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My main hobby is playing the card game Bridge.  I am a certified ACBL bridge instructor and am happy to play with anyone including beginners.  Someday I hope to start an HCC Bridge Club, and perhaps someday we can compete in the inter-collegiate league.  Stop by and talk bidding with me!

The American Contract Bridge League (ACBL) is one of the largest bridge organizations around.  Check out their tournament schedule, tips, books, discussions, etc.

The Tampa Bay Bridge Club has home-style games plus duplicate bridge games every day.  Experienced teachers provide individual or group lessons for all levels of players.  Phone: (813) 935-0974.

One of the best bridge magazines in the world is The Bridge World .  Their web site has contests and information for players of all levels.

The Internet Netnews group rec.games.bridge is a lively discussion group where players of all levels can ask questions or give opinions.

Interested in privacy?  I am!  One standard for privacy is P3P (Platform for Privacy Preferences).  These policies are available as both Human-readable as well as machine-readable (i.e., web browser readable) XML.  View this site's privacy policy.  (Click here to validate this site's P3P Policy.)

You can register with the Direct Marketing Association to remove yourself from many email, phone, and direct mail marketing lists by visiting www.dmachoice.org.

The U.S. government supports a Do Not Call Registry.  It is a crime to make sales or marketing calls to someone listed here.

There is excellent (and very popular) free software available to provide encryption and digital signatures for your email and files, known as Gnu Privacy Guard (or GnuPG or simply GPG).  This is compatible with the older Pretty Good Privacy (or PGP) software.  Find out more about GPG at www.gnupg.org, and about PGP at web.mit.edu/network/pgp.html.  PGP is now owned by Network Associates Inc. but open-source and free versions are available.

You can download my GPG Public Key if you want to send me private email, or verify my digital signature.  Below is what you should see if you check the fingerprint for this key:

Type bits/keyID    Date       User ID
pub 1024D/779190A0 2005-06-30 [expires: 2020-06-26]
uid                           Wayne Pollock <pollock@acm.org>
sub   2048g/40E29FAA 2005-06-30 [expires: 2020-06-26]

Key fingerprint: 1181 217F 1F0B 196C D8A1  6F49 0A8D F400 7791 90A0

You can also obtain PGP/GPG public keys from www.keyserver.net, pgp.mit.edu, JoGuNet (pgp.uni-mainz.de), the.earth.li, and other sites.

Thawte, Inc. and VeriSign, Inc. are some of the best and oldest certificate authorities (or CAs) in business.  Another CA CAcert.org provides free certificates for both email and websites.  They provide digital IDs, which are very hard to forge.  For a small annual fee CAs provide an X.509 certificate which you can load into Netscape Communicator (or MS Internet Explorer), which like any ID card certifies that you are you.  With a certificate installed you can easily send and receive email that is digitally signed or encrypted or both.  You can also use certificates to trust Java applets so they can access files and resources on your computer.  A server certificated, signed by a valid CA is needed by a website to allow users to use SSL encryption (HTTPS protocol) when connecting to your site.

From a CA's homepage you can find (and download into your browser) anyone's digital ID (such as mine!) and then send that person private email.  Note that some CAs provide free certificates.

Much of the software for PCs is compressed using the zip format.  These files can be uncompressed using the wonderful utility WinZip.

To view, and manipulate, and convert GIFs and other images, a good product is Lview Pro.  (You can download a free demo version.)

Use WS_FTPle from Ipswitch to browse and download software and other files using FTP.  The last free version (released for Windows95) is WS_FTP95 LE; Ipswitch now sells a commercial version instead with a "demo" mode, but as far as I know the older version is still legal to use free, for educational purposes.  The latest demo version can be downloaded from www.FTPplanet.com.

PuTTY is a very good free SSH client that supports telnet too.  Putty also provides pscp and psftp (PuTTY secure copy and Putty Secure FTP) as command line tools.  If you install these you can also install a GUI wrapper for these tools called winscp, that works similarly to WS_FTP.  You can get WinSCP from sourceforge.net/projects/winscp.  (Click on the Files link for the latest version to download.)

High quality email software is available at www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird.  This free email client is terrific!

Looking for interesting software?  You can visit tucows.com for Windows and Linux software.

Adobe Systems Incorporated is a company famous for high quality fonts and artwork software (Illustrator).  They invented the popular PDF file format, which allows you to view files without the original application that created them.  Visit their homepage to download the PDF plug-in (and viewer program).

At grisoft.com you can find AVG anti-virus software.  A free version is available.

ZoneAlarm from ZoneLabs.com is a great MS Windows firewall, currently free for personal use.

Microsoft releases (frequently) a malicious software removal tool that looks for spyware and other forms of malware.  (You probably have this already.)  To run enter mrt.exe at a DOS prompt (or use "Start—>Run...").  However, another tool couldn't hurt; One malware removal tool I like is called Ad-Aware from Lavasoft.

One of the largest network component companies in the world, Cisco Systems maintains a lot of useful technical information.  Especially useful for studying for Networking Technologies or Service and Support Novell exams.

HCC provides hands-on Cisco Networking CCNA training by providing four Cisco Networking Academy classes which together fully prepare one for the CCNA exam, and a career in Cisco Network Administration.  Check out our many Cisco instructional resources and HCC Cisco Academy Course Descriptions.

Some places to visit: The USENIX Organization,  LISA (the system administrator's guild),  and The Open Group (unix.org).

A Tampa area Linux Users Group website is Tampa-St. Pete Linux User's Group (SLUG).  You can read and post to their friendly forum, at list.suncoastlug.org.

Most of the free Unix and Linux software is actually GNU software, a project of the Free Software Foundation.  To find out about supporting this group, or to get the latest versions of some of the best software around, visit them at www.gnu.org.

To find information on (or download) the best known free Linux distribution, visit www.ubuntu.com (based on Debian Linux).  The most complete Linux commercial distribution available (and an award winner): SuSE Linux.

You can get various Linux distributions (CD images, you download these, burn CDs, then boot from those) such as Fedora and Red Hat, from iso.LinuxQuestions.org.  A lot of information on various Unix and Linux distributions, including rankings, news, and links, can be found at distrowatch.com.

See the description of the eight levels of Unix mastery.

Poem about using vi for the first time.

Visit the Linux Documentation Project for HOW-TO guides and other information.  Visit linux.ctyme.com for searchable man pages in HTML format.

Visit linux.com  and   linuxquestions.org for links for software, documentation, and news, updated regularly, and well organized.  You should check these sites when looking for information or software.

Search for RPMs and download updates from RPMFind.net.

See other on-line syllabi for classes I have taught in the past (note these may not be current syllabi, or even HCC courses anymore):

CGS 1000 (Intro to Computers and Technology) 

CGS 1555 (Intro to the Internet) 

CTS 1305 (Intro to Networking)   previously CGS 1550

COP 1332 (Visual Basic, Beginning)  previously COP 1820

COP 2800 (Java) 
COP 2805 (Advanced Java)

COP 2939 (Computer Programming Capstone)

CTS 1106 (Intro to UNIX / Linux)   previously CGS 1760
COP 2344 (Shell Scripting)
CTS 2301 (UNIX / Linux Administration I)   previously CGS 2763
CTS 2322 (Unix / Linux Administration II)   previously CGS 2764
CTS 2311 (Unix / Linux Security) 
CTS 2333 (Unix / Linux Networking)   previously CTS 2321

CGS 2825 (Web Site Management) 

CTS 2441 (Oracle DB Admin. Fund. I)   previously COP 2741 

COP 1220 (C Programming) 
COP 2224 (C++ Programming) 

CEN 1527 (Cisco Network Fundamentals (Class 1) (formally known as CTS 1305-Cisco) ) 
CET 1610 (Cisco Router Technology (Class 2) ) 
CET 2615 (Cisco Advanced Router Technology (Class 3) ) 
CET 2620 (Cisco Network Project Based Learning (Class 4) ) 

View my collection of bookmarks

HTML4 layout table

Current Tampa, FL weather.  (Courtesy of www.wonderground.com.)

Lost?  Need help to find your own house?  Use MapQuest or Google Maps to produce detailed street maps for any place in the world.  Or view Dale-Mabry Campus map and driving directions.

Dale Mabry Campus Computer Science home page 

HCC home page

Textbooks are expensive!  You might save some money by exploring your options.  In addition to used copies, students may be able to get free shipping from an on-line vendor (Amazon.com has (or had, last time I checked) free second day shipping for textbooks, for students.  However you must opt-out of the deal before one year has passed, or you'll be charged around $80.00.) You may be able to rent the book for the term (from Chegg.com for example).  Other options you should look into include purchasing an e-book copy instead, or even find a copy in the library.  The HCC bookstore also has some cheaper options in some cases; just ask!

In the mood for some adventure?  Try the Mystery Link.  (Goes to a different URL each time you click on it!)

Joke of the day link goes here...

Need help?  Do you have some questions on education at HCC or on any of the subjects I teach?  Please send comments and mail:

Prof. Wayne Pollock

Hillsborough Community College

4001 Tampa Bay Blvd

Tampa, Florida, 33614 USA

1+813-253-7213

Yahoo IM