July, 1996

Dear ICE Subscriber:

For those of you who are on the Reconstruction Committee who have an e-mail account, I have good news. I'm going to start sending out a free newsletter to you by e-mail. All you have to do is send me your e-mail address (but not by e-mail, since I'm not ready to give out my e-mail address yet). I'll add your name to the list.

I do a lot of reading, as you probably suspected. I run across all sorts of curious and interesting tidbits of information that I never have space in my newsletters to include. I will begin publishing in August a monthly e-mail report of oddities, bureaucratic horror stories, and other information that people would normally miss unless they are inveterate clippers of articles. I'll also include information that my subscribers have sent me. With subscribers all over the world, this should be interesting. I'll recommend books and summarize articles that I think are relevant.

I strongly suggest that you get an e-mail account if you don't already have one. You can get one through America Online or a local internet service provider. If you are an MCI or AT&T customer, both companies are offering inexpensive Internet service connections to their customers for about $20 a month. But it may take weeks to receive your free software to log on through these two giants.

Boardwatch Magazine has just issued a Directory of Internet Service Providers. It's probably on sale at your local news stand. It lists over 1400 ISPs by area code. Expect to pay from $15 to $30 a month for unlimited access time on the Web. You don't have to have AOL to gain Web access, although for newcomers, AOL is cheaper. But only you're on line over two hours a week, you'll need a local ISP.

You should use a 28.8 kilobyte per second modem for Web browsing. A cheap 14.4 kbs modem is fine if you only use e-mail.

You can sign up with America Online and get 15 free bonus hours of time. AOL charges $10 a month. This buys you five free hours. You pay an hourly fee above this. AOL has a great feature: flash sessions. You tell the program to log onto AOL, send out any e-mail you've written, download any e-mail that has come in, and log off. This takes about 10 seconds. (I sit there and watch my screen. I don't want the screen to lock up while I'm still on line with the meter running. I have seen this happen repeatedly with AOL. It is very annoying.)

Another deal: AOL allows you to use up to five different names. With each name, you're entitled to set up a separate Web page, free. So, you can get your company on the Web free of charge, in five different places on the Web for five different offers. You just can't beat this deal for $10 a month. To receive free software, call AOL at 800-827-6364.

If you already have an e-mail address, and you're a Reconstruction Committee member, mail your e-mail address to ICE, or FAX it to 903-593-1577. If you want to join the Reconstruction Committee, it costs $180 a year or $15 a month billed automatically to your credit card. Members receive all ICE publications free of charge during their 12-month membership, plus will receive my e-mail newsletter. These supporters are ICE's "hard corps," the backbone of the organization. To join the Committee, mail a donation, or for monthly credit card billing, call Barbara at 903-593-9124.

For people living outside the United States, ICE will start mailing your regular ICE newsletters by e-mail, to speed up delivery. It's time to get on line!

ICE will begin to take a more visible position on the World Wide Web. We will start mailing out ICE materials free of charge by e-mail. We're going to give away all the ICE books on our Web site. I will do whatever I can to increase ICE's readers this way. If we can save on printing and postage, I'm happy to let people read our material for free. This is a ministry, after all. I prefer printed newsletters that I can file, but I like electronic letters, too: easier to download into my data base files and then retrieve.

This reminds me: I use a great information retrieval program called PageKeeper. It sells for about $200. I can find anything that I've clipped and filed in filing cabinets in just seconds. I make a list of key words for every clipping. These are put into PageKeeper. Then I file the clipping in a filing cabinet. When I go looking for a clipping, I just type in key words. PageKeeper finds the file's references and tells me where I've filed it. I can also retrieve downloaded electronic files that I've picked up from the Web.

But there's more: it scans in anything, converts the image of the printed words (newspaper, magazine) into optical character-recognized text, automatically indexes every word, and enables me to search everything in seconds. Then . . . get this . . . when I ask it to find something, using one or more search words, it gives me a "hit list" that ranks the "hits." Without exception, if it pulls up 30 files, the one I'm looking for is in the top three. How it knows, I cannot fathom.

Finally, it retains the original file's image, so you can read it word for word in case the OCR software made a mistake. You can even print out the original image (although this takes forever, which is why I file the clippings instead of scanning them). Contracts can be stored this way. The image cannot be tampered with, so it's a legal document.

For years, I've filed thousands of clippings. But where is that one clipping I vaguely remember. Was it filed under foreign policy or New World Order? Or is it hanging in the United Nations folder? And when was that? 1995? 1990? 1987? As I get older, the dates get somewhat vague. "It couldn't have been in 1987! Why, I can remember it as if were yesterday." (Bigger problem: I'm beginning to have trouble remembering yesterday.)

PageKeeper offers a solution: I write on the clipping five or more key words, but I file the clipping under the first word on the list. This way, when PageKeeper pulls up the reference, which lists all of the other key words in order, no matter which key word I used to retrieve it, I know exactly where it's filed and in what year (which I list in the reference).

If I type in two key words, and both are accurate, that clipping is sure to be the first one listed.

I Wonder Where the Yellow Went

If you live in a metropolitan area of over 500,000 people, could you do me a big favor? If you have a copy of last year's Yellow Pages lying around, would you mail it to me (Special 4th Class Rate: Book)?

No matter what sized city you live in, if you have an old copy of one of the Christian Yellow Pages, I'd like to see it. I only need one book per city or town.

If you'll volunteer to do this and I take you up on your offer, I'll send you a bonus: the taped interview I did with radio commentator Marty Stacy on the subject of America's prospects. I'm told that it was one of my better efforts.

Mail me or FAX me telling me which Yellow Pages book you're able to send: 903-593-1577. Be sure to include your mailing address. If I decide to accept your offer (I may get five or more offers from people who live in the same city, but I only need one book), I'll send you the tape. Then you send me the book. If I don't get back to you within 30 days, you'll know that I got the book from someone else.

First come, first served!

Keyboard Big Blues

While I try to keep up with the latest computer and Internet developments, I am personally a computer dinosaur in the word processing department. I use an 11-year-old IBM AT keyboard, the old clickety-clack version. I'm addicted to its feel and also the placement of the function keys. This keyboard is perfect for using the DOS-based Word Perfect 5.1, which I intend to use until I die.

The problem is, my original AT keyboard is starting to wear out. It's not easy to find a used IBM AT keyboard. So, I'm issuing an alert. If you should stumble on one of them, I would like to buy it. Not the whole 286 computer — just the keyboard. Here is a photocopy of what it looks like.

Don't Look Like an Amateur

Every once in a while I get a letter from someone who asks me to give him advice on some matter that will literally reshape his life. He wants me to help him to decide. Sometimes these are hand-written letters, barely legible. Often they are computer-generated letters printed on a dot-matrix printer with a faded ribbon. Occasionally, they are printed on a laser printer. But it never ceases to amaze me that people send out letters that request vital information, yet the letters include no return addresses. It happens so often that I have told my secretaries to toss out every letter that has no return address (unless, of course, there was a check in it). If someone doesn't care enough about my response to his letter to make it easy for me to reply, then I don't care enough to go hunting through the trash to recover the envelope.

The simplest things seem to baffle Christians, like return addresses and fresh printer ribbons. "Gee, I never thought of that." The world thinks Christians are inept, backward-looking people who have yet to enter the 20th century. This is a totally unfair view; many Christians are all the way up to 1954.

Do you have a FAX machine? If you're in business, have a dedicated phone line for it. Don't use the same line that your phone uses. If you do, this makes you look like a one-man operation. (It's OK to do this is you're imitating Arthur Robinson, whose market positioning is that of "One Man's Family.")

Do you have a business phone line? Don't ever allow your kids to answer it. Better to have an impersonal voice mail system or a tape answering machine. (Again, unless you're Arthur Robinson, who has different positioning.) I think you can see what I'm getting at. Christians may be poorly funded, but we shouldn't look like it.

Sincerely yours,