Unofficial Farmwide user experiences

Updated August 15, 1996
Thanks to everyone sending these and other messages in. You are all really bringing a bit of Australian country hospitality to cyberspace! I am keen to hear even more so email me on ian@agnet.com.au.
Maryborough farmer Robert Ipsen:
...My experience of registering on the internet was a little slow but mainly my own fault. The modem finally arrived on a Thursday and after connecting to our computer I set about to register with Microsoft. This was done on our existing telephone line and I experienced problems in connecting to the internet. Half an hour to an hour would be spent trying to connect. If this was going to be the norm I was going to quit! The following Monday Telecom arrived and connected the new line and being on this line I connect to the internet with the first call most times...
Peter and Patsy Fletcher.Belka WA:
Just joined. Agree with the "I wanted to quit" comments. We get on-line with difficulty, our other phoneline is still on Viatel so we can guarantee to access what we need when we need! Guess we'll learn, QUICKLY. Good Luck to all who haven't yet connected.
John and Angela Bruce, Stanley
We have had a few dramas so far but things are rolling along now. We have many chats with Paul and Denise Saward and would like to go further afield. Winter in tas. allows much surfing time! We are Beef Producers with 500 ha. and 350 beef breeders (South Devons) Hope to contact other beef and general farmers to test this E(erratic)-mail out.
Paul & Denise Saward
We live at Redpa in the NW corner of Tasmania. We operate a beef property, currently calving 300 breeders. We are getting a lot of rain at the moment our paddocks are very slushy on top after cattle have been in them. If any of you need rain I would gladly send you some of ours at the moment because it is just pooring down the drains here. I would like to thank Ian for setting up his home page and trying to get a list of email addresses, I hope more people send theirs in. Just one thing I would like to have seen with the addresses is a list of farm type eg beef,dairy,grain etc. It would help us to make contact with participants in different areas with the same interests.

Fair enough - I don't know if it can all fit on the page but I will have a go. - Ian
Roger Dietrich, Old Junee NSW
I must have had the same problems as some of the other participants getting connected. It took quite some time as I had trouble connecting to MSN to send my account details etc. Once connected though I have had a whole new world opened up to me.

Some of the problems I've had since being connected are that Telstra are considering whether to connect a second line to our farm. Apparently they have to do a major upgrade to be able to do it. They have also explained that all the numbers in the area are full. This means that I am using my existing telephone line which is frustrating. Especially when you have people who want to contact you while you are on the Internet.
Another problem is that I quite often have trouble getting a dial tone (think that the modem is too quick for the telephone line).

On the positive side of things I have visited soon quite interesting sites on the Internet such as Chicago Board of Trade, Winnipeg Commodity Exchange, Sydney Futures Exchange, Australian Stock Exchange, I get satellite photo from the Bureau of Meteorology regularly, and have joined some mailing lists.

I have also visited many Australian Universities including James Cook Uni in North Quensland, Macquarie Uni in Sydney and Charles Sturt Uni - Riverina.

I find email excellent as I can communicate with relations in Australia as well as people throughout the world very quickly and easily.

Hope this all helps and the season is as good in WA as it is here in NSW.

Thanks Robert, the break was a bit late, and patchy but all the crop that's going in is in now. Incidently, my favorite 'is it going to rain?' resource on the Internet is the 10 day precipitation outlook from the US Center for Ocean-Land-Atmosphere Studies. - Ian

28/7/96
Peter and Jean Moore, Smithton
We also have had a lot of problems both with joining the 'Net' and using E-mail. Telstra have done very well out of us lately with numerous calls to the help line. We knew that "I want to quit feeling" very well. We run a beef fattening operation at Edith Creek, North West Tasmania. We've enjoyed "surfing the net" however have been a little disappointed with the lack of detailled information found so far relavent to beef farming.
30/7/96
Audrey Bird, Wickepin WA
Met briefly in Narrogin at the Farmwide introduction day. Found time to connect to the Microsoft Network with the new modem and after some teething problems I am in business (surfing the net). Changing the setups within Windows 95 to another provider and modem has given me some head aches. Can't seem to get connected back to my old provider. A good job for another rainy day.

Congratulations on your Agnet page it is excellent! The page that I refer to a lot is the 10 day precipitation outlook, well worth a look. The more you surf the web the more useful information and contacts you find. I also use e-mail to keep in contact with relatives in Hungary, plus my tutors at Orange Agricultural College in NSW.

I agree with Paul and Denise Saward that farming interests should be included with peoples addresses. Please include my address on the Farmwide participant list.

1/8/96
Stephen Smith, Boonah QLD
I must admit we too had some problems with the initial set up. The directions were not accurate with regards to some of the screens that appeared on the monitor. We have not had the problems hooking uo to the net that some people appear to have had. However we did have a problem because our computer supplier had set up another provider rather than microsoft and after a while we received a message that the licence had expired.

We also had a problem with the modem unable toget a dial tone and this was caused by us having two modems set up . Once we removed the superfluos setting the problem was cured. I have found the On Aust help line staff very helpful and now know some of them well! The fact that it is an std call for help shows the business acumen of telecom if nothing else!

2/8/96
Denis Buchanan
We live in Scamander, Tasmania where we have a horticultural operation producing stonefruit and berries. Like the rest of Tasmania ( August, 1996) even the sunny east coast has been experiencing regular and heavier rain this year.

We had some difficulty installing Windows 95 over Windows for Workgroups. We wish to kept a dual system operating and Windows 95 wasn't very appreciative. The Windows for workgroups handles some of the DOS programs that I use better.

3/8/96
Paul Saward, Smithton TAS
Keep up the good work with your home page Ian. Good to see more farmwide email addresses are comeing in, people are starting to find their way around.

You have encouraged comment and queries. I tried getting into the news groups that you have on your page, I finally did get in but it took ages. A couple of us have found that doing anything through the MSN icon takes forever. Is there a reason why? I don't know, but I have the same experience - Ian

We always go in through the internet icon and once connected are able to move around in reasonable time.

When I went in to news groups through MSN a box apeared on screen with a clock face type thing, and a message (that I cant remember) but it did include "please wait", the wait would have been at least 5 min, which is too long. I have had similar experiances each time I have tryed to move around in the MSN.

Otherwise getting on well, especially with e mail, also have worked out how to use fax. Have found a good on line Farm Journal, with a magazine called "Beef Today", I think they also have ones for other enterprises as well. The address is, http://www.farmjournal.com/beeftoday/

4/8/96
Grant Gartrell
I'm Grant Gartrell and my partner is Merry Long. It's good to see that we're not the first South Ozzies on your list. We grow blueberries and a few raspberries at Mount Compass south of Adelaide. If anybody is short of water at present we've got a bit to spare. The plantation is on a fertile flood plain, which is great most of the time but can have its problems. It's been raining almost non-stop for weeks now and I'd check out the boat, just in case, if I could still wade over to it. I'm going to track those 10 day precipitation predictions with great interest. We're having a more traditional winter than we've had for the past few years so there's a chance of a decent season ahead, but like most enterprises, plenty can go wrong yet. It's a bit tricky being cheerful when you're going mouldy, but I'm trying!

I've been playing with computers for many years now, and have seen some amazing changes, but this Internet bit is a totally different dimension and I suspect that they or I will probably chop up my credit card long before I feel truly comfortable with it. I hope this is not the case because it is clearly destined to accelerate the rate of change of our lives even faster. I think it's a case of hop on the bus or get run over by it, and of the two choices, the first makes more sense and sounds marginally less painful.

At least while I'm sitting here in front of the whizz bang multimedia extravaganza, I can stick a re-released CD album in the slot, and have CD-player transport me back to the sixties, when I bought my first long playing record and I was writing programs on punch cards for a super modern IBM 1620 which occupied a whole room and took half a day to print out simple answers on wheelbarrow loads of paper. Good grief!

It's just as well the computers are getting smarter. I know I'm not.

9/8/96
Libby Kellock
I won't bore you with the problems we had connecting to the internet but we have been told that our batch of modems have had problems. Further more Telstra have tried to convince me their are no cables left to give us another line as proposed. This seems to be what others have been told also and I wonder if the cost to some propertys has something to do with it?

Great to discover your page and find some other participants.

If there is any interest what about a crop watch chat page? We have found an interesting one in USA.

I'm thinking about how to manage some sort of discussion group - Ian

13/8/96
Keith McPherson
Hello Fellow Pilot Participants , Fortunately I have not had the phone problems as many of you have . But I have noticed that connecting at certain times to be impossible probably due to an overload some where in the system . The times that I have had difficulty with are :- Sunday mid-afternoon , 8.00 am and even midnight . A graph of system usage would be useful.

I have been able to subscribe to a number of mailing list`s but many of these are not very active one of interest is Roadmap96 (listserv@lists.internic.net) which is a Training Workshop sent by E-mail over 5 weeks covering topics such as E-mail , FTP Archie , Address Searches , WWW etc.. It may be a little out dated but I am still getting useful info out of it.

To date usenet is the area I have trouble with although I think it offers great potential it certainly has a lot of rubbish in it to sort out I am sure this will improve as the group matures . Not being able to store the info to read off-line ?? could run up some big bills . A Canadian home page ( http://www.agriculture.com/ ) points to some news groups that appear well organized.

St.Arnaud VIC Cropping & Wool growing area having a wet but very good year so far.

Thankyou Ian Bailey for organizing this page.

13/8/96
Judy Snell
Hi, My name is Judy Snell, my husband, Tony, and I farm at Walebing near Moora. We are mixed farmers, wheat, sheep and cattle-something to keep us busy all the year around!

I have found trying to hook up to the internet very challanging to say the least. I had trouble with my computer and after a quick trip to Perth to get more hard drive or rams or ewes or something in it I seem to be in business.

I think it is great that you have opened up this interaction between the other users, you can get very worried that your IQ level has suddenly done a dive until you read that others have also had problems.




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