June 1999: Internet Secrets
(or How I Learned To Do Everything Without Waiting In Line)

by Scott Rose, President of ScottWorld
(Note: This editorial was updated in October 2000 with new Internet secrets!)

I recently took a business trip to one of those exotic and exciting destinations that you often read about but don't normally get a chance to visit: Salt Lick, Kentucky. And so, mistakenly thinking that I would be the only one aboard the flight to this hidden locale, you can imagine my shock when the line to check in at the gate was longer than the line at my neighborhood artillery shop during their recent Y2K blowout sale. Do any of you know what's going on in Salt Lick that they're not telling us?

It was quite a predicament. I had less than 20 minutes to go to the bathroom, buy a $15 bottle of water, browse through the adult magazines, donate some money to the nuns, and still wait in the never-ending line to get my boarding pass and request a window seat next to the emergency exit (extra leg room, you know). Okay, I could probably skip the nuns, the water, and even the bathroom, but I definitely wasn't going to pass up this opportunity to browse through some filth in near-anonymity.

Yet the line at the gate wasn't budging an inch. In fact, it was growing. Families materialized out of nowhere to add more length and girth to the line. It was a no-win situation. I would either miss my flight or miss everything else I desperately wanted to do. It was major prioritization time. I quickly walked up to the vacant counter at the next gate, which was surprisingly empty considering how beautiful Yugoslavia is this time of year, and I asked the lady if she knew what the absolute latest cut-off time was to receive a boarding pass to Salt Lick. "I have to do some — uh — quick errands around the airport," I explained, "and I don't want to miss my plane."

She eyed me with a knowing look and said, "Here. Give me your ticket. I'll check you in right now." I immediately retaliated. "No, no, no... you don't understand. I'm not going to your destination. I'm visiting Salt Lick. That's my gigantic line over there. I'm just trying to figure out if I have enough time to -- well, you know -- do everything I need to do." She stopped, leaned over the counter, and whispered one of the greatest traveling secrets I have ever learned in my entire life: "We all have the same computer systems, sir. You can check in at any gate." I stared at her blankly. "WHAT?" "Just give me your ticket, and I'll give you a boarding pass right now." "NOW WAIT JUST A SECOND HERE. You mean to tell me that for the last 27 years, I never needed to wait in any of those lines that I always waited in?" "That's right, sir." "You're telling me that I was blindly following the masses, when all along I could have just side-stepped all the lines and picked up a boarding pass from ANY of your employees?" "That's right, sir." "You're saying that all of that wasted, stressful time for all those years could have been completely productive and relaxing?" "That's right, sir."

"Go to hell. I'm waiting in line."

It's hard to suddenly realize that you've been doing things the "old way" or the "slow way", so I don't expect you guys to immediately embrace all of the following Internet secrets. But once you get over the emotional hurt that no one told you about these sooner, you'll find yourself saving lots of time and energy. Welcome to the Internet Secrets issue. 

Check Your Mail From Anywhere

Admit it. It's happened to you. You're on a relaxing vacation (or even a short day-trip) to visit some friends, yet you end up salivating every time they check their own email right in front of you. How dare they taunt you like that? Don't they know that you seriously need to check your own email to see if your new love interests from match.com and jdate.com have finally written you back?

For the life of you, you can't figure out how to change the settings in their email program to check your own Internet mail. But you try. After all, it can't be that difficult, right? Wrong. You end up screwing up their whole computer system, you lose all of your own email, you lose a close friend, and you never do hear back from the love of your life. Bummer.

Even you America Online users (God help you) can never find a copy of the normally ubiquitous AOL software when you truly need to sign on as a guest! 

Enter MailStart and aol.com, two web sites that let you check your own email from any computer, without needing any special email programs nor AOL software!

With these two web sites, all you need is a computer — any computer — with an Internet connection, and you have instantaneous access to all of your email! Send, receive, and forward emails from anybody's computer anywhere — all from your own email account!

And MailStart is ultra-cool, because it leaves all of your messages on your ISP's server. What this means is that as long as you don't delete your messages from MailStart, when you come back to your regular computer, you will still be able to retrieve all of your messages normally via your normal email program! Hot diggity!

Pay Your Bills From Anywhere

Another problem that often crops up if you travel a lot is how to manage your bills while you're away. I remember once taking a 6-week road trip during college, only to come home to a stack of unpaid bills, shut-off notices from the gas company and water company, and an eviction notice from the landlord on the door. (Well actually, I pre-paid my roommate to take care of all my bills while I was gone, but that sure sounded dramatic, didn't it?)

Never again will you have to worry about being on top your bills when you sign up for paymybills.com. This service not only benefits the constant traveler, but it can even make the homebody's life easier as well.

Paymybills receives all of your bills in the mail for you (you switch your billing address to their P.O. Box), they scan in all of your bills for you, and then you view and pay all of your bills from any web browser. The payments are taken out of your checking account, and credited to your billers.

Better yet, paymybills archives all of your bills for 7 years, and you'll never again have to deal with a piece of paper in the mail.

Never Get Lost Again

Your friends sure mean well, don't they? Yet they always seem to screw up those driving directions nonetheless. Now you can do what I do. When your friends start rattling off directions on the phone, simply pretend that you're listening, throwing in the occasional "uh-huh" and "gotcha" to throw 'em off the scent. In actuality, what you're really doing is logging on to MapQuest. MapQuest will automatically generate the shortest driving route between any two addresses that you provide. It will even produce miniature driving maps for you! Even if you don't know the exact address of where you're going, MapQuest can give you a city-to-city travel route as well. It's brilliant. What more do I need to say?

Doo Wop Diddy Diddy Dum Diddy Doo

MapQuest map in hand, you go driving off to your friend's house (where you'll still be able to check your email, of course). And on the way, you hear that incredible new song on the radio that you've been dying to hear. You know all the lyrics, you're ready to plunk down $15 at amazon.com for the entire CD (or just download it via Napster), but you just can't figure out who's singing it.

You pray that the DJ is gonna come on to rescue you. Surely she must know that you're breathlessly awaiting her expert knowledge so you can mindlessly purchase yet another CD that you only listen to once before realizing that the group is just a one-hit wonder. But she never comes on. You listen for 15 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour -- listening patiently for some human intervention. You finally give up, and are forced to disturb your friends for weeks on end as you sing your own unpolished version of the song, ending with the unanswerable question, "Do you know who that is?"

Take it from me: Don't do that again. Instead, head on over to the International Lyrics Server, type in the lyrics you can remember, and within seconds you'll have the name of the artist and the name of the song.

Why? How? Who? What? Where?

So you finally found the song you've been searching for — that long-lost oldie but goodie "Crying" by Roy Orbison. (Seriously now, your friends couldn't figure that one out? You must be a really bad singer.)

The CD arrives in the mail, you pop it into your stereo, and as you're scanning the liner notes & photos, you suddenly realize that you don't know something. Something really important. Something that you never really thought about before, but now you unexpectedly need to know it more than anything else. You absolutely must find out before you can move on with your life — was Roy Orbison blind?

Knowing better than to ask your friends again for their advice, you immediately do what I do. You log on to askjeeves.com, type in your question, and observe as your mouth hits the floor when your answer instantaneously materializes dozens of results compiled from hundreds of search engines on the Net.

More Internet Secrets From The Treasure Chest!

There's so many more treasure chests on the Internet that I could go on for pages and pages. But instead of listing every single one of the amazing secrets I've discovered for you right here, you can simply visit our Web Resources page right here on the ScottWorld web site. We update the Web Resources page regularly with all of the latest and greatest sites for you to explore, so be sure to bookmark it and continue visiting it on a regular basis! Before I sign off, however, here's a few more of my favorite Internet secrets:

• ebates.com: If you do any online shopping at all, you will absolutely LOVE ebates, which sends you checks in the mail as rebates for ANY purchases that you make online! It may seem too good to be true, but this one really is for real! I've gotten hundreds of dollars worth of checks in the mail from ebates.com, simply for making normal purchases during my normal course of business! Check it out, and start saving tons of money today!
• outpost.com: Free overnight shipping. No sales tax on any items. Superior customer service available 24 hours a day. 30-day money back guarantee on every single item they sell. Outpost.com is the only place to purchase all your computer software and hardware.
• efax.com: Receive faxes right through your email, for free! No need to have a dedicated fax line anymore for receiving faxes. There's lots of web sites out there that offer this service, but this one's my favorite.
• MemoToMe.com: This email reminder service is absolutely free, and it's been a life saver for me on many occassions! Remind yourself of any important occassion or recurring event with MemoToMe.com! Reminders are automatically delivered to your email box, so you no longer have to burden your long-term memory with things you'd normally forget.
• ebay.com: Selling or buying something? Check out ebay, the Internet's largest auction community! Start your own auction, bid on a current auction, or just lurk around to find the true value of your very first Apple IIe computer.
• imdb.com: The Internet Movie Database. This is the hands-down #1 most useful movie/television reference site ever created on the Internet.
• moviefone.com: The fastest way to search for movies playing in your area. Purchase your movie tickets online, too, to avoid waiting in line at the theatre. My favorite feature: "searching by time" (to find movies that are still playing on those late nights).
• cheaptickets.com: The best place to find discount airfare online.
• dictionary.com: Look up the definition, pronunciation, and correct spelling of any word.
• thesaurus.com: Look up the synonyms of any word.
• MacNN.com: If you're a client of ours, you've probably wondered how in the world we can discover so much up-to-the-minute Macintosh news so quickly. Your days of sitting in the dark are over. Whenever we call you up to inform you about a new piece of software, or to chit-chat about the latest top-secret developments at Apple, chances are that we learned about it from our primary news source, The Macintosh News Network. Updated several times a day, MacNN is a phenomenal reference for any Macintosh aficionado. (Our other favorite Mac news sites are Mac Resource Page, MacFixit, and MacSurfer.)

Of course, none of this Internet stuff is much fun if you're still "dialing in" to the Internet with a sluggish modem and a normal telephone line. Even if your modem is a 56k modem, you're still wasting too much time waiting for pages to load in. How would you like to have instantaneous Internet access as soon as your computer turns on (no more waiting for the modem to connect), and flip through web pages as if you were flipping through television channels with your remote control? I thought so. That's why we highly recommend that you order a cable modem or a DSL line for your machine today!

Happy travels,
Scott