Computer

When the phone rang on a Sunday afternoon at his home, the week's anxiety would begin for John Seaman.As an assistant principal at Westminster High School, he was in charge of finding substitute teachers."

Officials in President Bush's drug war came to Towso yesterday to examine a new weapon -- a computer that plots Baltimore County's worst drug neighborhoods.They left impressed."This is a very positive approach to using technology to help limited resources go further," said Severin L. Sorensen, a special assistant in the Office of National Drug Control Policy at the White House.The computer program, called the Substance Abuse Tracking System (SATS), takes the locations of drug arrests and complaints, and areas with the most people in drug treatment programs, and converts the information into maps county officials use to direct enforcement and treatment efforts.

There's a word for the Anne Arundel school system's computer network: pitiful. In the classroom, one finds a mish-mash of terminals, none of them tied to a central system; much of the equipment is old and obsolete. At school headquarters, most records, statistics and other administrative data are not computerized at all. It often takes school officials days to retrieve one piece of information. The surrounding counties, even much smaller Carroll County, are all ahead of Anne Arundel.So County Executive Robert R. Neall did the right thing by including in his supplemental budget $500,000 in start-up money for a new computer system, appropriately called ASAP.

You may be able to live the rest of your life without learning to use a personal computer. But if you intend to be a part of the world around you, that is increasingly unlikely.If you are middle-aged or have retired, the entire idea may be intimidating. There is no cause for alarm, though. Those who provide computer training say it's just as easy for you to master computer skills as it is for the youngsters. And it is important, if you intend to continue working or start a second career after you reach 65.With the newest equipment and software, becoming computer literate is remarkably easy.

NEW YORK -- Everywhere you turn these days, you find astory about investing by computer. The cybernuts are already on-line ("on-line" means connected to a web of other computer users, through telephone lines; the prefix "cyber-" means computer). But what promise do the networks hold for investors not on the cutting edge?Most of you will probably conclude that the old technology is simpler and cheaper:* You can pick up the phone and talk to a stockbroker if you like his or her advice and research.

Since I had not experienced feelings of inadequacy and worthlessness in quite a while, I decided to go shopping recently for a new computer.Like dogs, the people who work in computer stores will automatically gravitate to the person who fears them the most.Therefore, it was no surprise that as soon as I walked through the door, a geeky-looking guy in his early 20s attached himself to me. He wore a button with a smily face that said: "Here to answer all your computer questions!"His name tag said he was Jay. Jay was frail, pallid, swaybacked and weighed about 125 pounds.

New York. -- Must we always let ''them'' -- architects, shopping-center moguls, parking-lot operators, local politicos, city planners -- decide what the world around us will look like?Or could all of us, as ordinary citizens, be given a voice in the design of the streets and freeways, the buildings, neighborhood centers and parks and commercial centers that make up our daily environment?An emerging form of technology says the days of ''them'' calling the shots could be numbered.The technology, a few years old and now gaining fast in sophistication and accessibility, is called ''computer visual simulation'' or ''image processing.

FROM time to time, I like to answer questions from the "I know this sounds dumb" mailbag. As usual, these aren't dumb questions at all -- just questions that people won't ask because they're afraid of sounding dumb. So ask away.Question: I keep reading about programs called "utilities," but I can't find any on my disk. What do utilities do? Am I missing something?Long answer: If you look at PC magazine's list of top-selling business software this month, you'll notice something odd.Of the Top 10 programs, only two have anything to do with actual business.

Ed Bedno, a graphic designer and professor at the University of the Arts, noticed something that surprised him after his computer went on the fritz a few months ago."My computer was in the shop for a week, and I got so many things done," he said. Work that had been piling up around him got completed. His design studio got cleaned.And without the computer to distract him, he said, "I got so many things done around the house."Bedno, 74, realized that by taking time off from computing, he could get a life.

Over the last couple of weeks, I've heard several complaints from readers about computers that behave strangely after several hours of hard use. Sometimes they slow down and the screens may start to blink. Then they shut off. When the owners wait a half-hour and turn them on again, everything's just fine - for a while. Until it happens again. While it's impossible to diagnose all hardware problems via e-mail, these sound a lot like overheating. I have no hard data on this, but it seems to be more common as users keep older PCs running longer and as newer PCs run hotter and hotter.