Encina Update (gemma/directories/bios/62/66/74/reunions/siblings/humor/internet&kids/netzero/deceased/crisisline/amazon/store/search/books/whatsnew/starwars) Date: Thursday, May 27, 1999 10:43 AM ENCINA ALUMNI, TOM GEMMA Diane Schoenborn 73 wrote: Encina's principal, Tom Gemma, is leaving for Oak Ridge HS in El Dorado Hills. CLASS DIRECTORIES I get inquiries all the time from alumni about why their class directory has so few listings compared to some of the other class directories. The reason that some class directories have so many entries is that the reunion committee/chair for that class has been good enough to provide me with the class mailing list. Or in some cases a memory book which contained a mailing list. This is why the following classes have lots of listings: 62: Carol Swinehart - names from mailing list 65: Chuck Long - reunion book containing mailing list 67: Linda Goff - mailing list 69: Alan Dankman - mailing list 71: Michael Billings - reunion book containing mailing list 72: Michael Babayco/Kerry Shearer - mailing list 73: Harlan Lau - mailing list 74: Terry Jurich - mailing list 77: Sue Levy - mailing list For other classes, I've located the reunion committee but I haven't yet received a mailing list from the reunion contact. However, if you are looking for a classmate who is not in the directory you might want to contact the reunion contact directly. And while you're at it, ask your reunion contact to send me a list the names on the mailing list for the class directory . 61: Joan Seitz 68: Cindy Rea 70: Tom Henley 75: Jenny Bender 76: Ron Rowan 78: Cindy Dimitras 82: Diane Hagey 86: Kathy Bender 88: Kelly Horine 89: Janice Barnes Obtaining the reunion mailing lists is the fastest way to expand the class directories. Without them, alumni may search through the directories and not find their old friends. With them, they will know who we are in contact with. If you have a class mailing list, I would really appreciate it if you could send me a copy. If you are concerned about privacy, just send me a list of the names without any contact information. Your classmates will thank you! And then there are the classes for which I haven't been able to locate anyone on the reunion committee. If you know someone on the reunion committee for your class, please write. BIOS For those classes having reunions this year, please take the time to submit a bio for yourself and let your classmates know what you've been up to all these years. Many of you have promised me your bio and I'm still waiting! Don't worry too much about polishing your bio. You can always resubmit it if things change. Some people have revised their bio several times. CLASS OF 62 Carol Swinehart 62 sent me a list of the classmates on the 62 mailing list. I've added about 300 new names to the alumni database and the 62 class directory. Carol only gave me the names and not the contact information so I'll be referring all inquiries to Carol. As I said, the mailing lists are the best way to expand the class directories. The 62 class directory just went from a handful of listings to one of the most complete class directories thanks to Carol! CLASS OF 66 Does anyone know how to contact someone on the 66 reunion committee? Lou DeCosta 66 thinks the 30th reunion was organized by John Lewis 66. Does anyone have an address or phone number? CLASS OF 74 I'm on the mailing list for the 74 reunion committee. It's amazing to me how this class has gone from zero to 60 in such a short time. They're planning the reunion and having fun at the same time. Maybe TOO much fun from what I've read... Those of you who are not on the committee are missing out. REUNIONS I would like to add a reunion planning page to the website as a guide to future reunion organizers who don't know where to start. A checklist of things to do, which things need to be done earliest, a list of good places to have the reunion, that sort of thing. Jot down your thoughts and send them to me. I'm sure some of you reunion organizers have lots of advice to share. The classes which plan to have reunions this year are: 1964 1969 Alan Dankman (adankman@worldnet.att.net) 1974 Bob Goosmann (Magusbob@hotmail.com) 1979 Laura Graff Allred (pacwest@foothill.net) Great Reunions: info@greatreunions.com 1984 1989 Janice Barnes (jabarnes@dttus.com) 1994 Candy Mleczko (candym229@hotmail.com) SIBLINGS Laura Gerrity 75 discovered the Encina website this week and she had quite a few Encina siblings: Dorothy Gerrity 68 Nancy Gerrity 69 (deceased 1980) Kathleen Gerrity 71 Laura Gerrity 75 Thomas Gerrity 77 Janice Gerrity 79 James Gerrity 79 I'm going to add the Gerrity family to the Hall of Fame page under the "Most Encina siblings" category. HUMOR This Columbine discussion has been pretty heavy. Time for some levity. If you have any funny stories you'd like to share about life at Encina send them my way. To make these of general interest, how about some funny stories about Encina teachers and staff and coaches which everyone can appreciate. How about Gonzales infamous trips to Mexico? Send me a story about your favorite teacher. This is a chance to exercise your storytelling skills. INTERNET AND KIDS Many Encina alumni are parents and I thought this NY Times article are children and the internet was particularly relevant. I would be curious to know how Encina alumni regulate or monitor their children's internet usage. How do you make the trade off between privacy, the parent's need to protect their children, and limiting access to the incredible resource known as the internet. May 3, 1999 Parents Fear That Children Are One Click Ahead By AMY HARMON It would be hard to find a parent more gung-ho about the Internet than Faith Maupin, the moderator of an online discussion forum for parents with teen-agers who spends much of her day exchanging e-mail and wandering the Web. But after the shootings in Littleton, Colo., last month, Ms. Maupin was shaken enough to sit her own two teen-agers down for a heart-to-heart about their doings in cyberspace. Did they ever find a recipe for a bomb? (Yes.) What sorts of chat rooms did they frequent? (Various.) What, precisely, did they have on their home pages at the moment? (Nothing alarming.) "I spent the other afternoon with my daughter learning far more about World War II than I ever thought I'd know," said Ms. Maupin, of Watsontown, Pa. "But it still scares me that they can come across things they're not even looking for. So I told them, they need to tell me what they're up to." Similar family huddles are taking place across the country as details emerge of the Internet's role in the lives of the two students at Columbine High School in Littleton who killed 13 people on April 20 before taking their own lives. And some parents are doing more than asking questions. "My parents took my computer away today, because of what they saw on television," one 10-year-old boy wrote to Jon Katz, a media critic, who quoted from the e-mail in his column for the Slashdot Web site last week. "They told me they just couldn't be around enough to make sure that I'm doing the right things on the Internet. My Mom and Dad told me they didn't want to be standing at my funeral someday because of things I was doing that they didn't know about." Reports that the two students involved in the shootings in Littleton had played violent computer games and that one of them had posted descriptions of making pipe bombs on a Web site appear to have sharpened parents' concerns about the online activities that are often the most mysterious corners of their children's lives. For many, it was the one item checked on a mental list of comparisons between their children and the gunmen in the Colorado massacre. About 10 million American teen-agers use the Internet, according to Jupiter Communications, a market research firm. Still, the profound ambivalence about the Internet that many parents have voiced in recent days is more deeply rooted than a reaction to the events at Columbine High School. A new study by the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania found that even though a growing number of parents consider the Internet an essential tool to which they must expose their children, they feel distinctly uncomfortable with the prospect. "There is this sense that the Internet is important, but also that it's a world out there you can't control," said Joseph Turow, a professor at the university who directed the study of parental attitudes toward the Internet. "Even when parents make the decision to embrace it, they are worried and skeptical." There are, of course, plenty of reasons for parents to be apprehensive about the Internet. Unlike other forms of media, which lend themselves more easily to ratings, the Internet is inevitably a mixed bag. And efforts to regulate its content have run afoul of free speech concerns. The first law passed by Congress to protect minors from indecent material on the Internet was deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. A federal judge has issued a preliminary injunction against a second law, and that action is under appeal. The Senate is considering bipartisan legislation that would require some schools and libraries to install software to block material harmful to minors. Still, some feel the current soul-searching, prompted in part by the Littleton news, may herald more active parental monitoring of their children's use of the Internet. "When you talk to parents about technology, it's a foreign vocabulary to them," said Ginny Markell, the president-elect of the national Parent-Teacher Association. "Our kids are much better at it. But we are coming around to the realization that this is something that needs to be incorporated into the routine responsibilities of basic parenting." The strategies adopted by parents across the country, who were interviewed last week, range from moving the computer to a common room to allow for easy supervision to reading teen-agers' e-mail regularly. "They say it's their privacy," said Maureen Carson, a secretary on Long Island who has warned her three daughters, ages 9, 12, and 15, that she will read their e-mail as she chooses. "I tell them I'm the mother." Sherry Turkle, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has studied the online lives of children and teen-agers, applauds the consultative approach. Cyberspace is one of the few places they have to experiment and learn, Professor Turkle argues. "To me the issue with the boys in Colorado is what were they expressing, not whether they were expressing it on the Internet," she said. "Parents should be very interested in what their kids are doing on the screen. My concern is that the monitoring of 14-year-olds is just that it is going to close down the space where they can have the privacy to be happy or unhappy adolescents." Thomas Mahaffey, 45, a lawyer in Washington, said he had simply chosen to trust his kids. "My view is that they talk to me about what they see and I can rely on them to use their judgment," Mahaffey said. "My son learned how to play chess on the computer. Now he plays with other people. My daughter does her homework on line." Indeed, three-quarters of those responding to the Annenberg poll say that the Internet "is a place for children to discover fascinating, useful things," while 72 percent say the Internet helps their children with schoolwork. More than half said children without Internet access were at a disadvantage compared with their peers. What is difficult, several parents interviewed last week said, is the sense of losing control once their children are set free on the Net. "Twenty years ago when I was in school, you didn't have access to millions of people to mess with your head," said Marti Seidel, of Greensboro, N.C. "What is on TV is sort of controlled. What is in the movie theaters is sort of controlled. The influences that you can be exposed to on the Internet are just a lot more widespread." To narrow that range, about 32 percent of American parents in online households use software that aims to block Web sites that contain sexually explicit or violent material, according to the Annenberg poll. Patrick Hanna, 51, of Houston, plans to soon be among them. After typing "Drew Barrymore and pictures" into an Internet search engine, Hanna's 10-year-old son was linked to a pornography site. "It wouldn't bother me that bad if the kids found a nude picture or two -- it's like finding a Playboy somewhere," said Hanna, a stay-at-home father. "But these links to triple-X sites that have animated activity is a completely different matter." Deanna Miller of Mill Valley, Calif., said she was moved to action after hearing that the boys who shot their fellow students in Littleton were avid players of the computer combat game Quake. She has since forbidden her son Max, 9, to play his favorite game Battlenet, where the object is to roam dungeons and kill enemies over the Internet. "If it's a violent film or TV show, I've always said absolutely not," Ms. Miller said. "But I realized maybe we're not being vigilant about this because it's not familiar to me. Now we're paying more attention." Judy Stein, a lawyer in Philadelphia, might wish she had not paid quite so much attention. Ms. Stein said she feared her decision for the last two years to keep her Internet password a secret from her two teen-agers may have deprived them of a certain computer savviness that she sees among some of their friends. "We wanted to keep them away from chat rooms and maybe we were too cautious," Ms. Stein said. "They aren't as advanced as a lot of their friends in that area, and after all, that's where the jobs with the money are now." Still, even the best parental rules have a way of being broken. "You know, sometimes I pick up the phone now and I hear the modem is on," Ms. Stein added. "I think actually sometime in the last few months, they may have gotten the password." NETZERO Eric Storm 83 wrote: "My father and I both got Netzero accounts after you mentioned them a while back. I use mine as a backup for my work (MCIWorldcom) supplied account. It's worth the time and effort to get signed-up even if you don't use it as your primary access. Having Netzero doesn't seem to conflict with my other service or my dad's AOL account. He now uses Netzero for all of his surfing and only accesses AOL for e-mail. The ads are not too annoying if you are running at a higher resolution and you use the options to turn off all the buttons and borders around the actual ad and stick it in a corner of your screen. I use Netzero a couple of times a month and haven't really had any problems logging in." I'm going to sign up for Netzero and give them a try. My brother Bert Lau 81 installed Netzero this week and said it works fine. For those of you with no internet access (e.g. Juno email users) this is worth considering. There's a chicken and egg problem in that you need to download a 5-6 MB Netzero file from the Netzero website in order to install their software. So you'll have to get a friend to help download this file and transfer it to your PC. Since it doesn't fit on a floppy this gets a little tricky but it's doable. DECEASED Veronica Spencer 86 and Rhonda Church 86 wrote that Shawn Robinson 86 died in 1993. CRISIS LINE Jerry Carpenter 68 writes: Would you please put out the word that the 24-hour crisis line I work at is in desparate need of volunteers. We have been online since 1969 and we want to continue our great record. Volunteers must be over 18 and be reliable. There is a 50 hour training course that includes advanced communication skills and crisis intervention techniques. The next class is set for July 10, 1999. There is an application and interview process which must be completed prior to training. We have room for 25 trainees. We ask that you do one four-hour shift per week for one year after you finish training. Anyone interested can call me at (916) 368-3324 or our volunteer coordinator at (916)368-3118 AMAZON.COM For those of you supporting the Encina website through amazon.com, here's an easy way for you to triple the commission the website receives from your orders. amazon.com pays 15% commissions for links to a particular book, as opposed to 5% for general purchases. If you find a book, the URL will look something like this: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0553110934/qid=927825387/sr=1-3/002-8 286472-7715065 There's always an ASIN//. The rest of the URL varies. If you edit the URL after the ASIN number so it looks like this: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0553110934/encinahighschool and hit return, you should be on the same page, but the URL will now indicate to amazon.com that you followed a link directly to the book and the website will receive a 15% commission. STORE Tiny internet retailer eToys went public last week, quadrupled the first day and now has a market cap of $7 billion, a billion or so more than Toys R Us. Sales? Last year eToys did $30 mil. Toys R Us $11 billion. Dot com mania. This week the internet stocks have taken a beating. Has reality set in? I received mail that eToys is decreasing their commission rates so that starting June 1st, commissions will effectively be reduced from 25% to 5%. So if you ever planned to buy something from eToys, now is the time! After June 1st, the commission will only be 5%, although they are paying a $5 bounty for new customers. The 25% commission was too good to last. So if you ever intended to buy something from eToys and support the Encina website, please do so before June 1st! CDNOW is having a Grand Opening promotion until June 14th. Up to 30% off entire selection plus free shipping and handling until June 1st. ALUMNI SEARCH I haven't run the entire list for some time. Please check and see if you know the whereabouts of anyone on the list. Teachers Susan Diaz Coach Hibbard Bob Trathen 1961 1962 Brenda Baker Shelly Ready 1964 Keith McDonald (reunion committee) Cathy Metcalf (reunion committee) 1966 John Lewis (reunion committee) 1967 Brian Egger Kathy Shook 1968 Karen Rhodes Ann Schirle Kathleen Wilkerson 1969 Steve Bradshaw 1970 Mike Fong Jack Graves Jim Graves Cathy Jordan Nancy Rhinehart 1971 Ruth Mack 1973 Craig Blake Sally Hurd Peggy Hutchinson Patty Russell 1974 Sara Schuler Julie Stewart 1975 Bill Hutchins 1976 Allison Corbin Jerri Fox Lori Lake Rick Price Caroline Schmidt Tina Weis 1977 Betty Carter Alison Ehlers 1978 Michael Aufrance Christopher Fiscus Greg Fox Robert Gemmell Nancy Vipond Perry Shultz Barry Wisdom 1979 1980 Christy Cooper 1982 1984 Becky Fransham (reunion committee) Tim Vince 1986 Kelly Mortenson 1988 Corrine McLuckie Rebecca Pickett 1989 1990 Michael Davis 1991 Joe McClure Patty Owens Brandy Fleming 1992 Christopher Birdsong Ryan Connor Nance Goecker Jason Graves Michael Hall Heather Kennedy April Thompson April Wellock BOOKS Father's Day is June 20th. This is the second-biggest bookselling holiday of the year! Looking for Star Wars' books: "Star Wars: The Phantom Menace" (Darth Maul cover) is 50% off: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1580601316/encinahighschool "Star Wars: Episode I Cross Sections" is 40% off: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/078943962X/encinahighschool My son is reading the best selling children's book "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone". This is available in hardcover: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0590353403/encinahighschool and paperback: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/059035342X/encinahighschool If you've never read one of Sharyn McCrumb's Appalachian mysteries, check out "The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter". This is an extraordinary novel which just happens to be a mystery. Great characters! http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0451403703/encinahighschool Another fabulous series is the Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes series by Laurie King. "The BeeKeeper's Apprentice" is one of my favorite books of all time: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0553571656/encinahighschool The fourth book "O Jerusalem" just came out: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0553110934/encinahighschool WHAT'S NEW Not much activity this week. 5/26/99: Luan Shelton 76, Laura Gerrity 75 5/25/99: Randy Reid 84, Nancy Reid 89/bio 5/22/99: Fabi Finocchiaro 89, Mike Meehan 66, Peter Forbes 85, Roger Bailey 79 Class of 62 directory: added over 300 new alumni from the 62 mailing list (check it out!) 5/20/99: Lisa Lowe 79, Peggy Crans 89 update, Erick Crans 96, C harmaine Crans 93, Mark Lawrence 80 Store: Growney.NETwork STAR WARS Steve Palmer 74 wrote: Glad you enjoyed Star Wars. I took my 13 and 14 year old kids to the 12:01am showing in Placerville. We had a good time, but the film stopped on a frame with the lamp on and in less than 1/2 second was bubbling, melting and burning. After they got it fixed everything went fine for about a hour until it happened again. Really sad to see such a nice print with frames burning up!! The second time they got it rolling again after 10 minutes and it lasted about 30 seconds until the whole theater watched as the film slid out of the film chain and we watched a bright white screen for 5 minutes. We never saw the last 5 to 10 minutes, and I was told that the film was all over the projection booth floor!! We got free tix to go back. What a great experience with all of the Star Wars groupies. We got home about 3:00 and the kids went to school 4 hours later. I think we'll all remember this for a long, long time. My oldest son is going to see Phantom Menace for the second time this afternoon with his buddies! May the force be with you! Harlan Lau 73 Encina webmaster www.encinahighschool.com harlan@rambus.com