Report 3: My Searches Through Gopher by Garrett Chun




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This report is all about my experiences using Gopher. I had to use Gopher to search for information on my database, which is Daily Hassles That Drive Me Crazy. From all I knew (which wasn't much because I had never used it in my life before), Gopher is part of the Internet, just as the World Wide Web is. Gopher is like WWW, except that it is totally text-based. That's right, only words. No pictures, no sound, no background, no nothing. Only text written in the same boring font. At first, I had no idea why we had to use Gopher because it seemed so primitive and boring! But then after thinking about it for a while, I figured it out. We had to search Gopher because it contains more information than what we can get searching the World Wide Web using browsers like Netscape. Gopher was around before those graphical pages and therefore would contain much more information without all the glitter and glamour that we get using Netscape (but it still is boring!!!). I really don't think Gopher is for people who just want to surf the Internet because their bored. I think it is only for those looking for information on a certain topic because it is very tiring looking at only text.

Well, as usual, I waited until the last minute to start this. But it wasn't really my fault, because I thought that this assignment was going to be due at the end of the semester, but my professor made it due on April 9th. That shocked me. Unfortunately, I was unable to do much of anything before the due date. Luckily for me (as well as the rest of my class) the assignment got postponed a week later.

I knew that if I did this report at home, I would just run into too many problmes and would have given up. So, I started my journey through Gopher by going to the computer lab in Porteus 635. I was glad to see the computer that I usually worked on open. I began by logging onto my UNIX account and than into my CSS account. Then I got into Netscape. Unfortunately, once I got into Netscape, all I did was fool around and go surfing the Internet. At first I told myself that I was simply going to look for a nice background (because I really hate that drab, gray default background). But I ended up just looking all over the Web for fun. Even after I found this pretty cool background that I am using for this report, I still continued to surf around.

Three hours later, I finally got tired of fooling around and decided to go to work. I left Netscape and went to my UNIX account. At the UNIX prompt, I entered lynx. Right after I pressed "enter" all this stuff came out on the screen. I was just looking around and soon found out that I couldn't scroll down by using the mouse and the scroll bar. All I could use was the arrows (which disappointed me). Well, I looked around and was pretty much confused as to where to start. So I looked over my notes and remembered that we discussed changing the mode of something in the preferences. I looked at the menu on the bottom of the screen and pressed "O" for Options. Then another menu came down with all these different things that I could change in LYNX. All I remembered was that we had to change the Options to "advanced mode". Well it took me a while to figure out which option I had to change. I soon learned that it is the last option, "User," so I selected "U" and hit enter and then used the right-arrow to scroll through the different levels and stopped once it reached "advanced." I selected that option by hitting the enter button and then it told me to hit "R" to return and so I did.

Up to this point, I was thinking that things were going fairly well. But when I was looking at the main LYNX screen, I was totally lost! I had no idea of where to begin looking for the Gopher thing. I thought that once I got to LYNX, it would automatically be in the Gopher thing and all I would have to do is enter my topic I wanted to search for. But I guess I was wrong! I began looking at all the different things in LYNX and I only saw stuff about UH (University of Hawaii). I thought that this LYNX thing was like using Netscape except only in text, but all I found was options about my university. Then I got to wondering what the heck LYNX really was. Well I kept hitting the down-arrow and then the up-arrow looking for anything that might be related to Gopher.

I soon began to feel very stupid and frustrated with myself. Not only because I had no idea about where to go, but because I didn't start earlier in our lab. Everytime our class goes to the computer lab, we have about 1.5 hours to work on our assignments. But the problem with me is that whenever I am in lab, I end up not doing anything. I don't know why. All I do is e-mail people or surf the net. Everyone in class was busy working on their report 3 except for me. I think that the reason I don't do anything in lab is because it takes me a while to stop fooling around. And once I am finished fooling around, there is only about 30 to 45 minutes to actually work. That may seem like a lot of time, but I don't feel like working for only that amount of time. I usually like to work on something for a long time so that I don't lose my train of thought. Now, I realize that I should've started in lab, then I could have been all confused in lab and asked for help. Too late for that now.

I continued to get frustrated trying to figure out where to start. While searching, I figured out that by pressing the right-arrow, you go into the document and using the left-arrow, you go back to where you came from. Pretty simple. At least I made a little progress. I then went to the "Hawaii Home Page" option and it really sucked. It was only in text and I remembered the same exact options (business, education, government, etc...) in the Netscape version of this home page. It looked really ugly! Anyway, I left that I suddenly, "WOW!" I found myself with the option, "Search and Explore the On-Line Universe". I thought to myself, "this looks like it!" And so I entered it and it was filled with options about searching the net and using LYCOS. YES! I found it. I was extremly happy with myself.

I then found and highlighted "Search UHINFO Gopher Menus" and it asked me to "Enter a database query." I knew I was getting warmer. I went to the part that you had to enter text and I typed, "Daily Hassles" and pressed enter. In respone to my actions, the computer quickly replyed "This is a Searchable index. Use 'S' or 's' to Search." Confused and slightly irritated, I complied by entering 's' and the stupid computer told me to edit my query and I was like why should I? It looked fine to me. I then felt like leaving the stupid lab because it was late and I was hungry. It then said something about Control-R and so I figured why not? I soon regreted doing that because it got all screwed up and I was pressing all these different keys and then nothing happened. I waited and still nothing happened. The stupid thing froze on me.

Boy, was I mad now! I just continued pressing anything and then my UNIX prompt came back on. I felt an urge to stop there and leave, but the smarter half of me told me to stay and continue. And so I started my journey all over. I typed "LYNX" and it didn't work. I tried it two more times and still nothing happened. Then I figured why -- you must type it in small letters only. I guess I must have accidently presse the caps lock key when my computer froze. After I solved that minor problem, I went back to the LYCOS page and I noticed in the options menu, "/=search" so I hit the "/" key and it prompted me to "Enter a Search String" I typed "Daily Hassles" and nothing happened. So I typed "Stress" and again nothing happened. Then I went to the edit part and it had "stress" and something popped up on the top about stress and so it was already highlighted and I pressed enter and all I got was crap and a "Does Not Exist" message. Was I pissed! (If you don't understand what I just wrote, neither do I. My notes were not very clear because I was really frustrated trying to figure this Gopher thing out and didn't take very good notes sometimes.)

At this point, I got a page from a friend and it had "911" twice (meaning that it's an emergency). I didn't have my cellular phone, so I had to go downstairs to call her. When I called her, all she wanted to know was if I wanted dinner. I got a little irritated at this. I mean she put "911" twice and it was only if I wanted to go eat dinner. I rushed down to the phone for nothing and lost my train of thought. Anyway, I got tired of aimlessly searching (or trying to search) Gopher. I decided to see how my fellow classmates were doing their assignment. I went to Jasmine's Report 3 (because she was first on the list). It was pretty helpful. She went to LYCOS and typed Veronica and started her search there. I remember we talked about Veronica in class, but I had forgotten all about it. I left Jasmine's page and went back to LYCOS and I scrolled down to the "Internet" option and pressed enter (which soon turned out to be a BIG mistake!). I thought I was heading in the right direction and I found blank spaces where I assumed I should type in "Veronica" and so I did and pressed enter and it highlighted "Go Get It" and I pressed enter again. The computer than gave me a list of six hits (yeah, I was excited!). So I read them all and under the fourth listing, I highlighted "Internet: Gopher Searches" and entered it. I saw more blank spaces and this time I typed "Stress" and again I got back 6 hits (I thought it would be more). I went to the first item on the list (The Stress Press) and I pressed enter. I was soon excited because after all my hours of figuring this thing out, I was about to see my first document. That feeling soon died because all I got was a message saying that it couldn't find anything. Piss me off! I went through the other 5 hits and none of them were related to my database.

I went back to the previous page (by pressing the left-arrow key) and entered "Daily Hassles". All I got was this huge listing of topics related to "Daily". So I typed in "Daily and Hassles", but still yet all I got was the same listing about daily stuff. So I tried playing with the quotes, but nothing helped me out. I then played around with the wording and put "stress daily" and all I got was the same 6 hits from stress and 239 from the word daily, but not of the two words together. I tried "irritating" and also "irrit*" and I still got nothing. I thought I understood how to use the "*" sign, but I guess I didn't.

I couldn't think of anything else to do, so I totally started all over -- going into LYNX and then LYCOS and then to Veronica. But now, the page looked different. I was pretty much surprised by this. Then I figured out what I did wrong. The first time when I was in LYCOS, I went into the "Internet" section and then did the search for Veronica. But this time, I went directly from LYCOS to Veronica. Then I started to understand why none of my searches were working, I was in the wrong section. So now, I went down to the third option, "Gopher Search Engines" and I got to a Gopher Menu (at this point, words can't explain how happy I was). I scanned the list and decided on "Simplified Veronica:find ALL Gopher types" because it sounded like the best option. I entered "Daily hassles" where it prompted me to enter a query and I prayed while it searched. I guess I didn't pray enough because my search came up empty. So I entered "stress" and waited... Yes! Finally success! I got a huge list of things to select. I briefly moved the highlight over the different hits and they all began with the URL of "gopher://" This really made me happy. I actually got a list of hits relating to my topic that began with the correct URL address.

I went through the headings that sounded like it pertained to my database topic. I don't know why, but a lot of the links did not work. But even if they did work, I couldn't view the entire URL address and I needed to see the whole thing if I wanted to make links to it in my report. I had already done that advanced mode option thing, so that wasn't the problem. I tried to make my window screen bigger (using the mouse), but that didn't help. So then I totally got out of LYNX and logged out. I then started all over, but this time I maximized my window screen before loggin on. But I still couldn't view the entire address. I then remembered some students talking about this problem in our last class, but because I hadn't done the assignment, I didn't know what they were talking about. Well, I went back to the Gopher menu and selected the first item, "Search GopherSpace by Title word(s) (via PSINET)," but I still got the same problem.

I would have been totally stuck, but I remembered someone in class saying that they searched Gopher through Netscape. So I thought, well nothing to lose and I got out of LYNX and went to Netscape. I clicked on "Net Search" on the menu bar thing in Netscape and went down to LYCOS and clicked on that. I then typed "Veronica" in the blank space and hit return. It gave me a list of all these Veronica links. I clicked on the first on, Veronica - List to All Gopher Menus by Keyword. Again I got another list, but this time, I was actually in Gopher (I knew this because the URL address began with "gopher://"). I selected the fifth item, Simplified veronica: find ALL gopher types. The first thing I entered was "daily hassles" This search came up empty. The next search I tried was for "stress". I had to wait about 30 seconds until a huge list appeared. Now I was actually getting somewhere. I briefly scanned through the entire list just to see what was there. After I looked at all the titles, I went back to the top and carefully examined the topics that related to my database. As I tried to read many of the documents, I was kind of disappointed to see a large number of files not working. For example, the first document I tried to enter," Tips for Reducing Stress." came up totally blank. Then the next file I looked at that disappointed me was " Stress Effect of Feelings." This particular document, as well as many, many others just did not work. An error message appeared when I tried to retrieve that document. All of these things were very discouraging to me because after all my hard work, many of these files didn't exist. On the other hand, I did get several interesting results. One of them was an e-mail message titled, " Stress on the College Level." This little message simply gave a small hint on how to avoid stress. This e-mail message also had several replies listed in the Gopher menu. One of the better results I got was this prettly long letter by Rebecca Goltzman. Here she discusses her experiences with stress in college and how she didn't have much stress during her early years. She than began to feel stress during the end of here senior year and she was not used to it, so she decided to do a little research. This document was very interesting because it includes her personal experiences with stress along with her new findings about stress. Other pretty good links that I found were, Strategies for Stress Management, Stress Management, and Stress Management : Approaches and Techniques.

I was rather disappointed on how little links I found using "stress" as the search word because I figured that stress would find the most hits. I wanted more links, so I had to think of other words to enter. I tried using "Daily Stress", but no luck there. I also tried "irritants", but all I got was links about rashes and stuff. Then I tried to get clever and entered, "stress*" but that gave me the same results as entering just the stress part. Just for the hell of it, I typed in "stressors" and I got a decent list of links. I didn't understand why because I thought by entering "stress*", I get the word stress, and any version of the word. But I didn't, so I don't know why. Anyway, I only found one good link in this list entitled," Top Stressors". This was a list of all the top things that causes stress (hence the title). This was kind of an interesting list to read. The top three stressors had to do with a boyfriend/girlfriend. They were death of a spouse, divorce, and separation from a mate. I was quite surprised (and puzzled) by the number 4 cause of stress, which was confinement to an institution. I mean how many people get confined to an institution? I don't think its that many, so I don't see why it would cause so much stress. It's ranked higher than the death of a close family member. Kind of weird huh? What was also good about this list is that it included a certain scale (a social readjustment scale) to rate how much stress that item causes. For example, marriage had a 50 on the scale while pregnancy had a 40.

Another query I searched was for just "hassles." I know one of the items I found, most of us students have felt. This certain hassle comes from registration. This was written by a college student and he gives his ideas and feelings about registration. He explains that there are so many students and not enough classes and that the classes are at bad times and all these other problems that registration causes. I really can relate to this guy. I dread everytime registration period comes. I have to figure out what classes to take and when to take them. I have to worry about getting advised, clearing holds, and getting the professor's approval. I also have to try and schedule my needed classes around my work schedule, because if I can't work, I can't make money, and therefore won't be able to go to school anyway. My job is really a big problem for me because I don't work on campus. If I did, than its no problem if I have a 2 hour break because I could just go to work for 2 hours. But because I have an off campus job, a 2 hour break really sucks. It takes me about 25 minutes (including the time it takes to walk to my car) to get to my job. Therefore, a round trip will take close to an hour and I would only be able to work for about an hour and it's not worth the hassles. I really want a campus job. Anyway, the next problem was with using bitmap. This is an e-mail message of a person with problems using bitmap. He is asking for solutions to his problem. There were many other documents about problmes with computer programs and their solutions. Most of these problems may not be daily hassles, but they can be very irritating!

I tried using "everday hassles", "everyday problems", and "daily problems", but none of these worked. The final query I tried that worked was for just plain "problems". The only one relating to my topic had to do with insects and all the problmes that they cause. An Entomologist wrote this paper dealing with insects that like firewood, including carpenter ants, termites, and certain beetles. I really hate insects and so I could relate to this problem. Everytime in my house we have these termite (well I think their termite) droppings. And its pretty gross because they dropped it behind my couch and we didn't discover it until later on and when we did, it had stained our carpet. I also really hate those irritating gnats. They piss me off soooo much! They get into everything, my food, drinks, bed, lighting. They just start dropping dead all over my books when I'm studying and I get really frustrated.

Well, I couldn't think of any other key words to try to search for. I did, on the other hand, try to change the certain Veronica search I was in. I tried some of the other ones dealing with only titles and stuff, but they all pretty much had the same results. In conlusion, my feelings about Gopher is not really good. It is such a bore to search these text documents. Another hassle is that many of the listed results did not work and I wasted a lot of time waiting for those blank files to download. Another irritating problem was that these Gopher documents take so long to download. I don't know why it does because its only text documents. I mean some regular graphical home pages can load faster than these text documents. Using Gopher is such a step back from using the wonderfully colorful Netscape! The only advantage I thought Gopher would have was that it would have more fact-based professional papers relating to stress, but I found that this was not really the case. A lot of my findings were just e-mail, or simple papers. I think I could find the same amount of material in graphical pages.




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