
  Alice Goes Surfing                     (c) 1995 by Peter Neuendorffer



  I called up Alice to tell her we were going Net Surfing. When she showed
  up at the house in a scandalous bikini, I told her it was not that  kind
  of surfing. "Of course, stupid" she retorted, "I am not your usual male
  bimbo.  I'm on my way to a celebrity wedding."

  "Oh," I said wordlessly,

  "Press any key to continue."  And we settled down to getting ready to go
  Net Surfing. We got Winsock and Netscape for Windows, and signed up for a
  trial TIA access on the Channel One BBS for the World Wide Web.

  After wrestling with where to put the password (it goes in the Winsock
  program, not the .ini file) and thirty or forty attempts getting nowhere
  because the addresses were wrong, we were connected to the Mosaic
  Homepage. Off to Yahoo to do a search on Alizankruplatz (Alice's last
  name).  This brought up three scholarly papers about Nebulae to be
  presented at Andromeda University next year. "That's my cousin Al!" Alice
  said gleefully. "Great search key! Not too many of us."

  Next we searched on Bob Dylan and read the lyrics to his new song Dignity.
  Then back for a hopeless search on "Love" (12945 entries found). Then the
  new Star Trek Movie, which didn't work when you clicked the starship
  control panel. Next we went to the Central Intelligence Agency for a dry
  history of the CIA and a reading of the CIA credo and motto. The aerial
  picture of the CIA did not come through.  If the omission was by design,
  we don't know.

  We checked out the Channel One home page and noted that my program
  MBTA126A.ZIP was not in the FTP file directory, and I have since cajoled the
  Sysop there into including this indispensable item. Then we read more than
  we wanted to know about the Naval official time clock, that has Cesium
  something or other, and saw a picture of the clock, which looked a lot like
  a large filing cabinet with a TV set. We did not know about the famous
  working Coffee Pot which is broadcast in time slices 24 hours a day, or we
  would have looked for it.

  We looked at pictures of the comet landing on Jupiter (or was it Saturn)
  that looked like orange billiard balls with little spots. We read some
  software sales catalog. Then we did a search on "Alice," and found this is
  a fruitful area with other fictional Alice's in Australia and England.

  When we were all done we vowed to send off a check to Channel One for
  access when we got paid for our first business venture,  - very soon now.
  Alice left for her beach wedding, as I settled down to listen to WMJX with
  songstress Vanessa Williams et al, and to re-read Slaves of New York.

                                 *   *   *


  Peter Neuendorffer is a DOS/Windows programmer. He is a contributing
  writer for WindoWatch who provides us with serious commentary on software
  and programming languages as well as keeping Alice's friends up to date
  about her doings. Peter is putting Borland's Delphi through its paces and
  will be reporting on it very soon.



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