5 ways to make the internet easier

Every day it feels that the internet finds new ways to infiltrate our lives. I honestly don’t even know what I’d do with a computer if I didn’t have the internet available. I mean sure I could still use it to write, but who would read it then? And if I had to use a phone book to figure things out I think I’d just give up and live the rest of my life as a hermit.

For most people the internet is a trusted friend. It offers support, solace, laughter, reminds us what the name of Willem Dafoe's charter in Boon Dock Saints was, and helps us build and maintain our group of friends. But for some people the internet is a frightening place that's next to impossible to navigate. Unfortunately using the internet and being an active participant of the web is becoming less of an option and more of a necessity. So for those of you who are new here, or for those of you who have never quite got the hang of surfing the web here is a list of 5 ways to make the internet easier to use.

5. Don't Be Afraid

The world wide web is not nearly as frightening as some might have you think. In reality it is a very fun, and for the most part, user friendly place to spend some time. We’ve all heard the identity theft stories, and the horror stories about viruses, worms, or bugs, but if you’re smart these are all very easy to avoid.

Being too afraid to do something has never got anyone anywhere. I used to hate fishing because if I actually caught a fish, I’d have to take the stupid thing off the hook. I was afraid of them, they're creepy, slimy, and their fins would always cut me. But rather than do it for me every time my dad made me face the fear and take the fish off the hook. I got pretty good at it and now I love fishing. If you’re afraid using the internet it’s the same as taking the fish off the hook. Be patient, and go at your own pace.

This rule might seem obvious to most of you, but I want to quell any fears that might be out there. If you use the next four tips and go at your own pace you’ll be using the web like a pro in no time, and you’ll see just what an amazing tool the internet can be.

4. Have Two Separate Email’s

This isn't necessarily a safety measure as much as it’s just something to keep the important things separate from the rest of the crap. I myself prefer Gmail from Google. In my opinion the easiest thing to do is sign up for two separate Gmail accounts. Make one your professional or personal email. Use your name or same variation of it. If it’s already taken don’t worry, there are tons of different ways to still have your name in your professional email. So if your John Smith and you want johnsmith@gmail.com but its taken just try johnsmith454@gmail.com. Make sure and use a number that’s going to be easy for you to remember. Also while you’re signing up for these things make sure to write your login information down in a small notebook that you can keep someplace safe. Your other email can be whatever you want. If you really love turtles try being turtlelover454@gmail.com.

The more comfortable you get using the internet the more you’re bound to branch out and try new websites. A lot of these websites will have you sign up for an account and send you crap emails. Use your secondary email to sign up for these websites. The best thing to do is only give your personal email out to friends, family, and for professional purposes. For everything else use your junk email address.

There are several different ways to manage both accounts at once, but in the beginning the easiest thing to do is keep them entirely separate. I recommend checking your personal email daily, and your junk email once a week. Most things in your junk email you’ll trash. And remember you can always change what your email is on any site you sign up for. So if you decide you want notifications from Facebook sent to your personal email you can always log into Facebook and edit your user account details.

3. Accumulate Trusted Websites and Use These For Day-to-Day Surfing

This is one of the easiest ways to stay safe while using the internet. The others are don’t open email from people you don’t know. And don’t open forwarded emails. There are sites that have very good track records out there. Amazon, Google, Best Buy, and YouTube just to name a few . The best thing to do is get a few websites that you trust for purchases, and a few that you enjoy visiting that are also trustworthy. Stick to these sites, especially in the beginning. Later on I’m going to talk about how to accurately use search engines to further expand your web horizons, but in the beginning find a few sites and stick to them.

I for example frequent six websites every day a few times a day. Two of them are forums, which I’ll talk about later, and the others are as follows: Digg (which you may want to stay away from till you’re a bit more comfortable), Zen Habits (one of my favorite sites) Life Hacker (indispensable), and Get Rich Slowly. Every morning I start off looking at these websites as well as checking my email. CNN is a good website for news, or BBC, just don’t use Fox News (I’m not even going to link to them). Ask friends and family about blogs that they read to get some ideas for blogs that you can frequent. And as I’ve said before we’re going to talk about how to use search engines to find your own sites.

2. Join A Forum

Forums, good ones, are invaluable. If you can join a community of people online that are willing and able to help you when you have questions or concerns you’ll be a pro in no time. If you have a hobby, or a particular author you like, or pretty much anything else you enjoy, there will be a forum full of people who also like it just as much. Here is a list of some of the forums in existence organized by category. The best thing you can do when joining a forum is sign up, and then wait to post. One forum I’m a member of makes users wait for three months before you can actually post anything.

Forum’s can actually be a little bit daunting. The thing to remember is that each forum is a lot like cliques were in high-school. They are little communities all to themselves with people who have “known” each-other in an online community for often times many years. A lot of forums will actually have yearly meet-ups as well where members of the form all travel to the same destination to get together with one another in the real world. If you’re a member of a forum that has this type of community these meet-ups can often be a blast and take you places you might otherwise never have gone.

Once you’ve spent a little while (3 months is an excessively long time) getting to know the new community you’ve joined you might want to post a thread (posts are called threads) introducing yourself. As time goes on you’ll get more comfortable making your own posts and commenting on other users posts as well. One thing not to do is be a user who only posts when you need help with something. To get the most out of a forum community you need to be a contributing member. Post interesting threads, and make worthwhile contributions to other users posts as well. If you are an active member you want be flamed for asking whether or not it’s safe to open an email you received or asking for tips to get rid of crab grass.

One final note concerning forums. There are always going to be assholes, sometimes called trolls, but if you spend some time learning about the users who post on the forum you’ll figure out who they are, and you can feel free to ignore anything they say. Just like anywhere in life, on a forum, you’ll have nice people, funny people, weird people, and assholes.

Good/Funny video for Forum use - How To Behave On An Internet Forum

1. Learn how to use search engines; How To Google

This is the single most important tool to have at your disposal while navigating the world wide web. If you can search properly you can find the answer to basically any question you might have. Learning how a search engine works is a nice thing to know. Google’s search engine works a little differently than some, but the general idea of using one remains the same. If you really want to be a nerd about it you can check out this link as well, it does a pretty good job of explaining it.

Anyway if you don’t wanna read all of the techie info about it the big thing to remember when using a search engine (I recommend Google) is the term “Key Words”. Google, or any other search engine, is not conscious, so posing questions for it like you would to a person is not a good way to search. Search engines are basically going to comb other websites looking for “key words” that you have used.

Here’s an example: If you were on a business trip in St. Paul, MN and you wanted to find a good Korean restaurant near you you should not type into the search engine, “What is a good place to find Korean food in St. Paul, MN”. Instead try typing in, “Korean cuisine St. Paul, MN”. These two phrasings actually produce very similar results truth be told, but I hope the idea comes across anyway. The idea to getting good results to your searches is cut out unnecessary words.

The other thing to realize while searching and using the internet is how to tell the difference between a good site and a bad one. This is a bad site. Good sites will look like this, or like this. That’s one of the great parts about Google. Their search engine organizes it’s results by how many other sites link to certain web-pages. So the very first link will not only be the best possible match for whatever your searching, but also the most popular site amongst the sites that fit your search criteria. Wow, that’s a mouth full, but that is how it works. Good sites are linked to by many other sites. Trusted sites are linked to by other sites, because no one wants to read a site that isn’t trusted.

Googling


I hope this helps you on your journey across the internet. Just remember that the internet isn’t that scary, help for anything is everywhere, it’s an amazing tool once you’ve learned how to use it, and as always, use common sense and you’ll be okay... Mostly :-)

Is Girl Talk Music?

First and foremost lets just all agree to shoot all of the lawyers. We can make a day of it. Sorry if someone in your family is a lawyer. Although with all of them out there just walking around that probably covers 98% of you. Still, it'll be for the best you'll see. After that's done we can all feel free to breathe again. Of course we'll still find ways to hate one another or any change that may come our way be it political, institutional or in the way we get our morning coffee. Maybe Caribou will come up with a new system where you can only order in 1337 speak through Twitter from a robot that wears a bowler hat and a monocle and speaks with a British accent saying shit like lift instead of elevator.

If you put me in a room with six objects for an hour I could come up with ten possible ways to change them each. I could also come up with a million reasons people would be pissed that something like a hammer now has a tiny LCD read out that tells you the time in Madrid and the humidity of Bangor Main. First complaint would probably be because you'd have to change the battery for the LCD to work. In reality of course who needs to know that trivial information (except for maybe a pirate lawyer and Stephen King), but people would still change the stupid thing. Why? IDK - mostly because it's there and we're just a few chromosomes away from throwing feces instead of pushing buttons on a small box to make a bigger box have different pictures and sounds. Christ if you want consistency and for nothing to change EVER lets just get a zoo to keep people in where they can hit a bar to get a nourishment pellet once every hour and the TV is constantly playing episodes of Celebrity Rehab or whatever other stupid show out there you find it okay to watch. Meanwhile I'll continue to eat different things for every meal, wear different pants every day, and oh yeah, TRY NEW THINGS!

So far none of this is in response to the New York Times article about Girl Talk and his new album. Whatever you think about this dude and his music (I for one dig it) lets just all agree that what he's doing is not that big of a deal. I mean we already had congress involved with steroids in baseball lets not have another horrendous waste of money trying to decide if what Girl Talk is doing is music or theft. Lets just agree that it's both and move on.

Except for there's money involved. And who likes money? Well, everyone I guess, I know I do. But, Lawyers! Lawyers love money too. In fact they all have a secret church that worships the stuff. But not in the good hardworking Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged sense, rather in the low immoral Enron sense. Maybe I'm generalizing. But who cares?! This is the internet, and I'm sure everyone will take issue with a lot of things anyone says here. Why? Because people love to take issue with stupid things because it helps them forget how boring and repetitive their stupid lives are. That's what I take issue with. Boring people wasting their existence worrying about whether or not I smoke while watching porn that I illegally downloaded.

Is it music? I say yes it is. It is because Girl Talk made me appreciate Busta Rhymes again. Because I wanna hear Korean pop singers backed by the song One from Metallica. Because what he is doing is further expanding our understanding of what music can be and how it can move us. How it can shake us. How it can make us want to get nasty and just boogie till there's no more Red Bull and the sun is about to rise!! It is because change is a good thing. Because change is a constant thing that will always happen no matter how much we want our children to stay young or Windows XP to still be in use. So we all need to get over it and embrace new things. Let us not forget our past so that we do not repeat the bad yes, but let us not be afraid to make new mistakes; new memories.

As far as the payment goes, I guess we still have to work that out. Or maybe people can quit being so greedy and just appreciate that their creation made someone else create something. Maybe they can be proud of the fact that they, for a moment, moved somebody away from the picture box, and into a fit of action.

But first, we must kill all the lawyers.