918 through the early '90s, but now any sack of mail is likely to be carried to the other coast on a plane.

Air Mail is a philatelic snapshot of the dawn of our global era, when there were dozens of first flights, pioneers, and tragedies. Of course, philatelically speaking, this is the era of the "Inverted Jenny" and the Zeppelins, not to mention Pan Am Clippers, and Charles A. Lindbergh.

If you want to learn about this very American story on stamps there are several first class sites available to you. The Air Mail Pioneers web site is dedicated to the men and women of the U.S. Air Mail Service, those flyers who showed the country that a continent could be conquered by air. The site covers a wide range of air mail topics with sections of air mail pilots, flight info, antique airplanes, and others, along with helpful links and a section of open questions seeking answers.

If you have a love of planes, especially those wonderful biplanes, the era, and philately, this is a website you'll visit over and over again, and if this is all news to you, here's a marvelous introduction to one of stamp collecting's great stories.

Air Mail Pioneers
http://www.airmailpioneers.org/

The legend of the age was an air mail pilot named Charles A. Lindbergh who flew the "Spirit of St. Louis" across the Atlantic. This midwestern air pioneer was a titanic American hero, whose life is the story of the American century. Today his accomplishment and life is continually re-examined, and has taken on the luster and patina of a tragic Greek hero.

Lindbergh flew the first plane over the Atlantic. His baby was kidnapped and killed. He embraced the restoration of the law and order in Germany, and in doing so, was blind to Nazism. He put America first and last, when his flights and airline company had helped to propel us toward the globalism we grapple with today. He loved America, but fled to a remote part of Hawaii to escape it.

And of course, one of the US's nicest stamp issues is the 1927 Lindbergh Air Mail set.

Charles A. Lindbergh
http://www.charleslindbergh.com/airmail/

The Web source for all-things air mail is the AAMS, the American Air Mail Society. Their first flight was in 1923 and boast 1500 members. Their excellent website has all the information and material you'll need to get up in the clouds and get you collecting into formation.

They have a beautiful air mail stamp album you can download in Adobe Acrobat format. Print it out and fill it up. There's also a message board, a color gallery of air mail stamp scans, and an air mail stamp collecting guide.

The guide covers: types of collections; covers, stamps, etiquettes, literature; the eras of air mail; pioneer, developmental, modern; geographic collections; country, route, airline; and by aircraft; balloon, Zeppelin, glider, etc.

The site also houses all of the AAMS organizational material, as well as membership details, which features "The Airpost Journal" and/or "The Jack Knight Air Log."

American Air Mail Society
http://www.americanairmailsociety.org/

Before I go, I have to mention one more air mail site that I love to browse. "The Airmail Stamp Museum: Airmail Stamps and Their Symbols" is a gallery of large stamp scans of North and South America, Asia, Europe, and Russia that gives visitors a good feel for the scope and breadth of air mail collecting around the world. Each page is a treat.

Airmail Stamps and Their Symbols
http://www.livefromsiliconvalley.com/airmail/index.html

Stamp Sites

Parsing the philatelic universe down to its smallest constituent parts, we come to a unique site of FDC's on ophthalmic themes. It's about your eyes and anything having to do with your vision, and as luck would have it also part of a larger medical site.

First Day Covers with Ophthalmic Themes
http://www.mrcophth.com/FDCs/fdcswithophthalmicthemes.html

If you click around, you'll come to a page of ophthalmology on stamps, but you'll have to keep your eyes peeled for the link.

Ophthamology on Stamps
http://www.mrcophth.com/ophthalmologyonstamps/thematicstamps.html

The Palestine Philatelic Society has a site I've been visiting over the months. The website is filled with stamps, covers, aerogrammes, divided into several large sections. Broadly, the site is grouped into the Ottoman, British Mandate, Egyptian, Jordanian, and the Palestine resistance movement and organization eras.

Within each era, the pages are divided by postal issuance, usage, or local specialities, e.g. “Court Stamps, British Mandate of Palestine Documents,” or “Naturalization Certificate,” with each specialized page being a gallery of issues or exemplary items.

It's a really well presented gallery of items that I haven't seen anywhere else, and I was waiting for some textual material that would put all of the items into a context for me, so that I could understand the story of Palestinian philately better. But after months and months, if not years, the site has remained inert, and now I'm wondering if it'll just go 404 one day, so before that happens check it out.

One helpful area is the gallery of "Other Labels and Themes About Palestine" with dozens and dozens of labels from the Middle East that we find in packets and not in catalogs.

Palestine Philatelic Society
http://www.palestinestamps.com/

Old World Archaeology Study Unit has a new contact site for anyone interested in thematics of archaeological subjects.  Nicely designed and functional, the site boasts a bulletin board, the requisite membership, contact and organization data, and good links. I've always been an avid fan of lost civilizations, the Incas, ancient Kelts, and the Silk Road, so I've bookmarked this one for the upcoming snow days.

Old World Archaeology Study Unit
http://www.owasu.org

Mark your charts and correct course. The Pacific Islands Study Circle has moved to a new URL. This is the port of call for all of the Pacifics small islands and groups such as Gilbert and Ellice Islands, Kiribati, Samoa and Western  Samoa and Norfolk Island.

While your surfing today, drop down for a visit. I'll bet you'll see something you'll like.

Pacific Islands Study Circle
http://www.pisc.org.uk

Web Watch

Kaltix is a soon-to-be search engine. It's one of those oxymoronic widely known secret start-ups on the 'Net that's attracting a lot of buzz because of something they call "personalization."

Early search engines counted keywords on pages (totally abused). Google refined that and added PageRank, a consensus of a page's relevancy based on the number of other websites linking to that page (oops, now abused). Now Kalix seeks to refine relevancy by sorting the results of a search by each user's personal interests.

The object of personalization is to offer the user the best results for them. For instance, if I'm a stamp collector and have visited many stamp collecting sites, when I type "stamps" into the search engine, I get stamp collecting sites, not rubber stamp or online postage sales sites. If I'm in the UK and type in "football," I don't get the NFL, but what is known in the USA as "soccer."

The effect of personalization could be enormous, as a website's profile, reach, or marketability would be directly affected by a user's previous surfing history, and many, low-level commercial affiliate sites could be wiped off the charts. Cumulatively, if it were found that a search term admitted to two or more meanings, a site, might take a nose dive if its content didn't match the user's browsing history.

Naturally, most people will be oblivious to all of this and will continue to use whatever search engine they feel delivers the results they need, and though the devil is in the details, it'll be fun to see how things work out.

As of this writing, Kalix only has a holding page up on its URL, but they are about to push the start button at any moment.

Kalix
http://www.kaltix.com

Searching

What do people use the WWW for? I mean, are the looking for the latest in geophysics and proper English grammar? Well, Britney and Madonna are the more likely quests, but you can check for yourself.

Yahoo! calls their collection of latest search reports "buzz," and it's a wide collection of groups, subgroups, countries, and languages. If you're looking to take the pulse of the Web, you'll see that they want to be entertained.

Yahoo Buzz
http://buzz.yahoo.com/

Over at Google they call the same thing (essentially) the Zeitgeist, and provide an equally interesting collection of result tables. The differences may be due to those who prefer Google over Yahoo! because actually each does attract a different crowd.

Search patterns, trends, and surprises according to Google
http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html

G33k Sp34k

Geek Speak is the keyboard language used by dyed in the wool 'Netters and computer gurus. You've seen it and those keyboard smiley face emoticons are just one flavor of the language. :-) It's jargon and rests on simple character substitution and phonetic bending and blending and takes vanity license plate spelling to another realm.

In G33k, or as it's somewhat officially called "l33t," non-letters can be letters, and letters can be made up from multiple keystrokes, e.g. D = |) and W = \/\/. The Rosetta Stone is that certain vowels become numbers A = 4, E = 3, I = 1, and O = 0, and if you're ever stumped when you come across G33k, just ask yourself what letter does the character also look like?

Like all jargon, shop talk, and shorthand, using G33k is something like name-dropping and deriving the benefit of an esteemed association. It shows your in "the club." It's the well-known secret handshake, which if all things remain constant in the 21st century means there's already a hyper-super-secret code floating around somewhere.

Of course, "l33t" means "elite." "H4x0r" is "hacker," and what you want are $t4mp$.

Google in l33t
http://www.google.com/intl/xx-hacker/

l33t - English translator
http://www.geocities.com/mnstr_2000/translate.html

Task Specific Desktops

Your PC screen is your desktop and virtual workspace, and on it you keep the files, folders, shortcuts that you need the most. In our real lives we keep certain things in the kitchen, some by the phone, and others near the TV, but our PC's toss everything onto one desktop.

In real life we'd organize things better than our PC desktop, and if you've got spreadsheets mixed up with office jokes, home pictures, and eBay confirmations, it might be time to use multiple desktops. This would allow you to switch from a desktop that has your personal and private things on it to a desktop that might be all about the work you take home from the office, or your kid's writing projects for school.

One of these multiple desktop utilities is "multiDesk 2001," a small download that's fairly easy to use and doesn't load up extraneous garbage to do the task at hand.

The creators have a how-to-use section, but the actual .zip is a free download available through the usual online freeware downloading sites. To locate an appropriate site, put "multidesk 2001" into Google, and you should be all set.

How to use multiDesk 2001
http://www.techsuperior.com/multiDesk/

FYI: If you'd like to hunt for an alternative, try using the phrase "virtual desktop manager" in your search.

Glassine Surfer

The Glassine Surfer is online along with column back issues, other stories, help, and links to stamp collecting sites. We also host the Sociable Stamp Society chats online on Sunday evenings at eight o’clock eastern.

The Glassine Surfer
http://www.glassinesurfer.com

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