Play Nice!
by Mitch Stone, the Accidental Expert
"You're gonna poke your eye out!"
How often did you hear that old chestnut growing up, shouted from the back porch by a perpetually anxious Mom? For must of us, on any given summer day, it was about as regular as Westminster chimes.
Okay, confess, modern Moms and Dads -- how many times have you used that expression since you yourselves became doting parents?
Not often? Never?
Dire predictions of ocular destruction certainly are out of fashion, but not because parents have given up worrying about their children's safety. Far from it. Protecting kids from harm is more in vogue then ever.
No, I believe it's because kids hardly go outdoors anymore.
It's mid-summer. In Augusts not long-past, the streets would be crowded with children, recklessly risking life and limb, at least as far as their folks were concerned. Hence, the ancient parental call to the wild.
But it's pretty darned quiet out there today, just like it's been almost every day this summer. Where did all the kids go, I wonder?
My guess is, they're all indoors, surfing the Web -- the playground for the new millennium.
The Internet is a pretty safe place for kids, on a whole, when properly monitored and screened by responsible adults. It's certainly a lot safer than, say, building a tree house. Your kids probably won't fracture a tibia surfing the Web.
Still, every playground rates a few simple rules -- and a finger-wagging adult to enforce them.
In truth, this lecture is directed as much to the grown-ups as to the kids. Even more so -- it's the adults who seem to be responsible for most of the casual misbehavior out on the 'Net.
So listen up, because I don't want to repeat myself until I'm blue in the face.
Never send e-mail attachments to people who don't want them or aren't expecting them. How do you find out if they want them? Ask.
If you do need to send an attachment, first determine if the recipient owns the application you used to create the file. It's awfully frustrating to receive a file you actually need, and then find yourself unable to open it. Not everybody owns the same applications you own. And why should they?
Again, you can find out by asking. Is that so hard?
When an e-mail tickles you, or seems important, does that mean you should automatically forward it to 150 of your closest friends and associates? No, it does not. If you're forwarding e-mail to over 20 people more than twice a week, you almost certainly need to become more selective.
When you do forward an e-mail, make sure it's legible. If the message has already been around the globe a half-dozen times, the text probably breaks to a new line every third or fourth word and has about eight "quote back" marks in front of every line.
Who can read that? If it's important enough to forward, then it's important enough to make readable. So fix it first.
Never, ever, click on an e-mail attachment without knowing what it is. The return address might very well belong to a friend, but that tells you absolutely nothing about the contents of the attached file.
Most of the nasty computer viruses running rampant around the Internet these days propagate by absconding with your e-mail address book. So, if you click on a virus, you'll not only infect your computer, but very possibly the computer of each and every one of your playmates. And that's just plain rude.
Your e-mail application probably has an option for sending mail as either "plain text" or html. Find that option, and set it to plain text. For one thing, some e-mail applications can't read html e-mail. For another, html e-mail is sent to the recipient as an attachment.
Can you remember what I said about e-mail attachments? I knew you could.
So play nice out there this summer. I wouldn't want you to break your neck.
06 August 2001 |
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