Congratulations! I've always appreciated your work, and am looking forward to lots of interesting articles to come.

Great magazine. I like the pictures, and I look forward to your Photon issue!

Response to "Academic Freedom"

While I mostly agree with Paul Gribble, my opinion comes with a few caveats related to Dr. Taylor's comments.

While I do feel that a University must support freedom of speech, especially freedom to espouse unpopular positions, this does not mean to me that they have the right to say just anything in the classrooms and lecture halls. As an undergraduate, the most painful classroom moments came when the instructor was nattering on about some topic with little relevance to the course description in the catalog. As a student I was paying my own good money for that class time, and I didnÕt want it wasted.

My personal favorite example was in an introductory course in Artificial Intelligence. I took this course during the period when the Strategic Defence Initiative was a hot issue. Our instructor thought that SDI was a horrible/evil idea and took up many a classroom hour explaining why in horrendous detail. Now, while it can be argued that there is some relation as computers would have to be used in any system such as SDI, this is more an issue for a Computers and Social Responsibility class (which did exist at that University). Very little AI was learned that semester. A year or so later I ran into an ex student of the same instructor from the early 70's who told me that back then this instructor was doing the same thing with the Vietnam War, including trying to organize the students in a sit-in. I partially agree with his opinions, but I wasnÕt paying for them. I was paying for an introductory survey of AI, hopefully relatively balanced. I wouldn't even have minded so much if his presentation of the issues of SDI had been more balanced. Checking the journals at the time, the software engineering community was close to evenly divided as to the practicality of the SDI system.

In short, the academic community has another responsibility, to their students, to teach the subject matter that the students are paying for. Too many students I have met have had similar complaints and the situation is getting worse as tuitions increase.

Thanks for the soapbox

Great Graphics

Thank you. I produce all of the icon graphics in Fractal Painter using a Wacom tablet. I am an illustrator and iconographer by profession; most of my work being produced for companies. My work can also be found in Adbusters Quarterly. Electronic publishing is an exciting new field and I wish you the best of luck.

E-Zine Recommendations?

I picked up 3 recent issues of your publication while "World Wide Webbing" around. The quality is superior. I think you are doing good work. Are there fellow e-publications of similar merit you can recommend?

Well, I probably don't spend enough time reading other electronic publications, but I can recommend InterText as a good fiction magazine. For some better recommendations, try e-mailing John Labovitz (johnl@ora.com). He compiles an extensive list of e-zines and could probably recommend a few to you.

DOCMaker

DocMaker was (and still is) a difficult program for creating exactly what you envision, but it's cheap (still $25 US?), and it's the only thing out there for small, self-running publications. You seem to have discovered a lot of the ways to make your magazine look good, despite limitations in the software.

Best of luck with Teletimes. You've got a very sharp publication there. Nice name for it, too. ModemNews may come back some day, but for now it's good to rest. Those monthly deadlines started to become inconvenient, and the Net is such a thankless place that it was difficult to justify continuation for something it seemed that nobody read.

Keep up the good work!

As you can tell, we are no longer using DOCMaker. The software was too limiting in terms of design possibilities. We now use "Replica" which allows us to create the magazine in Quark Express and export it in a universal format, readable by Macintosh and MS Windows machines while having high quality printing capabilities.

Response to The Wine Enthusiast

They make a pretty nice Black & Tan, and their Lord Chesterfield Ale isn't bad either. They also do a Porter, but I'm not one for that style, so I can't comment on their version.