Byte By Bite

Switching Internet service providers is easy

by Marv Dealy

Published April 30, 2004

Back to the mailbag again, this time with a question from Twain Harte reader Stephen Nicols who writes: “Like your column, but do not always understand some of the technical stuff.”

Stephen goes on to say he’s changing his ISP from AOL to SBC DSL and wants to know how to transfer his favorite websites list and how to notify people of his new e-mail address.

Well, Stephen, first about the technical stuff. I try to write in plain English. Unfortunately, the folks inventing the things I write about seem to delight in using English as a foreign language. Their apparent goal – never make clear what can be obfuscated beyond recognition.

If we can get the geeks all back to high school and make them finish English and writing classes, then the rest of us will have a better chance of understanding what the heck they’re talking about. In the interim, I’ll continue to try to translate. But by all means, if something just doesn’t make sense, please e-mail me and I’ll try again.

Back to Stephen’s questions: informing people of your new address. While there are several ways you could do this, including driving to each and everyone’s business or home address and knocking on their door, it might be easier to create one e-mail that you send out to your entire address book.

Tell folks in this e-mail that you are changing your account and after a certain time or date your old e-mail won’t work any longer. How do you physically create the e-mail in AOL-land?

Unfortunately, I haven’t found any way in AOL’s e-mail program to click a button and send an e-mail to your whole address book. I perused the help desk at AOL about the address book and how to send e-mails to multiple people, and apparently you have to add them one at a time to make a list.

When you’re ready to do this, you might review the “help” topics yourself to see if something will make the task of entering each person a little easier, for example copying and pasting rather than retyping each address.

On the favorite website lists question, Stephen asked how he could move those from AOL to SBC. I presume you’ll be using Internet Explorer – as you don’t specify otherwise – for your browsing once you’re hooked up to DSL.

IE has a pretty easy to use tool that helps you import your favorites or bookmarks. Open IE, go to File, then Import and Export…

A “wizard” will open up, click “next” and at the following screen choose “import favorites” from the choices. Click “next” again.

At the next screen this gets a little more complicated. You’ll have to use the “browse” feature to identify where your AOL favorites are stored on your computer. Once you can point to that file, the wizard will help you finish importing the favorites list.

On a completely different note, the folks who would save us from ourselves have apparently taken over Los Angeles.

According to an AP article I found in this very newspaper, Joe Sandoval, a division manager of purchasing and contract services for the Los Angeles County Internal Services Department sent out an e-mail to 1,000 or more vendors of computer and electronic equipment, asking them if they could quit using the terms “master” and “slave” to describe electronic components.

For the uninitiated, the phrases have been used for years to describe the relationship between two objects, such as a hard drive in your computer and the CD-drive or secondary hard drive. One controls the other and therefore was described as the master, while that object being controlled was the slave.

Back to the land of the overly-politically correct. I searched at Google for "joe sandoval" + master + slave and found 802 listings. Apparently a lot of news sources picked up the story, but importantly lots more people wanted to comment on this foolishness.

To read the full text of the memo, as well as to read Joe’s comments in follow-up, visit Snopes.com (http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/outrage/master.asp).

The gist of the story is that an employee of LA County Probation Department saw the labels on some video equipment and filed a discrimination complaint with the Office of Affirmative Action Compliance.

The Internal Services Department was then required to issue the memo requesting that vendors quit using the master/slave terminology. Joe is quoted as saying that the memo wasn’t an ultimatum.

Personally, I vote to force the complaining employee into a room full of other “we know what’s best for you” zealots and let them argue with each other for the next, oh, I don’t know, maybe 10 years would be good enough. When we let them all out, things will have changed so substantially their jaws will collectively drop to the ground and stay there, causing a vacuum-like area to develop around them with the result that they’ll suck in every bug within an 11 mile radius