"They tell you how smart they are, and you believe them because you can't understand what they say.

They tell you how dumb you are, and you believe them, because you know how smart they are.

Now I tell you how smart you are, and you don't believe it because they've got you believing how dumb they say you are.

How about I show you how smart you really are?"
The Eggman

Right Off the Bat . . .

• DON'T Forward Chain Letters
• No dying child wants your business cards, get well cards and the like. This child died many years ago,and the hospitals, clinics are tired of the mail. (Actually this one had some merit many years ago, but seems to resurface every six months or so.)
• The FCC and/or Postal Service is NOT planning to add a tax on E-mail. They don't have the authority!
• Bill Gates, Walt Disney, Sony, Sega, Microsoft and the like WILL NOT PAY YOU, give you a camcorder, Disneyland tickets, Palm Pilots or whatever for forwarding some silly bogus E-Mail message.
• Nobody has awakened in a bathtub of ice after someone stole their kidney.
• If it says "Send This to Everyone You Know," DON'T!
• No matter HOW many times you forward some E-Mail, you will NOT see a video, or get any reward.
• NO ONE IN NIGERIA Will Deposit ANY Money Into Your Account!
• You have NOT been 'Specially Selected!'

The Internet is NOT Rocket Science!
OOPS, I guess it really is.....or Was!

Well, not any more anyway. Today, anybody with a credit card (or the ability to crack one) or a free ISP can either impress or aggravate upwards of 300 million innocent people with a few keystrokes and mouse clicks.

Trust me, you will learn to use the tools. All the acronymns and techno-babble that confuse you today, will eventually become miraculously clear. Of course, they will be replaced by a whole new set of confusing "stuff" in a few months.

The first thing that you must NOT do with the Internet, is be afraid of it. People have been making this sound complicated for years, and it used to be. It still is if you want a job as an Internet Consultant, Web Developer or other "techie" type.

If, however, all you want to do is use computers and the Net as the tools that they should be, PLEASE, don't get wrapped up in the bits, bytes and techno-babble.

You don't have to know how to rebuild a transmission to drive your car. It does help if you know a few things; check the oil, change a tire and maybe jumpstart the engine. The days when you had to be a mechanic to drive are over. The days when you had to have a pocket protector full of little screwdrivers and brightly colored pencils in order to compute are also over. Today, you just jump in, hang on, and enjoy the ride.

Get yourself a "Net Buddy." Surely you don't think that you are the only one that's learning this stuff?

Find someone at your own skill level, and try things with them. Set up a chat session play with E-Mail attachments, the Internet Phone, and experiment with other stuff before you inflict it on an unsuspecting Net.

There is a wonderful cartoon which has been circulating around the Net since well before the Web. It shows a dog, sitting at the keyboard of a computer, and captioned, "On the Internet, No One Knows You're a Dog!".

The joy of that, is it's true! Until you post a message in a newsgroup, or participate in some sort of chat or conference, no one cares. Yes, webservers can keep some pretty detailed information about you; when you hit the site, what you did while there, what your browser is, what your IP address is and maybe even your E-mail address. Just about anything else, you have to volunteer by answering a question on-line.

So far, about the worst that will happen to you is that you will get on a few junk E-Mail lists, but you'll learn to deal with that. (It's called the delete key-Later on you can learn about Mail Filters and Kill Files.)

The Most Important Thing, is not how you get to the Net, what you use to get there, or what you get from the Net, it's what you leave behind that tends to live forever.

There are a few core rules that will help you get off to a good start as a new net citizen.

In a nutshell, and in no particular order...

Newsgroups (USENET) and Bulletin Boards

• Don't Participate in Flame Wars!
  
  
• Please look for and read the FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) for any USENET newsgroup before you post messages there. The process of locating and reading a few FAQ's is a good little learning excursion out on the Net. Just don't get intimidated.
  
  
• Lurk Before You Leap. Please follow at least 50, preferably more messages on a newsgroup before posting your own.
  
  
• Don't post the same message to more than five newsgroups at one time. (crossposting) If you do, it's highly likely that your message will be off topic on at least one of those groups.
  

E-Mail

• Should you decide something you received is so priceless that you must forward it, DON'T include your entire address list in the TO: field.
  Learn To Use Distribution Lists or send Blind Carbon Copies.
  
  
• Please don't post or respond to any of the "Make Money Fast" postings. Most are illegal, and the best that they do is suck up disk space needed by real stuff.
  
  
• Respect other people's privacy. If someone sends you E-mail that says, "Now that mother's out of jail, John's whipped his drug problem, and I haven't had a drink in almost a week, I might be able to stop cheating on my husband.", please don't forward that E-Mail to a newsgroup, or anywhere else.
  
  
• On a related subject, remember -- E-Mail is not private. It's a lot like a postcard. It is highly unlikely that anyone but the recipient will ever read it -- but it is possible.
  
  Don't say anything in E-mail that you wouldn't want your grandmother to read.
  
  
• Please don't tell anybody about the "Good Times Virus" if you get an E-mail about it. Just reply to the well meaning person who sent you the E-Mail and let them know it's been a "joke" floating around the Net for years.
  
• 
  Please avoid the temptation to share the story of a poor dying child attempting to get in the Guiness Book of Records by collecting business cards. That story was true many years ago, but the child has long since died, and the hospitals are really sick of the mail they start getting every six months or so as this rumor resurfaces on The Net.
  
  
• Use the subject field!
  The subject field is a useful option that is often neglected. The biggest problem in my experience is ineffective or improper use of the Subject field. It's disturbing how many people send e-mails with no subject or the wrong subject, particularly in replys. If you change the topic of an E-Mail in the reply, Please Change the Subject Line To Match!
  
  Inappropriate subjects also make it difficult to file, forward, or provide meaningful responses.
  
  
• When responding to E-Mail, don't quote the entire original message in your reply. Only quote the relevant parts, and only to the extent that they will help orient the recipient on your reply.
  
  
• All E-Mail should end with a short signature line.
  A signature should be descriptive and short.

• Most E-Mail tools, ie. Netscape, MS Mail, Eudora, Pegasus, etc., have an automated signature function. This function will attach your signature file to all
  outgoing messages.

• Your signature is about the only way that you can legitimately post a commercial message on most USENET newsgroups. Please, however, keep your signature to 5 lines or less. Large sig's, with pretty little text pictures only impress the new net user, and consume precious net resources.
  
  
• DON'T TYPE IN ALL UPPER CASE, it's considered SHOUTING.
  
  
• If you want to unsubscribe from a public mailing list, please PLEASE make certain that the UNSUBSCRIBE command gets sent to the LIST SERVER and NOT the Mailing List Itself. If you do this, you irritate every member of the list who gets your message, and you will still be subscribed to the list.
  
  
• Practice The Golden Rule on-line.
  
  
• Finally, with apologies to President Kennedy, ask not what the Net can do for you, ask what you can do for the Net.
  Leave the Net a better place when you log off.

Effective use of the Internet is not really difficult, it merely requires practice, a bit of common sense, and the ability to learn from other people's mistakes.