It is to bad when misguided people see everything as a means to make money. I know money is what makes the world go round, but there are other things in life. I think Bill Gates and his wife are a perfect case in point.  According to resent news programs, Bill Gates is the richest man alive, yet he and his wife have given away more money to charitable causes than anyone in history.

I wish I had better computer skills, if I did I would be glad to assist with the POC DB. Being semi-retired I have the time, I also have an excellent laptop computer that I take with me everywhere I go, I have setup local  dialups at my places in Idaho, Montana, and here in California so I am never more that a click away. Fortunately for me one of my daughters has a degree in computer science and is a department head in a large IT company. When I accidently drag a finger across the key board causing everything to dissapear or stackup on the left side of the screen like so much hen scratching, then ......I call my daughter at work/home and say.....HELP.

Happy New Year everyone.....Bill

Guess I didn't realize a web site was such a complicated deal.  thanks for all your help

Thanks for the response - sorry the whole incident occured.  Jack Gallagher

I felt it was not proper to discuss in too much depth the way I came to be the current Web-Master - let us just say, it was not something I was looking to do but I felt the club is important enough to warrant the extra time it requires.  Yes there are a lot of people out there taking advantage of innocent and un-informed people.  Web design is not so much of a problem in 2006 as it was when I started my turbinecar pages back in 1995.  Ten years ago, you had to pay lots of $$$$$$ for a small storage space that came with your Internet Service Provider Account.

My first web site was one of those www.skypoint.com/~olsonm/turbinecarstuff. - Don't try that is it LONG GONE!  About five or six years ago some cheap Web Hosts appeared - I had my site on a place hosted by a local company - they charged me $20 a month for 25 megs of storage and three email addresses.  The domain name cost me then about $75.00 a year so in 1997 I got very little for about $350.00 a year I could post a few photos and some text, if I wanted to put a lot of stuff up - it would cost me over $1,000.00 per year.  Then as more people used the web and more companies came on board the price went down.

About four years ago, the guy that I was paying $20 a month left town (bankrupt) and left me with no web site - the company he was re-selling space to me and many other people from shut everything down because he was not paying his bills.  I contacted them directly and all they could do was offer me a small contract space for $10 per month.  I had the smarts to register my Domanin (turbinecar.com) in my name not the bankrupt guy's name so it was mine.  I had to re-build my site at that time on the server company's host - I did have my own backups so it was not a big deal - my site was gone for about a week maybe two.

About two years ago, I switched to another provider because I get a lot more space (10 Gigs) 75 email address and a lot of other bells and fancy stuff for $19 a month.  My Domain name registration has gone from $75 a year to $35 a year and can be got cheaper if I wanted to switch registra's.

Our new club site is hosted on GoDaddy.com and with the Domain Name registration (Plymouthbulletin.com) is less than $200/year for hosting and Domain registration. We have 20 Gigs of storage, 1000 Gigs of data transfer, 50 databases, 1000 email accounts, many other free features and all for less than $18/month.  When we re-subscribe if we do it for two years it gets down to less thatn $16/month.

The fellow who was hosting our site before wanted $300 per month for excess data transfer and other things.  What he really wanted was another "Cash Cow".

Now since I started doing the work on the site - in the first week I put about 30 hours into it.  Since then I don't think it has taken more than about 20 minutes a week for site related things.  Figure that out - even if I charged $75/hour it would not add up to $300 per month.

I don't plan on doing this forever, I hope someone will offer to help.  We could have a lot more features and things - one thing we need is to have people willing to write things, take photos or whatever to add here.  This discussion board is the biggest part of the site and I would like some help here too.  I have set Jim Benjaminson up as a moderator, he can delete posts, users, and just about anything I can do.  A board should have at least one moderator for each 50 users.  We need more - if someone is interested in becoming a moderator of one of the areas or the whole board and is very computer savy - that is can learn how buttons work and is willing to use help menus to figure things out - please email me.  I can't check on this site every day - if someone posts something bad, or a fight starts, stopping it fast is the best way to keep a board like this from falling apart.

I have not had to delete anyone yet I have denied some people the use of the board because they did not activate or respond to my emails when I saw they had signed up but not followed through with activation.  I have activated some of you who had trouble because of spam checkers or otherwise did not get the auto-reply to activate.  That is part of the moderators/adminstrator duties also.

I have gone WAY off the topic - I was going to say that if there is a lot of interest in a calendar for 2006 - we could look into doing it - we still have a Cafepress account and that is where the previous webmaster/provider was going to make the calendars.  If someone wants the calendar - let me or Jim Benjaminson know - I am sure it could be arranged.  No cost to the club - you pay for them as you want them.  Cafepress is a great place to do small runs for a reasonable price - no hassle.

Mark/POC-Admin

Jim;  Thank you for the brief explanation as to what happened to the former POC website. Most of us probably just assumed it crashed, now it seems there was something else a foot.

I guess that very few of us really have any idea just how and what this new fangled information hiway can or could be worth to someone that sees everything as an income sourse.

I have seen a couple of the Forums I am on, or was on, turn from a free service to a fee membership, ie; Classmates for one.....Bill

Jack - the 2006 calendar was a project cooked up by our former webmasters.  When they shut down our website and tried to steal it from us, we were fortunate to have club members who know their computer a-b-c's and our site had been legally registered to the club.  The calendar project was never discussed with the club and wasn't an "official" calendar.  When we got the website back, I'm sure the calendar deal went down the tubes. 

When and how will the Plymouth 2006 Calendars be available?