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Important business first: The PWP WebRing now has 16 sites online, one in the queue and one more on my desk waiting for me to set it up. That, my friends, represents 1% of the total viewers of this list. ( A moment's pause to ponder this fact.) While I'm tickled pink over the people who have put in the effort to be part of the ring, I'm a little concerned about the 99% who seem reluctant to say anything. Let me repeat myself: The PWP WebRing has a two-fold purpose. One - as a resource for those who seek information and personal experience stories about PD. Two - as a method of increasing public awareness about PD. The larger the Ring, the more power it will have to fullfill it's duties. To join the Ring means simply to place a linking banner somewhere on the page which many of you have on the web. Folks can go from one PD site along the ring to the next without having to use the search engines. The offer: if you don't have a web site, I will make one for you. If you don't have a place to put it, I'll set it up on my server. This is NOT free. There IS a charge for this - once a week you must help someone, either by writing to this list, writing to the PWP Forum on my site, or by helping someone in your support group.. Bottom line: We need your story. Please. By helping others, you may return the good a million fold to all of us - by helping those who are trying to find a cure for PD. I really rather not have PD anymore and, all things considered, you probably feel the same way. Let's do something about it. Someone complained about the speed of the Ring - saying it was very slow to go from one site to another. For those who are unfamiliar with the WWW, let me explain something. I have absolutely no control over the speed of these sites. The speed of the internet is dictated by everything from the weather around your home to servers in Boston and London to the classrooms in Las Vegas. As the internet grows larger and the demands placed upon a largely outdated system increase, slower speeds are a natural result. I only hope that new technology coming online will be affordable enough to ease the load. A great place to check when the Web seems to drag is: http://www.internettrafficreport.com/ Which gives a detailed report of the net at any set time. As I write this it shows that the routers in Boston and Chicago are crawling and Las Vegas and San Francisco routers are completely down. The internet speed, on a scale of 0-100, is 55. When Boston goes down, my New Country site in AZ becomes unreachable from my home in SE Texas until the traffic is rerouted. (Which is why I could not upload anything for about 5 hours the other day.) The webring.org site is the only site I know of which has the type of webring hosting we need at no cost. These folks are basically donating their time, efforts and server space to the internet community. They host thousands of rings, thus they have a heavy demand upon their computers, particularly during heavy traffic hours. The sacrifice of waiting is worth the time spent for what we, the PWP, are obtaining at no cost. Personally, I cannot afford a server to handle the demands for the PWP WebRing and keep the site as a free resource. I am already out $40 a month for what I have now, but it's a price I'm willing to pay for the eventual good which we all may receive at some distant point. Be assured that, were I able to do anything about the page loading speed of the ring's member sites, I would. The PWP Dumpster's site doesn't cost money. No one is paying a nickle to be a part of it, or to access it, and I intend to keep it that way. I'm in this because I don't want to have Parkinson's anymore. As much as I love you people, I'd rather none of us have PD as our common bond. I think we could all have a lot more fun on a trailride, eating BBQ and singing songs, which would probably spook the horses into a stampede, but since none of us would have PD we could handle that, right? -- Jerry Finch The Official PWP Dumpster Gang Hideout http://www.newcountry.nu/pd/