It's Easier Than You Think (or: How I Learned to Stop Working and Love the Web)

Monday, November 2, 1998

From the archives: Resurrecting content from my first personal website, InterViews. Presented for historical reasons only. Not all links work.

By Charlie Meyerson

Out of work for the last couple of months, I’ve spent a great deal of time on the Internet, screwi—er, enhancing my skills for the next chapter of my career. And I’m pleased to report that during all my goofi—um, skills enhancement work—I actually learned a lot. And most of it is easier than I thought.

Forthwith, I share the bounty of my enlightenment.

Getting a better e-mail address is easy!

Free e-mail services have proliferated on the World Wide Web—sponsored by companies that want you to check your mail at their site and see their ads while you’re at it. Services like

Email.com <http://www.snap.com> (part of NBC and C|Net’s Snap service),
Hotmail <http://www.hotmail.com> (owned by Microsoft),
iName <http://www.iname.com>,
Netscape <http://webmail.netscape.com>, and
GeoCities <http://www.geocities.com>

provide free e-mail addresses. Netscape and iName, to name two, have been giving away $10 Music Boulevard credits (at <http://www.musicblvd.com>) to those who register with them.

In general, they work like this: surrender some general demographic information, and you get to register for a euphonious and mnemonically satisfying e-mail address—like, oh, say <Meyerson@email.com>. And you then tell the service to (a) leave all your mail on its servers, for you to read from any web browser on any computer; or (b) automatically forward all mail to your real (not-for-free and probably not so euphonious) e-mail address. You can configure most e-mail software (not AOL’s) to display your free address in the outgoing mail, so that no one need know that—back when you were an Internet newbie—you meekly accepted the computer-generated account name <asdso87@uaig.mnfoe.ement.fdie.org>. The other benefit to free services is that they promise to let you keep their addresses for life. You just give the free service a new forwarding address, and no one’s the wiser.

Another advantage: you can have as many free addresses as you like. I’ve registered all the kids for free email.com addresses. The disadvantage here is that your e-mail now has to make it through two Internet gateways to reach you—your free service and your actual service provider. A breakdown at either could disrupt your e-mail delivery.

Those without web access can get free e-mail from Juno: <http://www.juno.com> or (800) 654-JUNO. It provides free Windows-only software—downloadable from its Web site or available on disk, by mail, for a token fee. The software dials a local number for you, sending and receiving all your mail. Your cost: you put up with the ads Juno displays in the upper quarter of your screen, and all your outgoing mail is tagged at the end with an ad for Juno.

Keeping up with your favorite comics is easy!

See a day’s worth or a week’s worth at once—in color every day, free! This groundbreaking service is available courtesy of the San Jose Mercury News, at <http://www.mercurycenter.com/svlife/>. It’s another portent that today’s newspaper—printed on mammoth presses, delivered in huge trucks and tossed into your bushes or gutters—is an endangered species.

Building a Web page is easy!

It can even be free, once you have Internet access. Your Internet service probably even includes personal web-site space. I’d wager it’s among the most underused features in Internet service today.
Even if your Internet account doesn’t provide a web site, a number of organizations specialize in providing web sites for free. The most famous of those may be GeoCities at <http://www.geocities.com>. The disadvantage there is that you get a fairly clunky web-site address, and you’re at the mercy of the banner ads GeoCities chooses to impose on your site.

Learning HTML—the universal language of the Web—is easy!

If you have any experience with first-generation word-processing software (like the old text-based WordPerfect or WordStar), you’ll grasp Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) in a wink. The fundamental principle is that every style change is preceded by a “start” code and followed by an “end” code. For instance, to make the word “Internet” appear in boldface, you write “<b>Internet</b>.” An excellent and simple guide to HTML is available for download or viewing online, courtesy of the University of Illinois National Center for Supercomputing Applications—birthplace of Mosaic, the modern web browser (from which Netscape Navigator is derived)—at <http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/General/Internet/WWW/>.

Putting up a Web page without HTML is easy!

GeoCities, for instance, now provides templates into which you can simply pour your text. Chicago-based DKA (Digital Knowledge Assets) Web <http://www.dkaweb.com> also offers free web sites with pre-designed templates or “’scenes,” into which you can dump your stuff—no software needed beyond a modern web browser. The designs are minimal, but they’re visually appealing and elegantly functional. Disadvantage: you have to accept DKA’s generic photo-illustrations in the upper left-hand corner of each page, and DKA reserves the right to insert banner ads at some point down the road. You can add your own graphics at will, but you have to store them in some other web site and reference them (using HTML) on your DKA site. DKA is where I’ve established a homestead: <http://www.scenemaker.com/meyerson>.

Tracking visits to your Web page is easy!

Visitor-counting services are prolific on the Internet. In general, they consist of a simple line of HTML code that you paste into your page. Most of them require your page to feature generally obnoxious ads; but one that doesn’t is WebTracker, available at <http://www.fxweb.com/tracker/adduser.shtml>. The only ads involved are those that you, the page creator, encounter when you check into WebTracker’s pages to view the demographic breakdown of your visits—things like number of visitors per hour, which browsers they’re using, and their domain names. WebTracker will even let you disable display of its logo and the counter, if you’d rather not let the public in on the fact that you’ve had only five visitors since you set up shop.

Sending me questions is easy!

Click here.

_____________________________

Funnies Business on the Internet

By Charlie Meyerson

Wednesday, October 7, 1998

From the archives: Resurrecting content from my first personal website, InterViews. Presented for historical reasons only. Not all links work.

Strip Joint

by Charlie Meyerson
InterViews Proprietor

_____________________________
(c) 1998 Charles Meyerson. All rights reserved.

Charlie Meyerson is an award-winning Chicago journalist.
Check out the Chicago InterViews web page at http://www.meyersonstrategy.com/search/label/Interviews-archives

Entire contents Copyright 1998 by Charles Meyerson. All rights reserved.
This material may be freely transmitted to others if it's transmitted in full, including copyright and subscription information.

Back to "InterViews" home page.

A Skeptic Speaks

By Charlie Meyerson

Wednesday, September 30, 1998

From the archives: Resurrecting content from my first personal website, InterViews. Presented for historical reasons only. Not all links work.

An Online Chat with a True Disbeliever

Our first guest for this new series of online interviews is Michael Shermer, director of the Skeptics Society and publisher of Skeptic magazine , a journal praised by a crowd so disparate as to include Penn Jillette of "Penn & Teller," who says "Skeptic kicks ass"; and by distinguished Harvard science historian Stephen Jay Gould, who writes the forward to Shermer's latest book. That book--just out in paperback--is "Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time" ($14.95, W. H. Freeman and Company; ISBN: 0-7167-3387-0). He e-mailed the answers to Charlie Meyerson's questions on September 28 and 29, 1998.
_____________________________

CM: Do you regret not being able to include a chapter on President Clinton's relationship with Monica Lewinsky?

MS: Actually, in my next book, WHY PEOPLE BELIEVE IN GOD, I do have an explanation of the Clinton mess, from an evolutionary perspective. Here is an Op-Ed piece I wrote about it that summarizes my position.CM: How'd you come to be a skeptic? How did you know you WERE a skeptic? And weren't you a little skeptical about it?

MS: I became a skeptic gradually. It was an evolutionary process, in contrast to how I became a born-again Christian (recounted in my next book), which was a sudden conversion experience. My deconversion into skepticism and out of Christianity came slowly, with my slow immersion into science. I realized I was a skeptic when I tried a lot of New Age gimmicks and beliefs in the late 70s and early 80s. I realized that most were total bunk. I also discovered James Randi and his revelation that a lot of these folks lie and cheat, which was a real let down, but enlightening. I also discovered the scientific method. In fact, I had 30 units of statistics and research methodologies in an experimental psychology graduate program, so I was well-versed in the ways of finding answers to questions scientifically. New Age beliefs don't hold up.

CM: How do you define "weird things"?

MS: Weird things are what I say they are :)
Well, no, this is a democracy, so every year the Skeptics Society board votes on what the year's weird things were :)
Okay, seriously, weird things are like pornography--I can't define it operationally but I know it when I see it.

CM: Is the belief in "weird things" stronger or more prevalent now than it's been at other times in human--or American--history?

MS: Oh, no, not even close. If you compare today to, say, 15th Century Europe, then things are much better than before. But, compared to, say, 50 years ago, then definitely the belief in weird things is on the rise, especially during and after the 60s.

CM: What do you consider the most dangerous of the "weird things" widely believed today?

MS: Moral panics and mass hysterias that result in people being thrown in jail, like the Satanic Ritual Abuse scare of the 80s and the Recovered Memory movement of the late 80s and 90s.

CM: For those who consider themselves skeptics--and who'd like to bestow more skepticism on their friends and relatives--what do you consider the key tools at their disposal?

MS: Science and reason. More specifically, empiricism and logic. More specific still, experimental methods, correlational methods, the rules of logic and reason, etc. But mainly being from Missouri: SHOW ME the evidence. When we hear an outrageous claim, we say "THAT'S NICE, PROVE IT."

CM: Does the Internet compound the spread of belief in "weird things"? Do you see it--in the long run--as an aid or a hindrance to rationality?

MS: In the worst possible way. The reason is that there is no filter, no screening process, no editors and fact checkers, no peer review system, no checks and balances. Anyone can say anything about anyone or anything and, essentially, publish it. Everyman his own publisher. As a civil libertarian I am against any and all attempts to censor the internet, but this is one of the negative by-products.

CM: Has your work debunking beliefs so strongly held by others ever put you in danger? Have you ever been threatened by True Believers in some cause or another?

MS: Danger? Threatened? Naw. Some people get mad, but I'm a fairly conciliatory fellow and I like to give people a chance to have their say (I justify in my mind as a form of data collection about why people believe weird things).

CM: Tell us about Skeptic magazine: What is it? How did it come to be? How can people check it out?

MS: Skeptic magazine is the quarterly voice of the Skeptics Society, founded in 1992, that has a 4-color cover and runs about 112 pages per issue. Each issue features a special section on a particular theme with several articles pro and con (e.g., False Memory Syndrome v. Repressed Memory Syndrome, the AIDS Skeptics, Holocaust Revisionism, Race and IQ, Cosmology and God, Conspiracy Theories), plus an array of news items, forum letters (more than any other magazine we know of) discussing all manner of subjects demanding skepticism, long and short book reviews (e.g., The Bell Curve), an interview with an influential scientist (e.g., Richard Dawkins, Stephen Jay Gould, Charles Murray, Martin Gardner, Frank Sulloway), and much more. Skeptic has a WWW page at http://www.skeptic.com/ and an FTP site at: ftp://ftp.skeptic.com/pub/skeptic. SKEPTIC MAG HOTLINE is the new weekly [e-mailed] voice of Skeptic magazine and the Skeptics Society. [It] will include media updates, critiques and commentary on current events, ongoing investigations, upcoming lectures at the Skeptics Society Caltech Lecture Series, updates on our annual conference, what's scheduled for the next issue of the magazine, and other timely events.
To subscribe: just send an e-mail to: join-skeptics@lyris.net (to "unsubscribe," send an e-mail to: leave-skeptics@lyris.net)
Note: we do NOT release the e-mail addresses of members to any other organizations.
Skeptic, P.O. Box 338, Altadena, CA 91001. Phone: 626/794-3119, Fax: 626/794-1301, E-Mail: skepticmag@aol.com

CM: What do you see as the New Frontier for Skepticism? What weird new beliefs do you see on the horizon, begging for deflation from you and your fellow skeptics?

MS: Alternative medicine.

CM: Why is it on the rise? What dangers do you think it poses? What can or should skeptics do about it?

MS: Because medicine isn't perfect. In fact, it was not until well into this century that it was better NOT to go to the doctor than it was to go. Therefore, worthless remedies like homeopathy seemed to work because they did no harm. But today they are appealing because medicine still can't cure things like cancer, so people feel they have nothing to lose and everything to gain.

CM: For all the skepticism that (we must conclude) pervades your being, do you care to 'fess up to any "weird beliefs" of your own--things you wished you DIDN'T believe?

MS: Sharon Stone.

CM: Thanks for your time.

MS: You're welcome. And remember, nothing is certain. But I'm not sure about that.

Charlie Meyerson is an award-winning Chicago journalist.

Check out the Chicago InterViews archive web page at http://www.meyersonstrategy.com/search/label/Interviews-archives

This material may be freely transmitted to others if it's transmitted in full, including copyright and subscription information.

Back to "InterViews" home page.

Sex, Lies, and Gossip

By Charlie Meyerson

Wednesday, September 30, 1998

From the archives: Resurrecting content from my first personal website, InterViews. Presented for historical reasons only. Not all links work. More to come. This was a guest entry by science writer Michael Shermer.

An evolutionary explanation for President Clinton, and our interest in him, reveals a baser side of human nature.

By Michael Shermer

Author of Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time

[To read our interview with Shermer, click here.]

Humans are, by nature, storytelling animals, as evidenced by the wealth of myths and tales we have been telling about our world and ourselves for thousands of years. But when you examine those stories closely, a number of common themes leap out, not the least of which is sex, lies, and the moral status of the perpetrators, victims, and bystanders. Most of us, most of the time, are bystanders (you can only have so many affairs and tell so many lies before being caught). But as seen on Bill's Black Monday, this does not prevent us from gossiping endlessly about other people's transgressions.
Gossip is the basest form of storytelling.

We all pretend to disdain gossip, but let's face it, it's fun talking about sex and lies, particularly when it is someone else on the hot seat. Why? In most hierarchical primate species the alpha male wins more copulations by virtue of being on top (metaphorically I mean). If he defects on his alliances by showing he is untrustworthy, however, his status may collapse and he may fall from grace. Sound familiar? In primates, status relationships are determined by an array of nonverbal forms of communication, such as grooming, staring, gesturing, and so on. In humans, language is our primary tool of keeping track of status, and gossip is what we call this tool. The etymology of the word "gossip," in fact, is enlightening. The root stems are "god" and "sib" and meant "akin or related." Its early use included "one who has contracted spiritual affinity with another," "a godfather or godmother," "a sponsor," and "applied to a woman's female friends invited to be present at a birth" (where they would gossip).

The word then mutates into talk surrounding those who are akin or related to us. Not surprising, we are especially interested in gossiping about the activities of others that most effects our status and the status of those around us, such as relatives, close friends, and those in our immediate sphere of influence in the community, plus members of the community or society that are high ranking or have high social status. And our favorite subjects of gossip are sex, cheating, aggression, violence, social status and standings, births and deaths, political and religious commitments, physical and psychological health, and the various nuances of human relations, particularly friendships and alliances.

But why, in our culture, do we gossip about total strangers, especially celebrities and other famous figures? The mass media makes these figures so familiar to us that they seem like our relatives, friends, and members of our community. Why would anyone care who President Clinton slept with? Because our Paleolithic brains are being tricked into thinking that President Clinton is someone we personally know and someone we should care about.

Perhaps we should. In those long-gone Paleolithic millennia we lived in small villages of approximately 150 people, where morality was enforced through shunning and ostracization, and gossip was the means of keeping track of who you could trust and who you couldn't. (It turns out that 150 is the average number of each of us knows and has in our personal address books.) Thanks to modern transportation and the mass media, we now live in a global village, perhaps not that different in principle from our those our ancestors lived in.

Our gossiping about Bill Clinton is how we are deciding the future of his status as our alpha male, because today it not only takes a global village, it takes a global leader.

Back to "InterViews" home page.

From Chicago ... InterViews: News, Interviews, Scoops, Things & Stuff Via the Ether

By Charlie Meyerson

Sunday, September 27, 1998

From the archives: Resurrecting content from my first personal website, InterViews. Presented for historical reasons only. Not all links work. More to come.

by Charlie Meyerson

Proprietor
and Otherwise Idle
Broadcast Journalist

Welcome to InterViews.

INTERnet. InterVIEWS.

Get it?

It's a little pilot project. An experiment.

Something to keep your Proprietor busy between JOB interviews.

Here's what you'll find in these electronic pages:
* News (scoops, courtesy of anyone who cares to share 'em with us);
* Commentary, from yours truly and friends--including my partner from my days at legendary progressive rock station WXRT-FM (93.1) in Chicago, Garry Lee Wright;
* Interviews, via the internet, with prominent authors of important books;
* Comments, criticisms and other great thoughts from you, the readers.

The idea is to create an extremely interactive forum--courtesy of the elegant designs of our host, DKA, the innovative Chicago software firm whose SceneMaker software powers this site for free. (As a matter of fact, you can make your own Scene--for free--by clicking the logo in the upper right-hand corner of this screen. But don't leave yet, OK?)

If all goes well, we'll prove together that a little site like this can, in this revolutionary time of ours, grow to be a major force in shaping the opinions and policies of a Great Metropolitan Area. If all goes not-so-well, I will have learned at least the ins and outs of HTML. And I will have wasted plenty of time designing and redesigning logos.

You can subscribe to InterViews by clicking the "register" button at the top right corner of this page; you'll be notified automatically any time something new shows up here. You can submit your comments by clicking on the "add a comment" button on any page. And you can write to InterViews by clicking the link on the right side of this page.

We look forward to hearing from you.

The Time Has Come...

By Charlie Meyerson

Saturday, September 12, 1998

From the archives: Resurrecting content from my first personal website, InterViews. Presented for historical reasons only. Not all links work. More to come.

Commentary on the Presidency

by Charlie Meyerson
Posted 98/09/12

Bill Clinton’s time is up.

For someone like me—someone who voted twice for Clinton, someone who wanted to believe, naively, the president’s assertion that there was “more to the story” than we’d heard—that’s a tough call to make.

But, love him or hate him, forgive him or condemn him, Clinton must go.

Much was made in the days after his primetime confession of the fact that he didn’t say the words “I’m sorry”; that he didn’t apologize to the nation or to his wife or to poor, misguided Monica Lewinski or to Congress.

That never was the real issue—as we know, now that he *has* said he’s sorry. The problem won’t go away.

Clinton’s credibility is shot. He is—at least in the political sense of the word—impotent.

As president, Bill Clinton faces two roads now, and you can stick a fork in both of them: He faces impeachment proceedings and possible removal from office. Or Congress gives him a pass, in which case he faces two years of public appearances plagued by protesters waving cigars in his face (a prospect brought to my attention by my former colleague Jenette Kerr.) Either road spells months of ineffective, halfhearted government.

Vice President Al Gore certainly carries some of the baggage of the president’s shame. And he faces the prospect of his own independent counsel investigation. But the chance that he might survive to run for another term or two gives him much more clout in Washington than Clinton, who remains a lame duck under the best of circumstances.

The Republican party might delight at the prospect of a Democrat limping through the last days of his term, an ineffectual presence on the campaign trail. But the nation deserves better.

Clinton’s administration would able to achieve far more without him—with Al Gore in the Oval Office—than it can ever hope to achieve with Bill Clinton in power.

Comments? Counter-View? Write here.

Charlie Meyerson is an award-winning Chicago journalist.

Entire contents Copyright 1998 by Charles Meyerson, <CMeyerson@mediaone.net>. All rights reserved. This material may be freely transmitted to others if it’s transmitted in full, including copyright and subscription information.

Back to InterViews home page.

Notes from the New Frontier: Cable Modems

By Charlie Meyerson

Friday, September 11, 1998

From the archives: Resurrecting content from my first personal website, InterViews. Presented for historical reasons only. Not all links work. More to come.

How I Spent My Summer Vacation

by Charlie Meyerson
Posted 98/09/11

Late in June, I took the plunge and signed up for a trial of cable company MediaOne's cable-modem access. If the cable company in your town -- as is the case in so many Chicago suburbs -- is offering the service, then you're truly on the cutting edge of this new technology, as documented in a May New York Times piece. The service lives up to the hype, for the most part:

* Amazingly easy -- and stable! -- access to the Internet (a 16-meg file-download in less than 2 minutes is the benchmark);
* No waiting for a connection -- you're online as soon as your computer's on and your browser's opened;
* No need to tie up a phone line.

One additional benefit to cable modems, documented in the Times' CyberTimes section: Internet service provided by cable companies may fall under the federal Cable TV Privacy Act -- giving those consumers extra protection not now provided to those who surf the 'Net via standard phone lines.

Cable-modem service still doesn't make the Internet as effortless as TV. It won't make your computer work faster, and the appearance of new images on-screen may not seem substantially faster than with a dial-up connection. But the heavy lifting of the Internet -- like the downloading of huge updates to browser software -- becomes almost effortless.

As a matter of fact, when my computer's hard-drive crashed a few weeks after getting my cable-modem (no connection, I believe), retrieving my vast collection of shareware and freeware off the Internet was a breeze. (I do wish I'd backed up more of the kids' homework and my private letters.)

It's been hard -- but fun -- to shake the feeling that I have to get off to free up the phone or to keep our phone bill down. That psychological shift may be the most challenging aspect of the service, based on my conversation with others. If you need Internet access at home for business reasons, this is a no-brainer -- with a few reservations:

(a) You're already getting at least some level of cable-TV service -- which typically brings the price down to $40/month (it tends to run around $50 otherwise);
(b) You dump your present Internet-access service (AOL or whatever, saving you about $20/month) and you dump (or cancel plans to buy) a dedicated phone line for your modem (at least $20 a month). You can also continue to access AOL quickly and easily through cable-modems -- at AOL's discounted $9.95/month "B.Y.O" rate.

And beware botched installations.

MediaOne, which admits its installers are still learning the ropes, sent out two guys who really didn't understand the system....or my Macintosh. They left without finishing the job, promising to have someone call me the next day.

No one called.

With the advice of a friend, I managed to get the system up and running in a couple of hours, but it was a week-and-a-half before I got all my technical questions answered -- and then they had to send out an installation guy because I discovered my connection speeds were only about half what they were supposed to be. (MediaOne's *phone* support was excellent.)

Still, the system's been up and running fine ever since. And MediaOne freely granted an extra (second) month's free service and $20 credit for my trouble -- a reasonable settlement, for which I didn't have to make a big fuss.

Because companies have several different sign-up offers, make sure you request something at least as good as the following:

* Free installation;
* Free cable modem;
* Free first month's service;
* No commitment beyond the free trial.

You will need an Ethernet card for your computer (if you don't have one already); depending on your computer, they'll sell you and install one for anywhere from $50-100. You could also buy and install your own for (maybe) less.

If you'd like more information, check out the MediaOne Express web page at http://24.128.1.116/express/central/twoway/how_it_works/index.html.

Techno-dweebily yours,

CM

Charlie Meyerson is an award-winning Chicago journalist.
Check out the Chicago InterViews web page at http://people.ce.mediaone.net/cmeyerson

Entire contents Copyright 1998 by Charles Meyerson. All rights reserved.
This material may be freely transmitted to others if it's transmitted in full, including copyright and subscription information.

Back to "InterViews" home page.

Strip Joint

by Charlie Meyerson InterViews Proprietor

An evolutionary explanation for President Clinton, and our interest in him, reveals a baser side of human nature.

By Michael Shermer

Author of Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time

Commentary on the Presidency

How I Spent My Summer Vacation

by Charlie Meyerson
InterViews Proprietor