Note: Many of the URL's provided in this and other columns have changed or disappeared in the decade since this column was written. They are left intact in these columns to preserve the original content.

This month's column focuses on the power of the Internet as a tool to get others to do your work for you. We receive several email messages at JES each week from people who reconfirm our faith in space travel. For example, alert reader "Patricia S "TroyBoy" (really) Pukki" writes (and this is exactly how the message arrived):

Hello Jes,

Hi, I would like to know if you could help me with my program ? Well what my problem is if you have time to answer is.

How do I get music to play with other input?

Now I will give you some details on my program. Well I have inkey$ for input as movement of a target that I made on the screen, and sound affects when certain keys are press. Well when I add sound the program freezes for the music. Well you should now have, and if you could take a look at it I would appreciate it a lot!

To avoid the temptation of using the attached 1200-line program as filler for the rest of this column, I'll just mention that it was written in some language that may actually run on some computer in some part of the galaxy, but we're not sure which galaxy.

Another alert young reader, whose name we have since lost, but we'll never forget until this column is completed, sent me what appeared to be his homework assignment. It seems he needed a program to calculate the day of the week on which Easter falls in Australia. It, too, had to be written in some obscure language that I had never chosen to study. I think it was Klingon Visual K++. My answer, he informed me, was due by Friday.

Having been on the WWW since the Dark Ages (the Summer of 1994), we are linked in hundreds of places. Apparently, at least a few of these links are at some intergalactic truck stops and correspondence schools (and grill).

One recent posting from said truck stop said that he had "heard somewhere of this pick basic" and asked if "we could send the program". We gently educated him that it is actually a programming language contained within a database environment, and reminded him to take his medication.

Even my family gets into it. Recently, my niece Holly, who is attending college in Northern Virginia, emailed and asked me to record a program for her that she had missed for some reason. She was playing to the three-hour time difference between her time zone and mine in California and that it was really, really important, as she needed the information for an upcoming debate. This caused some technical problems on my end of the email, as I can program in multiple languages, but still have trouble programming my VCR.

[VCR Programming Tip: It's easy to solve the problem of those pesky flashing "12:00" messages on your VCR by applying a piece of black electrical tape over top of them.]

So here you have it: If you are under a deadline to finish a project that you just don't want or know how to do, just start surfing the web until you find someone even obliquely involved with your area of concern, and ask them to do it for you. It is also common netiquette to remind them of their deadline and to appeal to their ego: "... as the leading authority on bovine flatulance, I wonder if you can help me with a wind-breaking problem..."

I just wish this had been an option when I was in school. I could have added to my vast excuse-pool: "sorry (teacher), my DNS server went down while I was FTPing the results of my work back from Australia".

As an experiment, I'd like to ask all the readers of this column to pitch in a few words for the next issue. The way I figure it, if we all write about 200 words each, we can easily achieve our 800-word requirement.

If you have questions that you think I can actually answer, send them to: vicepres@whitehouse.gov; he's got a lot of spare time on his hands and is an absolute expert on every aspect of the Internet.

See you next issue.

Jon Sisk
www.jes.com

Original article for Computing News & Review, December 1996

Copyright © 1996 Jonathan E. Sisk.