Hairy Underwear (Internet Surfing)

Member Name: clissoldjones

Product:	Internet Surfing
Date:	22/09/01 (67 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: lots of sites you can use, loads of infortmation and enjoyment, chatting has its (few) good points

Disadvantages: crazy bastards (ok maybe a little melodramatic there), gets boring , nothing compared to real life

If you'd come to me three years ago and said: 'I enjoy surfing the web' I would probably have thought that you were descended from spiders, a little odd and confused why someone would come up to me and say such a thing before introducing themselves. Having never owned a computer, and keeping my distance from the ancient school ones that sulked in the Maths classroom, I had never 'logged' on and never so much as thought about e-mail.
Then one fateful day, my dad brought home a small black bag over his shoulder. As he put it down onto the floor with a soft thud, I was immediatley intrigued and approached the object with curiousity. I found out that it was a laptop computer that he was borrowing from work, and after seeing the wonders that it could do, was hooked.
After unhooking myself from the fishing rod that was lying about, I set about making the most of the laptop when it was available. We got the internet about a year and a half ago, and I was about to start my great internet adventure.
The first thing I did was check out some sport sites (typical male animal instincts I'm sure) and was amazed to find that you could chat to people instantly. For this I had to learn the internet 'chat room' language:
1) lol: at first I thought this was 'lots of love' and was proud, and a little worried, that people kept saying 'lots of love' to me, particularly after saying a joke. Having asked a particularly loving user why she kept sending her love, she then said lol again, before explaining what it meant. Lesson no.1 learnt
2) following on from the 'lol', I found that many people used variations on the theme including 'g' for giggle and probably the most extreme, 'lmao' or laughing my ass off'.
3) facial expressions: you could never say that the internet encourages creativity and art, but people have managed to show their emotion with lifelike facial images such as :) or :0)
or ;) or even (.)(.) which I will say are supposed to a pair of eyes (this is a family site you know). I find this images irritating, so I have created my own, see if you can guess what they are (answers at the bottom of the opinion)
a) ]'.'[
b) 88
c) 0-)
d) ú
4) 8: this letter seems to be a very important part of a chatter's vocab. They use it to 'save time' by spelling things like 'g8 (great)' of 'I h8 (hate)' and as you can tell, typing '8' instead of 'reat' or 'ate' saves exactly 0.0014 seconds. Brilliant. There are other techniques as well, but I will not tempt f8 to attempt to recre8 them.
5) brb: meaning 'be right back'. Others include jothacoc meaning 'just off to have a cup of coffee' or hoasmijntctfs meaning 'hang on a sec mate, I just need to check the football score', or even omgijsaliog 'oh my god I've just seen aliens land in our garden'. I think you get the point.
6) a/s/l: this threw me at first, but I now realise that it means 'age, sex, location' not 'age/sex/length' as one rather crazy friend put it.
With the vocab sorted I went out to the chat rooms. I was wary of all the potential paedophiles and I want to make some serious points now (for once) :
1) do not reveal your adress or village if you live in one.
2) do not meet up with anyone that you do not know at all, even when meeting up, do it in a public place not at their home.
I know they seem obvious but I have been shocked and appalled by the stories in the papers about older people pretending to be teenagers and manipulating younger naive people.
Chat rooms aside, I soon came across the sort of sites where you play game, like yahoo games where I play literati (scrabble). This is good fun but there is a tendacy for a computer to give up on you when you're just about to win that would not happen in real life. Dooyoo
of course is an excellent idea. There may be other sites like it, but since becomming a member around 4 months ago I haven't bothered looking for other similar sites as dooyoo is so good.
However as well as all the information, jokes, games and chatting you can do on the internet, I find it a poor substitute to real life. I know many people rely on it heavily to gain confidence and new friends and that is great, but for me it cannot even go close to talking to someone face to face. It is so easy to lie on the internet when chatting, and you cannot really share a laugh or check someone's body language. Another gripe is with computers, machines I distrust alot. It may be just me, but why do they always crash or decide to have a tea break when you're doing the most important thing on your computer?
Finally, I suppose to make this opinion remotely useful, I should talk about prices. The system I use is a free on weekday nights after 6 and at weekends, charging around $14.99 a month I think, (it may be £10). This is an excellent deal as like morning and mid-day television I don't use the internet at these times, and I'm sure the majority of users do not either.
So, enjoy the internet, be careful, check out new things, keep at it on dooyoo. brb
Answers to 'images' above:
a) early computer game
b) salt and pepper pots
c) blind one-eyed man sleeping happily
d) fly about to fall into a cup of soup

Summary: