Email
Graphic Source: Stock.xching

There are so many things to love and hate about the Internet and Email. When someone talks about a love hate relationship, nothing could be truer than our relationship with this relatively new technology. The hate part is easy to figure out, I am sure that many of you have had the same experiences that I have. I may get more occurrences than most of you, because of my increased exposure with the website and all that. I think that just letting criminals do whatever they want on the web is a total disgrace. None of the countries involved with the net seem to think that the problem is important enough to enforce their laws upon those of their citizenry that are running all sorts of scams. I remember reading where a Nigerian government official, Nigeria is famous for being the home to many scams, stated that it was the fault of the victims that fell for the scam, because they were greedy. In some cases that might be true to some extent, but not entirely and not for all. Some of our elderly citizens might really believe it, when they are told that they inherited some money and to get it they needed to send a few hundred dollars to some supposed lawyer to facilitate the transfer. I really shouldn't just say the elderly, that is unfair, because there are others that have fallen for this also.

One of the most incredible things that I have observed is fraudulent email being sent to me using my own name and address. Many of you who come to my website must have seen the notice that I was forced to put up telling people that I don't send out email, so if they get anything from me asking for money or selling something, not to click on any links, send any money, or buy anything. I have tried to stop these emails in the past, but it is too big a problem to do. When I seen them coming from places like PayPal and Chase, I realized that if they can't stop them, what chance do I have with a one man operation? Email certainly is not all bad however. This is probably one of the handiest things to come along in a hundred years or more. Can you imagine if you have to write letters instead of using email? Sometimes it is far easier to shoot out an email than to make a phone call and as we know it is cheaper, since it is free. There are times when people only have a few minutes and don't want to engage in long discussions. Email fits this bill wonderfully. Another good thing about it is that it has become almost universal, meaning that almost everyone has an email address. Having said this, some people have too many and others don't check their email very much.

According to my email, I have won different lotteries thousands of times, inherited money from overseas hundreds of times and even had my email address found by lonely women at least a hundred times a year. The emails state that companies like Microsoft and Home Depot and Sears have decided to give me thousands of dollars, because they picked my email address out of a hat. I would like to know what my email address was doing in that hat in the first place? Then there are all those supposed companies that want me as a partner. They promise that this will increase my sales on the website tremendously. I guess they might be right on this one since I don't sell anything to start with and have no advertising on the website. I have even been offered a wife from Russia. I don't think my current wife would appreciate that very much. On the plus side, I have been contacted from time to time by some very interesting people who I never would have met, if it weren't for email. As a matter of fact, when I contact people to see if they want to give an interview, I do it by email.

Internet
Graphic Source: Stock.xching

The Internet is an entirely different thing. There are an awful lot of what I refer to as BAD Websites out there. They are sitting there just waiting to dump some horrible virus, or trojan onto your machine. Others are not the ones that you think they are. They look like the genuine website that you wanted to go to and yet they are only a clever copy put online for some nefarious purpose. To combat this some of the web browsers can be set to pick out the ones that have been reported so far. There are also attachments available to your web browser that will let you know when you hit a bad website. One of these is Macafee Site Advisor, which I use and find very useful. There is another that can be added to Firefox that I don't like and is often at odds with Macafee and that is Web Of Trust or WOT. I am sure there are others out there, but I haven't searched for them. PC Tools Spyware Doctor with AntiVirus and the free PC Tools ThreatFire are really good running together and eliminate much of this threat from these places.

Another problem is the content on some of the websites. If you are looking for a software program that is downloadable, you have to be very careful where it comes from. I enjoy downloading and trying freeware. I have found in my long experience with computers and software, that some freeware programs can be very good and rival and are even sometimes better than the commercial ones. Examples of a couple are Audacity, the audio manipulation program, Infanview the photo manipulation program and Open Officer the replacement for the Microsoft Office suite. Many years ago I was a freeware author and distributed my programs through the Internet. The software was written to run on the Amiga computer, a computer that was far ahead of its time. Maybe that is one of the reasons that I appreciate freeware so much. I have a lot of it on my computer and the stuff that I have is very useful. Some of the drawings that I do from time to time, like the saucer over the O'hare Airport was done with a freeware program called Paint.Net. Even the audio files from Roboreader are created with a freeware program called Balabolka and spliced together with another freeware program called MediaJoin. My transfer program for sending files to the website is freeware and is called CoreFTP Lite. So you see, freeware from the Internet can be very useful.

I also find the Internet is an incredible source for ideas on articles. Sometimes I will spend awhile browsing it and I usually come up with a few ideas for future articles. Hey it isn't easy writing a new article every day and if it wasn't for the Internet, I probably wouldn't be able to do it. There are an awful lot of great resources out there. One problem is that there are also an awful lot of bad resources out there too. One has to make an intelligent choice on what is baloney and what is accurate. That can usually be done by checking other known sources and seeing if they agree with what you have found. I have to say that all in all, we are very lucky to be living in the times that we are. There are so many resources available to us, along with so much entertainment. Years ago all you had was a radio, newspapers and a few toys. Today people have television, the internet, Wii, XBox, Nintendo, Playstation, computers, the Internet, Email, dvds and more. We are truly living in the world of instant communication and fun, with a few thorns in our bed of flowers. The thorns are what I spoke to you about above. Well I have to go now, I have a lot of emailing to do and some sites to search.