Hi Deanne (and everyone else who may be interested),
Over the last couple of years a few of us have chosen to get together once
a week for an hour or two over IRC. These chats are rarely about fish,
more about the fishkeepers and how they are getting along in the "real"
world.
There are many fine IRC tutorial sites on the web. One not-so-fine one is
www.tip.net.au/~andrew/irc.htm - I haven't updated it in ages. There is an
unofficial web page for the channel at
http://www.tip.net.au/~andrew/rainbow.htm - it again needs a little work.
To join in you will need an IRC client - as you use Eudora as your mail
client, so you must find a client for IRC. Popular ones for MS Windows
include mIRC, vIRC, and pIRCh.
Do a search on one of the above names, there are many download sites for them.
You may have trouble accessing IRC from your QuT account - some tertiary
institutions frown upon access to chat services.
Hard to say how to handle this end of it - how well do you know your Admin
types? :)
We use the AUSTnet IRC server network at the present time - there are
various servers on AUSTnet - some work, some do not. The problem I touched
upon in my email is that server usa.austnet.org seems to be cut off from
the rest of the world at the moment. (This is actually an alias used by
several servers, but I won't go into that kind of detail here).
There are more details available on www.austnet.org.
Anyhow, I hope that this has given you a bit more of an idea of what we are
talking about :)
We meet at 12.30PM AEST (Canberra/Sydney time) of a Saturday. Maybe we'll
see you there.
Cheers, Andrew
_________________________________________________________
andrew at pcug.org.au http://www.tip.net.au/~andrew
"Beware of people who dislike cats."
-- Irish proverb
_________________________________________________________