Readers' Tips

Anonymous

If you are ever going to have an affair, you should establish (from the beginning of the relationship, if possible) a set of habits that will help you cover up. For example. I always make it a habit to shower when I come home from work, no matter if I need one or not. I also tell my wife that I have to entertain clients (or go out with the guys in order to network) and that the "other guys" want to go to titty bars. This way, if I come home smoky, smelling of perfume, sweaty, and have some other woman's cream on me, I can pass it off as, "Sorry I'm late, had to go out with the guys, and they wanted to go to that damn Titty bar again, but I'm trying for that promotion, so I had to go hon." Then go straight to the shower. *that also explains alcohol on the breath, perfume on your clothes, and lipstick on your collar! Of course, in order for this to work, you do have to occassionally actually go to a titty bar, that way your description, and stories you make up are most realistic.

One last thing. When getting a page from your lover, make sure that they disguise their page to look like a legitimate business call, and not a code! If they send something like: 123 or 811, then your spouse will get very suspicious right away! And if you DO use your pager for contacting one another, then rest assured that at some point you will leave the damn thing at home when your lover decides to page you. Your spouse will find the pager and attempt to figure out who the caller is, because they don't want you to miss an important page! IF they call the number back, and it is obviously a personal call, you're screwed. Most spouses are less likely to call back a long distance number. Especially if you normally get long distance pages in the course of your business. So have your lover preface the code with a long distance area code from a city that you normally get paged from. Then, make sure the actual code looks like a real number as well. Finally, if you do leave your pager home. Page it
Well, good luck everyone, and remember to always plan well in advance. When I am between affairs I make sure that I occassionally work late, go out to Titty Bars, and come home a take a shower, etc. etc. etc. Keep an established pattern so that you can move smoothly into your next affair with no change of habit!

Thinking in Toledo

(*) Having hair(s) very different than your own or your spouses in your hair, on your clothes, or worse, found in your undershorts.

(*) Coming back from supposedly watching your favorite team at the sports bar, but WITHOUT the smell of smoke on you or beer breath, or without a detailed knowledge of the game's highlights.

John

IF visitors to this site would like to bookmark the page, or have it cached, they can do a couple of things:
first, they can install a second web browser on their computer in a "hidden", nested directory. What you do is this:
take a copy of either IE or netscape. Make sure that it's not the same version that already exists on the computer. Installing an earlier version than the one on your computer works well, because the program won't try to "upgrade" itself and thus defeat your attempt. Begin to install the program on your computer, and when prompted for the directory for installation, instead of the default directory, choose one that is located deep in the bowels of your file structure, then remove the start menu shortcut for it. That way, no one is just going to "stumble" across it. Second, if you DO bookmark the page, then RENAME the bookmark to something innocuous, like "ESPN" or "HOW TO GUT A FISH" or some other such nonsense. You can do this by right clicking a bookmark and choosing "properties", then change the display name. For those who are not overly computer literate:
In IE, go to "favorites" then "organize favorites" in the default dialogue box, choose "rename" then pick your cover name. In Netscape, choose "bookmarks", then "edit bookmarks". You'll have a list of your bookmarks. Pick the appropriate one by right clicking on it. A properties box ill come up and one of the fields is "name"; click in that field, then edit the name to your liking. Don't think that you are out of the woods yet though, (kind of a pain, isn't it?) most web browsers keep a log of where you've been in your "history" settings. That's how the "address" or "location" bar can drop down and tell you where you've been. Each browser is different, so find the settigns for history and set it to a very low number, like "0". IF you can't do that, then the history preference will cache the URL of the "bad" site you visited. You can overcome this by simply surfing for a while until you clear the "bad" site out of the history list. For example, if your history is set to "4" and you hit this site, history will keep it in place until you have visited 5 other sites that will knock it off the list. "Yahoo" sites are good for this, as are MS sites, or other large corporate sites. Then, for those of you with very computer savvy spouses (like me) DON'T USE COOKIES. All the sites that you visit will leave a record of your visit on your hard drive. The three most dangerous folders on your Hard Drive are located in the C:/MYCOMPUTER/WINDOWS directory. They are: Cookies, TEMP, and Temporary Internet Files. If you are doing something you don't want your significant other to discover, then CLEAR THESE FOLDERS EACH TIME YOU VISIT AN OFFENDING WEB SITE !!! You can do this all at once, or selectively: to just wipe them all out, choose "edit", "select all", then "delete". To do it selectively, find the URL, cookie, or whatever of the site you want gone, then right click it and choose "delete". Also, REMEMBER TO EMPTY YOUR RECYCLE BIN.(deleting that stuff just sends it to the recycle bin) You can avoid the whole problem by turning off cookies and setting your cache size and history values to "0", but your partner might notice a performance decrease if they visit certain sites regularly. Finally, (whew! almost done) if you do some offline browsing and you view sites or documents that you don't want your partner to know about, beware of the "documents" slot in the "start" menu. It keeps a list of the documents you have been working on/viewing. To get rid of "bad" documents, right click the title bar, choose "properties" and select the "start menu programs" tab. In this window there is a little space called "Documents menu" with a button titled "clear": this will set the recorded documents list to "0": voila! no more "bad" .jpgs, email attachments or whatever!

My apologies for making this so long, but there are a lot of ways to snoop what you do on the PC, and you should know about these in order to protect yourself. Enjoy the Internet, but enjoy your privacy more. If you would like, I could give you comprhensie guidelines for making your websurfing experience bullet-proof private, including how to set up and use proxies, remailers and the like. Let me know!

Phewffff!