www.title.com (Internet Surfing)

Member Name: triplecthegame

Product:	Internet Surfing
Date:	19/09/01 (135 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: getting information, a chance to get new friends, find dooyoo!

Disadvantages: time consuming if you don't know what you're doing

Hey you, pssssssst, yeah you over there, I´ve got a secret for you, do you know what?, I like to surf the Internet, you know?, how do you know?, oh, well, um, yes, the whole dooyoo membership thing?, well theres more to the Internet than dooyoo you know?, and thats what I´m here to show you now.

See although I personally love dooyoo, I do use quite a few other websites, it all started in March of last year, when I finally got a modem installed in my PC, I wasn´t going to use the Internet much, perhaps the odd football website here, maybe a discussion site about a couple of my favourite TV shows there, but it´d only be the odd half an hour when I got a chance, nothing too major and indeed when I started out online thats the way it was, well it had to be, I was paying a charge by the minute so I had to be clear and concise in what I wanted and where I went when I went online, but it wasn´t long before I´d started talking to people at my then work-place about how I´d found a couple of websites that had interested me, one of them suggested online gaming, `hows about a little game of Delta Force 2 some time Chris' was the question that came around, so before long we´d agreed that when a couple of us had a bit of spare time online we´d get a game going, the next suggestion came around that I get myself Yahoo Messenger so we can know when we´re all online, well that was it - being online took on a whole new meaning.

Now then how can one tiny little program like Yahoo Messenger be the result of my being online taking a new turn?, well simple, I had to get a Yahoo id to get Yahoo Messenger and, um, well I had to test the new nickname out didn´t I?, So off I toddled into Yahoo Chat knowing of all the scare stories, such as Internet Stalkers, Strange people making out they´re somebody they´re not and so forth, but I wasn´t going to say anything was I?, I was just going to sit there quietly, don´t attract suspicion, don´t let any of these freaky people who
sit in here all night get to me, just test the id and that would be it, hah!, more fool me, first night I went in I was fine, but the second night I slowly started to get involved, I was sat in a Movies Chat Room and I was interested in getting involved in the discussion, and before long I had a strange little box on my screen, it was a private message, from someone claiming to be a 17 year old female fan of the Scream Trilogy of movies, now nothing of `that´ kind of chat happened, it was just 2 fans of a certain movie sat talking, only they´d never met `face to face´ but it didn´t matter, I was having a laugh and enjoying myself, in fact the online game with my work-mates was the last thing on my mind, this carried on a few nights and each session was getting longer and longer, sitting there finding new friends, adding the occasional one to my Yahoo friends list, it soon became obvious that if this carried on then I´d be facing a huge phone bill, it needed remedying.

It was time to find an 0800 Internet access, but still I wasn´t going to be using the Internet that much, so for cost-saving purposes we found a service that gave free access in the evenings and at the weekends, I mean now I´d found myself trying to get into a few `get-rich-quick´ schemes on the Internet, every time I found somebody offering a couple of pounds/dollars/pesetas/other strange foreign currencies that was it, the site was bookmarked and I´d be online all the time in the hope of finding `the next big thing´, or failing that a free sample of something or other be it MP3`s, T-shirts (always handy in the winter) or anything else I wanted it. By now we were looking at 3-4 hours a day online and this was even before dooyoo came along.

This carried on for a while, searching freebie sites and nothing else, talking in the Yahoo chat-rooms and e-mailing back and forth with all my new-found friends, then on June 25th 2000 my whole online world changed, dooyoo came along, as had happ
ened many times before, I saw the pound signs and started to churn opinions like there was no tomorrow, however this particular opinion (that you´re reading now) isn´t about dooyoo itself, so lets just say that this carried on for a while before I started to realize that this wasn´t your average hit and run website, I had to put a bit of work into it, before long rather than sitting at my screen churning out whatever I could find to write on all the time I went back to the old hobby of surfing around different sites, reading things, generally looking up sites that I could enjoy, I´d got to talk to a few of my fellow dooyoo writers and had visited some of their reccomended sites, and finally getting the most out of my online time.

That was around a year ago, and also around the time that I started to work nights, this meant that my time online was limited to perhaps an hour a day, it was time to get the addresses of websites that were going to give me what I wanted fast, it was search-engine time, even today I still find myself using just one engine - google (http://www.google.com), putting in a few words, such as `The X-Files Fans´, or `Grimsby Town Football Information´ and getting the sites that I´d want to visit, now this continued all the way to the present day, my time online?, well I use the computer between 2-3 hours a day followed by many long nights sat in the Opinionated Community chat-room (http://dooyoo.community.everyone.net and follow the links, if you´re interested), thats mainly due to being out of work and in dispute with the local college about courses, but what have I gained from being online?, well I´ve found the love of my life in a fellow dooyooser (one of these days I´m going to name her, if you haven´t worked out who it is already), when a major event such as last weeks tragic events in Manhattan I know that I can find out whats happening within a few seconds of clicking my mouse, plus I´ve met up with friends that I probably never w
ould have met if it hadn´t been for my trusty PC.

But what has been the main advantage of my surfing online?, believe it or not, I have my confidence in myself back, before I got online I´d have never properly talked to anyone, I was always too scared to `get out there and make friends´ but now I haven´t a care in the world at who I meet, be it meeting them online first, or through other friends, or just a normal friend who I met in the pub/ in town/wherever, but speak to me before I got online and well you was lucky you´d got me speaking.

So today this day, although my Internet surfing is a big hobby of mine, its streamlined, my main bit of advice to anyone whos just started on the Internet?, realize what interests you and find it through a search-engine, be it getting the latest song, reading about your favourite sports team or inter-acting with fans of the TV show you just simply can´t miss, do a search on it, you´re bound to find something that interests you, you want another quick tip?, say you want to find information on banzai (the crazy `japanese´ TV show), then try a couple of addresses such as www.banzai.co.uk or www.banzai.com, you never know your luck, you may find exactly what you´re looking for straight away, but as with everything make sure you have fun won´t you?

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