If my math is right, Bill Gates owes me $1.78 million!

A few years ago an email started it's way around the Internet that was, supposedly, from Microsoft.  In this email, it stated that Microsoft had placed a tracing mechanism in the body of the message and that Microsoft was going to pay $1 for each person that received the email because of you.  The idea was that you might send it to four people ($4), and those four might send it to four more ($20).  Five generations later, Microsoft owes you $21,844!

There are several different versions of this email and all of them are hoaxes.  I know, I know... It's unbelievable to think that something you receive in your email might not be pure facts. 

One of the more recent emails being forwarded to hither and yon shows several pictures of muslim people demonstrating.  This email says that the photos are from a demonstration in London that was titled the "Religion of Peace Demonstration".  The photos depict several hundred protesters holding signs that are not exactly... what's the word... "friendly."

However, this email is only a half-truth which, according to the way my Dad raised me, is far from a complete truth.

The pictures in this email were taken on February 3, 2006.  There was, in fact, a demonstration on this day in London, but it was to protest the political cartoons that were originally published in a Danish newspaper and later reprinted in several other publications.  These "cartoons" were very offensive to Muslims world-wide.  (Click here to read more on this story.)

Emails of this kind are becoming more and more common.  The old axiom that, "You can't believe everything you read," stays especially true for email. 

Now, I have to go check  my Hotmail account... I'm expecting some information from the Prince of Botswana who needs my bank account information so that he can escape the military coup that is after his money.

You're Online, But When Are You Going to Start USING the Internet?

When people get online, most of the time they do one of two things: read their email or use a search engine. But how many of you really know how to use a search engine? Sure using a search engine is easy. You open the page, enter what you're looking for in the box and hit the search button. How hard is it?

Well, you're right, but there actually are a lot more features built into search engines than that, and knowing what they are and how to use them will help you harness the vast amounts of information that are on the Internet.

There are many search engines on the Internet: Google, MSN, Yahoo, Lycos and quite a few others. (There's even one that's named after a dog that "fetches" the information you're looking for... sheesh). For the use of this article I'll be using Google. I prefer Google because of its simple interface.

This AND That OR The Other

In every programming language I know, every single one has something called "operators". Operators are words such as "and" and "or", that help describe the results you are trying to get from whatever datasource you are using, such as a database or in this case Google. (Ok, ok... I'm on a plane right now and I can already see my wife's eyes glazing over, so I'll get back out of the weeds.)

Let's say I'm trying to find out why my dog insists on chewing on the window ledges in the kitchen when we leave him home alone. (No, that is not funny.) Now, our dog is a pureblood mutt, Beagle and Terrier mix, so I go to Google and I type in this query: 

beagle terrier chew alone

Note the number of results... quite a few, and at first glance most of them aren't very relavent. Now I could stop right there and spend the rest of the afternoon going through these results myself, however, that would probably start to impose on my bike riding time so let's try something else instead. I'm going to get Google to sort through these for me.

With the first search I ran, Google read it like this: "beagle AND terrier AND chew AND alone". Well, I know that there aren't going to be any results that are thatspecific, so let's use the OR operator to tell Google what I really meant. This query is going to look much different from the first, but just follow along and I'll explain. So here's what our query looks like now:

(beagle OR terrier) chew alone

Wow! What a difference a couple of words make. Now Google knows almost exactly what I was searching for. Notice that if you don't use any operators, the search engine assumes that you mean to put an AND between each word. But by writing our query this way, Google understands that I mean to search for "chew and alone and either beagle or terrier." (Wish you knew about that back in college, don't you?)

Ok, one last thing. What if you have a Great Dane and needed to find a kennel for him? If you just enter those words, then you'll be searching for "Great and Dane and kennel". But you could make that search even more specific by just adding quotes. Try this method whenever you are searching for something that has a proper name:

"Great Dane" kennel

With these features that are built into almost every search engine, you'll find information faster and get back to whatever is more important.