Call Sign December 1999

COMPUTER CHINCHAT

DaC's Web Site
Looking through various taxi web sites, I thought I'd visit Dial-a-Cab's new whizzy site at, http://www.dialacab.co.uk or http://www.radiotaxis.com Funny that, Dial-a-Cab getting there before Radio Taxis, eh! Anyway if you type in http://www.radiotaxis.com you'll still view the correct Dial-a-Cab site which I must say has improved a lot. In my opinion, Dial-a-Cab's site does exactly what I'd expect it to do and in a very professional manner too. The graphics are good and there is good use of JavaScript rollovers (images changing when you pass the mouse over them). These seem to have been created in Macromedia's Dreamweaver 2.0, an excellent HTML editor. Each page has been designed effectively and the navigation through the site is good too, there are even areas describing the best taxi drivers in the world - what more could you ask for!
Wouldn't it be groundbreaking if you could visit the Dial-a-Cab web site and view a graphical image of central London with dots representing the cabs currently available? Hey, that would be cool!
So if you need to know anything about Dial-a-Cab's drivers or services, then you can't go wrong at http://www.radiotaxis.com, whoops, sorry I meant http://www.dialacab.co.uk

Christmas On-line Shopping
Stone me, it's Christmas again! It seems only a short time ago that I was playing with my Thunderbirds 2 toy, now I'm buying truck loads of Action men toys and Power Rangers for my little terrors! Which made me think, why don't I check out the web for an online toy store?
Of course, you'd expect Toys R Us to be on the web and sure enough they are at: http://www.toysrus.co.uk Considering the wife and I have already bought a good proportion of our kids' toys, we are in an ideal situation to compare the high street prices to the online prices and I'm glad to say the online prices won hands-down. The problem with E-Commerce sites that display their products for sale, is that it involves a lot of graphics and Toys R Us site is no exception. It took quite a while to download the images of toys. I'm going to have

to exchange my reliable external 28.8 Motorola modem for a new speedy one very soon.
   I found the Toys R Us site quite easy to navigate since I knew exactly what I was looking for, their sections had headings such as, Action toys, Board games, Pre-schools/Infant toys, Fashion dolls, Radio control, etc and they had another site for secure credit card transactions:
http://www.discounttoys.co.uk
   One area I found annoying though was the quality of the graphical buttons, they seemed to be blurred and were of an unusual font type. Maybe it was a design decision of theirs, but it didn't work for me.
Still, it is definitely worth a because a/ it's cheaper and at the moment they're offering free delivery and b/ because you don't have to fight all the other shoppers - a few clicks and Bob's your uncle!
   Have you noticed that everything on the web seems to begin with an E nowadays, E Commerce, E-Learning? What about an E-Taxi site? Any suggestions?

And Finally Finally Finally...
Finally, another Xmas web site worth visiting is http://www.xmas.co.uk a very graphical site where my kids had great fun emailing Santa asking for everything under the sun, and receiving an immediate reply. Shame the reply didn't say s*d off!
Finally again, on my taxicab web site you can now take part in an on-line survey to finally decide what vehicle we want to drive as taxis in the UK. It is available at: http://www.taxicab.co.uk/pbv_survey.asp Here you will be able to supply comprehensive details of your current taxi vehicle or past vehicles, thereby creating extensive statistical records of all vehicles. If you care, visit and take part!
And really finally, did any of you go to a Sussex Fireworks procession following the last Call Sign? Apparently there were between 10-15,000 at Battle and over 20,000 at Lewes, don't tell me my articles are that popular!
Have a great Christmas and a blinding New Millennium Year....

Vince Chin