Positive Atheism Web Guide

Resources

  

The Index

( Now Soon in Five Files)

Index Index

(for the Index Entries)

Internet Projects

(Atheistic and Educational Web Resources)

  

Internet Projects

(Atheistic and Educational Web Resources)

Atheistic and Atheological Web Resources

Web Communities; Freethought Libraries; Tools for Atheistic Activists

General and Educational Web Resources

Things of Interest to Activists of All Stripes

Things to Do for This File

And Speaking of Projects...

This Very Web Page is a Project In Progress

  • What we were doing when this was last updated:
    • Continue work on Search Engines
    • RuleBar testing and consolidation TO BE CONTINUED!
  • More
    • Make Disclaimer CSS entirely self-contained.
      • In other words, put the whole thing on a separate file.
    • Create and fix Navigational Links.
      • Index Index and Internet Projects sections are done
      • Check the latter
      • Build the rest
    • Is it time to divide this thing into five files, yet?
      • Not until all the internal (intra-"Index #6" file) links are fixed
      • Not until all the external links have been tested
    • Keep struggling with Footnote container
      • MSIE Win 6 has a right margin problem
      • Check Footnote container for the Letters style sheet
  • Next
    • {DONE!!}
  • More Immediate Term
    • Still more consolidation of CSS
      • Is everything related to H-Tags together in one spot, yet?
  • Long Term:
    • Convert the vertical space reference from “whatever was convenient at the time” to a “top-adjust” standard. This means that all block-level tags, from the lowly [P] and [LI] tags to the [H1] through [H6] headers will reference their distance from whatever is above them. The [H3] tag, for example, will be losing the line above it and instead placing itself twelve points from whatever is above it.
    • Another idea: Convert links from UL and LI to DL, DT, and DD, with links being the DT and descriptions being the DD. See if this would allow us to still keep both on the same line, as they are now. In other words, see if we could make the DD follow the DT in the same line.
    • Consolidate the little tables to the right that contain graphic icons — with or without captions.
  • Completed Tasks
    • Searched for unwanted SPAN tags and deleted them.
    • All those nested BLOCKQUOTE tags {WERE} creating havoc for the right margin! {BUT NO LONGER!!}
      1. Remove{D} them.
      2. Adjust{ED} the remaining UL tags with [BloqMarLeft] Class Rules.
    • {WORKED} on the A-Tag colors!!
    • Place{D} (almost) all color declarations in the same special section.
      • All of them!
        • (almost)
      • Note{D} any irregularities in color section comments
      • This is crucial in case of color change or special colors file
      • PLEASE DOUBLE-CHECK
  • Consolidate AntiVirus Sections
  • Consolidate CSS and convert tests to document-wide use
    • (an ongoing concern)
  • A-Links and Targets
    • There are three different [A] Classes:
      • a ; a.aUtility ; a.aVeiled
    • There are four-plus-one different [LI] (or [P]) Types:
      • #IdxIndx [LI]
        • yielding, #IdxIndx a ; #IdxIndx a.aUtility ; #IdxIndx a.aVeiled
      • #IdxGenl [LI]
        • yielding, #IdxGenl a ; #IdxGenl a.aUtility ; #IdxGenl a.aVeiled
      • #TheLynx [LI]
        • yielding, #TheLynx a ; #TheLynx a.aUtility ; #TheLynx a.aVeiled
          • (or simply: a ; a.aUtility ; a.aVeiled — although the simplification is not necessary for convenience — like the use of the unmodified “a” tag is for the main links, making it a snap to add links later!)
      • Footnotes [LI]
        • [.DivFootnoteContainer] [A] ; [.DivFootnoteContainer] [A.aUtility] ; [.DivFootnoteContainer] [A.aVeiled]
      • Disclaimer [LI] (or [P])
        • A Whole New Ballgame (See Above)
        • See Above ("Make Disclaimer CSS entirely self-contained.")
  • Suggestion: Frames
    • There is no reason to shun frames just because some people don’t like them.
    • One problem is that the search engines point to the frames rather than the main page (of course). In lieu of an answer for this, we might implement a redirect to the main frames page.
  • Consolidate CSS and convert tests to document-wide use
    • (an ongoing concern)
  • Notes for DW Help Log: How to place a double-space after the first tag in an LI entry.
    • In Find and Replace:
      • Search:
        • Specific Tag = A
        • Without Attribute = Class
        • Inside Tag = LI
      • Action:
        • Add After End Tag =  &0032; (That is, the code for a nonbreaking space followed by a regular space, that is, the string, “  ”)
      • Options:
        • Ignore Whitespace = Checked
  
  
  
  

Soft Stuff

(Come and See! Grab It! Do It!!)

Expressions Artistic: Literature; Music; Art; Software

Plus Many Other Things that have Impressed Us To No End

Books and Motion Pictures

  • Powell’s City of Books “A great reason, in and of itself, to vacation in Portland, Oregon” –Cliff Walker (and numerous others)
  • American Book Exchange {BookSeller}  The American Book Exchange Website claims to list “45 million books: Used, Rare, and Out-of-Print”  PAM’s Choice when Powell’s doesn’t have it.
  • AnyBook4Less.com {BookSeller}  “The Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine.”
  • iChapters.com  (PAM Pick!)  offers brand new textbooks in electronic and print formats. “Electronic versions of college textbooks, including individual chapters, are available for immediate download at affordable prices. Only at iChapters.com can you choose to buy just what you need at the price you want to pay.
  • XLibris Publishing  “Print-on-demand” and online book and manuscript publishing services allow authors to self-publish books, picture books, e-books, and more.
  • Booksurge An Amazon subsidiary that offers inventory-free publishing (aka “print-on-demand”), a recent innovation that enables small-time authors to obtain big-name marketing power without mortgaging the family farm in the process.
  • Kingdom Kong Everything Kong, by the late Jeffrey Blair Latta.
  • Killer B’s: The 237 Best Movies You’ve (Probably) Never Seen {Book}  Excerpts from the book, from Impermanent Press (changes each week). See also:  New Discoveries Since the Publication of  “Killer B’s: The 237 Best Movies You’ve (Probably) Never Seen.”
  • Dictionary.com’s Online Bookstore {Bibliography}  This is simply a list of English Language guides and references that you can buy at your local bookstore or order from any Mom-and-Pop online bookseller.
  • Note: PAM recommends the “Encarta World Dictionary” (print edition) over all others, and recommends all others over those by “American Heritage” and “Merriam Webster’s,” offering two clues as to why this is our opinion:
  • For insight into the first clue, simply look up the word “atheism” (and “atheist”). In most dishonest reference works the Narrator figure will presuppose the theistic model over the atheistic model (or vice versa) rather than calling each a model or opinion. By assuming the validity of the theistic model (in theistic parlance, “by assuming the existence of God”), the Narrator implies that atheists “deny” this so-called truth! “Encarta” has the only entry whose language in this respect is overtly neutral.”
  • Our second clue can be seen by looking up the capitalized word “God” in the disputed reference work. If our supposedly neutral Narrator figure takes any sides on this most controversial subject (again, rather than calling each side a model or opinion), then we don’t even need to wonder whether the work is biased — that is, whether it’s even a bona fide reference work at all!
  • OpenOffice.org  (PAM Pick!)  This 2006 Open Source Product of the Year is a fully equipped, multiplatform, multilingual, no-cost office suite — kinda like “My Crow’s Soft Orifice” or “Corral Weird Perverts” — except that it doesn’t cost a pfenning! The Open Standards XML File Format alone makes this package worth having, even if mainly as a feel-good thing for supporting the Open Source concept. However, this package boasts all the great features standard among word processing suites. (It also features an SQL database package!!)
  • MetaPad Icon (by Cliff Walker)MetaPad  {Software}  (PAM Pick!)  Windows NotePad on steroids! While you’ll want to use NotePad to create MS-DOS batch (.BAT) files and Windows registry (REG) files, you’ll probably find yourself using this for just about everything else — including the creation of the files you eventually intend to save out in Notepad!
  • Windows NotePad is a plain text editor that saves out to the Standard Windows ANSI 1252 code page or to the now-universal Unicode format rather than MS-DOS ASCII. And that’s it! That’s its only advantage: pure ANSI 1252 (pre-XP) or Unicode (XP). If you’ve created a code file and want to make sure it will run properly in the Windows environment, then, by all means, fire up a copy of Notepad and open your code file; then save it back out again. You can rest assured that it’s the right stuff. Unfortunately, even with the improvements made in XP, NotePad’s user interface (UI) is still for the ravens.
  • MetaPad initially restored all the standard UI keystrokes that have become so familiar to Windows users that we can navigate the most surrealistic document imaginable — even while deep in the REM dream state.  (Hear that, PageMaker?  Hear that, Dreamweaver?  Hear that, WordPerfect?  Standardized Keystrokes! Standardized Windows User Interface! What a Concept!!)  Metapad had numerous extras, too, although just the bare-bones UI improvements over NotePad would have earned this gizmo the  (PAM Pick!)  honor! But the improvements have lately gotten wa-a-ay out of hand (Hooray!), to include language modules!

Music and Sounds

  • Roger McGuinn’s Folk Den  (PAM Pick!)  Completely renovated since we edited the last edition of our Web Guide!  Roger McGuinn’s distinctive voice, 12-string guitar, and love of folk music made The Byrds such a joy to listen to, particularly toward the end of their existence as a musical group as The Byrds evolved to become McGuinn’s backup band. (Check the two-record set that was mistakenly called (“untitled”), which was recently given a shot of steroids that results in an entire CD (an additional two records’ worth) of previously unissued material from the “untitled” era!) Within a month or three of our starting the project that eventually became Positive Atheism (autumn, 1995), Roger began recording and uploading one folk song each month to this incredible (and refreshingly raw) Web site! The Creative Commons Music Sharing License allows sharing and rebroadcast of this music under certain specific conditions!
  • Rate Your Music  (PAM Pick!)  Even if its only usefulness was as a source for album cover images for our MP3 tags, Rate Your Music would get rave reviews from us: “Forget Amazon: don’t even go there! Really! Instead, use Rate Your Music as your only source for large-sized cover-art!” –me
  • Ah, but that’s just the beginning! Rate Your Music is an online community of people who love music. The Rate Your Music slogan says, “Share your musical knowledge and opinions with others by rating albums and writing reviews.”
  • Rate Your Music features authoritative discographies (double-checked by We, The People), track listings (triple-checked by We, The People), release histories (quadruple-checked by We, The People), plus homegrown reviews (written by, you guessed it, We, The People). Rate Your Music is a textbook example of the site that gets the  PAM Pick  honors for being the epitome of how the Internet ought to be used as a medium! Bookmark the Rate Your Music Website today! We insist!
  • ReelRadio  (PAM Pick!)  If you’re enough of a “radio freak” (or professional) to know what air checks are, this is where most of them live that have been posted to the Web. Track down the jocks you loved listening to when you were so much younger.
  • For me, it was that harbinger of happiness Tom Maule! (RIP); it was the inimitably provocative Lee “Babi” Simms! (Duh-eee, which way did he go, George? Is he even working any more?); it was the refreshingly professional Bobby Ocean! — He’s still working!)
  • Listen to hour after hour of samples of the classic acts you’ve always respected (Wolfman Jack! Gary Owens!) chart the professional evolution of pure talent (start off with three decades of “The Real” Don Steele). Hear some truly one-of-a-kind radio (such as John Lennon spinning records on LA’s 93-KHJ, filling in for Charlie Van Dyke in 1974).
  • Any one of the dozens of unedited shows makes for a truly unique “oldies station” to put on in the background when you have company! (Be sure to toss them a donation when you do this so they can recover the cost of the bandwidth, as this is a one-man labor of love!)
  • See also: Boss Radio Forever.
  • Ots Labs We were so thoroughly impressed with this little plaything that we bought it practically sight unseen, although the demo versions are, for the most part, fully functional. (Some versions have a DJ shout “Ots” self-promotional spots in between songs -- every so often.) Play CDs and MP3s (etc) with this stuff!  Just do it!!
  • The phonograph get-ups graphically emulate a pair of (vinyl) turntables that you can actually scratch (!!) with your mouse! Use your mouse to make it sound like you’re spinning the record with your finger (“Wwaaah-ooowar-reh-bree-de-bede-bedebede-bede-be-bah-brroooww”). Change pitch and-or tempo and-or mechanical “turntable speed” (pitch plus tempo). Play an entire Beatles or Led Zeppelin CD backwards (!!) or just part of it. Set compression and EQ (settings only on the freebies, fine tuning available on the pay-for-it copies). There’s much more, including the ability to introduce flaws into the sound, such as the scratchy record or the wobbly old belt-driven turntable (!!).
  • What we consider its most important feature, as innovations and usability go, is the algorithm for creating automated (computerized) segues. Ots crawls through your entire collection and creates a unique map of each song that determines, with over 99 percent accuracy (by our estimation), the length of the “talk-up” and “talk-out” section timing.
  • “Talk-up time” (TUT) and “talk-out time” (TOT) is archaic radio “jock” talk for intro and outro. The figures for each song were written with a grease pencil or felt pen directly onto the record’s label, as any purusal through a bin of collectable 45s will show. The concept of TUT and TOT is just as crucial to a radio programmer today, although instead of a record label and an intimate relationship with the huge sweep-second-hand clock on the wall, everything gets spit out via digital readout — and at some places the segue points have been programmed into the songs themselves. Today’s DJ not only doesn’t need to know how to talk (Ahem!), there is a blanket of skills that a talentless on-air “talent” no longer needs to hone down to second nature before he could expect to deliver “that rhythm.”
  • And I say “he” because they were all men — smooth-voiced, confidence inducing, “one-of-us” men — every one! All of these unspoken-about, barely describable emotional skills were as crucial to the trade as any of the other skills.
  • Ah, these days when the movement of the sweep-second hand of a huge 14-inch clock six feet in front of you was second-nature to the point where you could simply glance at it out of the corner of your eye and the unconscious parts of your mind would take care of the rest: you knew, experientially and intuitively, how many seconds you had left!)
  • Gemm.com {Online Retail Vendor}  World’s Largest Catalog of Music! (Okay, now you can just forget about Amazon, Tower, CD Now, and all the others with those Gilliganesque Gotta-Get click-through links without which your music page “just ain’t shee-it”; here’s the more straightforward and easier to use and less exploitative staple to their alternative) “If you can’t find it here, fuhgeddaboudit!” –Rolling Stone ··· cookies ···
  • The Classical Music Archives {Music Service}  Many files can be downloaded at no cost, but a $25 membership fee per year brings access to all files. We’re curious to hear what the MIDI sequence of the entire Das Rheingold sounds like. (MIDI!? How could they do that!?) That’s not the only reason we would gladly accept a gift membership to this fascinating Web project — nor is it the main reason, even!
  • Tom Waits on His Cherished Albums of All Time The first in The Guardian’s “What the Stars Are Listening To” series has become a primary guidepost in our household when wondering what next should fill the various gaps in our selection.
  • Regarding Sinatra’s “In The Wee Small Hours” (Capitol: 1955), Waits muses: “Actually, the very first ‘concept’ album. The idea being you put this record on after dinner and by the last song you are exactly where you want to be. Sinatra said that he’s certain most baby boomers were conceived with this as the soundtrack.”
  • That last line is most certainly Waits’ typical leg-pulling bowl-sheet, especially considering that the year of this album’s release, 1955, was the same year that the so-called baby boomer generation stopped — uhh — “booming”!
  • Guide to Singing the Blues ··· cookies ··· busy animated ads ··· pop-up ads ···  deceptive “error message” ads ···

The Visual Arts

  • Jonathon Earl Bowser and  Mythic Naturalism  (PAM Pick!) {Personal Online Gallery}  “Dreamscapes of the Mysterious Connections between the Mythological and Natural Worlds: Original Oil Paintings and Fine-Art Reproductions available.” These works are especially enjoyable as an online experience.
  • Klaus Voormann Sketches The Beatles (Hamburg, 1962) (PAM Pick!) {Personal Onine Gallery} Herr Voormann did much more than create the cover for Revolver and later play a stint with John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band: He’s known “The Fab Four” since at least 1962 when, in Hamburg, the name of the game (acccording to a marginal notation) was to become the first band who, by jumping up and down frantically while they played, would make the rickety stage collapse beneath them. This was the running bet amongst the bands, according to Klaus,
  • Klaus played with the boys and sketched hundreds of fascinating drawings, ostensibly for the practice and because he enjoyed sketching. These now document one of the most important periods in musical history for this century. Those documents, if you will, are now for sale online as sketches and prints.
  • We will gladly accept a gift of the piece called "Hölle," showing a drunken John and Paul stumbling up the stairs to the street level, exiting this subsurface bar named, in the classic German, “Hell” or “Hole.” (“Hell Hole?) In lieu of that one, the sketch of John ambling down a deserted street in the pouring rain, his face betraying his eager willingness to jump into the middle of any “action” that might perchance cross his path.
  • Ouray Meyers {Regional Gallery} Spirit Runner Gallery in Taos, New Mexico, features the work of Ouray Meyers, whose luminous paintings reflect the light and vibrancy of pure color. Ouray utilizes the technique called Giclee (“zhee-clay”: French for ‘spray of ink’) wherein each droplet is one-quarter the diameter of a human hair. The full color spectrum (plus ultraviolet inks, where appropriate) allows for the portrayal of the finest detail and vibrancy of the artist’s original image and maximum resolution of color density. No Pam Pick but only because the online experience cannot begin to do justice to the works themselves.
  • AllPosters.com {Online Retail Vendor}  “The World’s Largest Poster and Print Store!”
  • No, they don’t have the Jimi Hendrix “green smoke” blacklight poster, marketed at Fed Mart and other ultra-commercial venues circa 1969. This is a screened ink drawing of the image from the famous photo of Jimi holding the KCBQ medallion. In this adaption, this green, ultra-psychedelic, “Wheels Of Fire”-like pen-drawn smoke is seen wafting from the medallion, rising up and becoming one with his by-then substantial Afro.
  • I lost my copy (along with two originals from Thierry Chatalaine’s teen years: we grew up together) in a burglary at 30th and Grant in 1987 or so, and I want another one! (I’ll take the Chatalaines back, too, while you’re at it!) I have a blacklight poster with the same image of Jimi, published later but definitely derived from the green smoke poster. This one, however, shows an orange and yellow geometric sunburst behind his head. Of course it’s just not the same as the green smoke original.
  • The Postcard Man {Online Retail Vendor} It’s just as the title suggests, of course! Spendy, but you won’t find much of this stuff on sale elsewhere. As one might expect with the tendency of people to steal material for their own Web sites, the examples of the various cards in stock are almost too tiny to appreciate.
  • Screen Savers A2Z {Online Retail Vendor} As the (misspelled) name implies, RatLoaf.com lists virtually every screen saver in existence (except, of course, the ever-elusive and possibly nonexistent flying toasters spoof). Many are links to the sites where you can get them, but many are direct links to A2Z’s own local downloads (this way ensuring a higher rate of working links).
  • TwoFifty {Online Gallery} “This site is a showcase for digital artwork, strictly 250×250 pixels in dimensions and on various platforms including GIF, PNG, JPEG, Java, DHTML, Flash, and Shockwave.”
  • Web Gallery of Art, Hungary {Online Gallery} This “is a virtual museum and searchable database of European painting and sculpture from the Gothic, Renaissance, and Baroque periods (1100–1850). The Gallery currently features over 13,900 reproductions” as of September, 2005. Includes commentaries and biographies.
  • WebMuseum, Paris {Online Gallery} “Some companies may be trying to get a monopolistic grab on arts and culture, developing a pay-per-view logic, and shipping out CD-ROMs while trying to patent stuff which belongs to each of us: a part of our human civilization and history.” Includes The Catacombs of Paris.
  • The Worldwide Art Gallery {Online Gallery} “Discover the world of great artists in history in the ... Art Education section.” ··· cookies ···

Things and Other Stuff

Food and Drink
  • The Coffee Fool Unless you are ready to forever change your outlook on coffee, how it’s made, what it tastes like, and, most importantly, what a big scam the Arabica bean industry really is, then steer clear of this Web site.
  • TheKeoSanOfficialWebsite This is where we found the phenomenal KeoSan Mineral Water System (!!)
  • Herbal Medicines and Dietary Supplements: Information for People with Heart Disease  (PDF)  Heart Center of The Rockies Pourdue Valley Health System
  • The ‘Joy of Cooking’ Recipe Swap Board Hundreds if not thousands of excellent online recipe swap boards vie for your attention.
  • And there are so many cookbooks both in and out of print that until the recent name change, an entire bookstore dedicated to selling only cookbooks has thrived near my home in Portland, Oregon, for almost two decades (Powell’s Books for Cooks). Still, in all the various households I’ve called “family,” “home,” and the like, there’s only ever been one truly dog-eared cookbook: “Joy of Cooking” by Irma S. Rombauer, her daughter, Marion Rombauer Becker, and Irma’s grandson, Ethan Becker.
  • Of course, in keeping with its own reputation, “Joy” has over a dozen spinoff books, covering such topics as breakfast and brunch, grilling, pies and tarts, vegetarian, pasta and noodles, the all-important staple of the human species, chicken, party foods and drinks (soft and hard), and our favorite here at PAM, cookies. ··· (speaking of which), Cookie City ···
  • Yankee Harvest Organic Garden and Tasty Kitchen Recipes I promise you that the food is much better than the grammatical styling!
  • iGourmet This online catalogue is a whole world full of imported cheeses, honey, seafood and meats, veggies and dry goods, sauces and spreads, oil and vinegar, coffee and tea, desserts and sweets, and a host of cooking and serving implements you’ll find nowhere else (except the towns and villages where the various items came from). Enjoy! ··· Cookie City ···
  • Voilà Catering’s Favorite Locations in Portland, Oregon.
  • I was trying to find the correct spelling of the French interjection “Violà!” for a letter I was writing to a friend. My computer’s thesaurus only wanted to talk about a rather large fiddle. I didn’t stick around for the part about the giant banjo!
  • Per my habit, I quickly resorted to my favorite spelling corrector, the Google search engine: if what you enter isn’t a word, Google makes suggestions for you; if it’s the wrong word, you’ll notice this just as quickly. I placed the string “viola” into the Search field and proceeded to skim-read my first page of results, satisfying myself, after finally discovering my spelling error [blush], that I’d found the information I sought.
  • One listing stood out from the crowd, however: Voilà Gourmet Catering, operating out of my home town of Portland, Oregon. Yes, we do host one of the top culinary institutes in the World, along with our first class Chiropractic College. For this reason, Portland is aswim in fancy restaurants and neck-wringers. So it makes sense that one would find several top-notch catering services, too!
  • The site for Voilà Gourmet Catering features one page that I found most fascinating and have visited several times since: an impressive list of rentable rooms and domains for parties and events in around our hometown of Portland, Oregon, and Vancouver, Washington. Find the link on the NavBar for it, because we can’t get you there with a simple link without disrupting the frames thing they’ve got going on their site.
  • The History of Eating Utensils From the Department of Anthropology at the California Academy of Sciences, which houses the Rietz Collection of Food Technology. This collection contains nearly 1,400 items assembled by inventer and food industry entrepreneur Carl Austin Rietz. During his many travels (ostensibly for business), he collected a wide variety of implements used in the production, processing, storage, presentation, preparation, and serving of the World’s foods. A large portion of this collection consists of eating utensils, including tableware and portable eating sets. The variety of forms displayed by many items in the Rietz Collection document the history and evolution of such common utensils as forks, knives, spoons, and chopsticks.
  • How to Use Chopsticks A guide for White people from echopsticks.org (yup!). Includes animated graphic. (Cough!)‘
Games and Diversions
  • Web CrosswordsWay cool! From the Bored.com folks. Flash™ highly recommended. ··· cookies ··· busy animations ··· Popup City ···
  • April Fool’s Day Pranks The anti-hoax activists at the Snopes “Rumor Has It” Urban Legend Reference Pages have assembled a merry list of memorable, historic, and just-plain-funny pranks that have been pulled on April First throughout the World. Notice: This upcoming April First, for example, “Positive Atheism” Magazine plans to announce that there really is a God.
  • New Grounds This is where our favorite home-made, subversive, Flash-based games live, including the controversial HamsterBlast. (Git yer sub-mo-sheen and blast ’em to Kingdom Kong, I say!) There must be at least a thousand different ways to kill, maim, humiliate, etc, Brittey Spear (and any number of other teen and pop icons roundly despised by the self-starting, refreshingly alert adolescents who walk among us). Don’t even go there unless you promise to try Tom Fulp’s Telebubby Fun Land spoof. Hilarious!
  • Sextoys: A Brief History {Article}  Speaking of “Soft Stuff,” this one’s from clitical.com (yup!) and is fully illustrated.

Anti-Virus; Anti-Spyware; Anti-Adware

Commercial

(pay good money for what you can get without cost)

  • Ad-Watch Simply the best adware system. Note that prevailing wisdom tells us to use more than one adware snuffer, that it is unwise to depend upon just one. There is a no cost version, too, but we opted for the “Pro” edition of the pay-for-it edition (although we cannot for the life of us remember why).
  • eTrust AntiVirus Computer Associates International. We would probably use this product were it available as a download. ··· cookies ···
  • Panda Antivirus We used to use their comprehensive product, but lately it makes connecting to other computers nigh unto impossible. Well, we can’t figure it out!
  • AVG Anti Virus ··· cookies ···
  • Kaspersky Anti-Virus ··· cookies ···
  • Norton AntiVirus Very popular, we hear! Our computer dealer so adamantly refused to believe that we don’t use any anti-virus “protection” that he tried to refuse delivery of our machine without it.
  • (Well, he means commercial protection. Our protection consists of wise use of the Internet plus a hard-won sense of savvy plus an equally well-earned and thus up-to-the-minute awareness of what’s going on.)
  • When I refused to buy Norton, he made me promise to buy something. When I further refused, he tossed a copy of Norton into the box, wrapped only in a blank paper sleeve, looked at me one more time, shook his head.
  • “Sheesh!” I smiled.
  • Then I told him, within earshot of every customer in that room, “Only unwise people ever get infected with a computer virus, and only monumentally stupid people ever get infected a second time. I’ve been infected already, and the lessons I learned from that experience mark my immunity.”

‘Free is a Very Good Price!’

 –Tom Peterson, Flat-Topped TV Dealer

  • Ad-Watch Simply the best adware system. Note that prevailing wisdom tells us to use more than one adware snuffer, that it is unwise to depend upon just one.
  • AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition Installs on Your System ··· cookies ···
  • Computer Associates International (UK) ···cookie city···
  • CastleCops Security Professionals (formerly Computer Cops) ··· cookies ···
  • F-Secure  Six-Month No-Cost Trial Subscription ··· cookies ···
  • McAfee 90-Day No-Cost Trial Subscription  (MS Only) ··· cookies ···
  • Panda Software 90-Day No-Cost Trial Subscription  (This was once our system of choice, but lately we’ve been unable to use numerous utilities and applications even with Panda simply installed and not running; no telling how we would have fared with Panda actually running!)
  • Active Scan Panda’s Online Virus Scanner
  • Windows Defender The new name for the Beta 2 of Microsoft’s anti-spyware program reflects its maturity toward full release status. While other Microsoft protection systems now sport a price tag, this puppy is still no-cost (as of 24 February 2006).
  • PestPatrol The pay-for-it version is a full-on spyware and adware removal tool. The evaluation version scans and reports, being fully up-to-date, but it will not clean up your system for you. This in itself can be very useful for some. With a little work, you can use the evaluation version to identify the culprits while you remove them yourself. Be very careful, however: read all of PestPatrol’s warnings before you use it, and when cleaning up your system, try to use the Windows Uninstall feature first, before resorting to more stringent measures. ··· cookies ···
  • Symantec (aka Norton) 90 Day No-Cost Trial Subscription  (Warning: Do not assume that you’ll be able to fully remove any Symantec product from your machine once you’ve installed it! You will have a much easier time second-guessing that tattoo you got when you were younger.) ··· cookies ···
  • Trend Micro:  Virus Encyclopedia Search  ||  Virus Hoaxes  ||  Free Online Scan  ||  90-Day Free Trial (MS Only)
  • Housecall “Scan Your PC” Trend Micro’s Online Virus Scanner

One Way to Save Money

(our story)

  • One option for saving a small amount of cash for these grotesquely overpriced utilities is to find one of those (we think scrupulous — well, we hope) internet retailers who sells OEM versions as a slight mark-up from what computer dealers pay for this stuff.
  • A few years ago we reduced the cost of Norton Internet Security to about half its download price (which was still over twice its true value, even if the product worked) by purchasing a copy of the Turkish-slash-Israeli version on CD.  Now, it turns out that Norton Internet Security is one turkey of a program, regardless of which group Symantec™ targeted as the program’s potential users.
  • Be aware that these versions hardly ever come with tech support!  At all!  (Of course, nothing that Symantec™ puts out includes tech support anyway! Defective out of the box? Return it and go with Panda or one of the others! This is why it pays to buy from someone with a no-questions-asked return policy.)
  • Put it this way: we were eventually able to gain access to our computer, wrest control of it from Norton Internet Security, and uninstall the bulk of this little Terrorist-on-Disc. A full six months later we discovered that some little Symantec™ something-or-other was still loading itself every time we boot! Now, it wasn’t using any CPU resources, just RAM; but still, these things ought to uninstall themselves completely with the Windows Add-Remove Programs feature. Any time this doesn’t happen, the wisest move that the consumer can make is to suspect foul play on the part of the software publisher.
  • Nevertheless, our little horror story is about Norton and Symantec™, not about where we purchased the thing! If you want a program (Norton™ or otherwise) but do not like the asking price, the work involved in tracking down one of these retailers might pay off in a big way.
    • This anecdote is flawed only in the fact that we really had no business purchasing the product described. Otherwise, we would have been customers of the completely satisfied variety, at least in this one case. Be aware that not all OEM versions are complete! Be aware that few OEM versions are supported by the publisher, that burden often falling on the OEM supplying it.

The Ins and Outs of Your Inbox and Outbox

E-Mail Tutorials

(like we even need eMail lessons! — or do we!?)

  • Taming eMail From the very same Leo who brings us the wonderful “Ask Leo!” e-list:
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  • ‘As I type this, my inbox is empty. Zero messages.’
  • —slogan of the Taming eMail list and site
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  • Dismayed to discover just how many people consider their Inbox a major source of frustration (Me! Me!), Leo took it upon himself to rethink his entire eMail regimen to the end that he might be able to describe to others just what he does to make himself the last person on Earth to start sputtering and sniveling about an unruly Inbox.
  • Hotmail Tips Another brainchild of Leo. Since we don't use Hotmail (and won't use Yahoo), we can only say that Leo is top-notch in everything he does (that we do know about). Having perused the site, however (simply a collection of articles relating to no-cost eMail in general and Hotmail specifically), we can say that apart from the specifics (mouse-clicks and keystrokes), much of what he says about Hotmail is at least applicable to most the others. Again, this does not count the specifics, such as "click the icon that says ______" etc: obviously the specific instructions differ on each system.

No-Cost eMail, Good and Bad

  • The SpamCon Foundation Get your disposable eMail addresses here, ladies and gentlemen! “Provided in cooperation with ClicVU.”
  • Netscape WebMail The netscape mail site requires that you accept cookies that come from sites other than their own. Brrrrrr! ··· cookie city ··· requires Java ···
  • Google G-Mail Google’s attempt at doing ad-supported eMail with the same conscientious and comprehensive care and caution by which we know them on