Actually, people don't ask these questions.
But vain fellows that we are, we figured you should know all this stuff.
So just read it.
TOURBUS is a free, on-going, semi-weekly, text-based tour of some of the neatest sites on the Internet. The TOURBUS posts are written by Bob Rankin and Patrick Douglas Crispen, and are distributed via the LISTSERV server at America Online.
What makes TOURBUS unique is that each TOURBUS post not only gives you the addresses of neat Internet sites, it also gives you a really in-depth look at how to fully use those sites. Surf the Net for any amount of time, and you will soon discover that many of the Internet's most exciting sites do not come with instruction manuals. TOURBUS helps you overcome that problem.
We also try to make each TOURBUS post as conversational -- and humorous -- as possible. Above everything else, the Internet is FUN ... and we try to show that in our TOURBUS posts. :-)
Nothing. Zero. Zip. Zilch. Nada.
TOURBUS is absolutely free. All of the costs associated with running the TOURBUS list are paid by our sponsors (and by Bob and Patrick).
Yep! You can find the TOURBUS archives and other TOURBUS stuff at the TOURBUS homepage at http://www.TOURBUS.com.
Don't panic! You can still access the TOURBUS homepage (and, for that matter, ANY other Web page) through e-mail using the information contained in Bob Rankin's free guide "Accessing the Internet by E-mail." To find out how to get this guide (and how you can still participate in theROADMAP Internet training workshop), send an e-mail letter to LISTSERV@UA1VM.UA.EDU
(that's "you-aye-won-vee-em") with the command
GET NEWUSER PACKAGE F=MAIL
in the body of your e-mail letter.
Its kind of hard to say. TOURBUS is, for the most part, distributed every Tuesday-ish and Thursday-ish.
Well, sometimes we are a little late in getting these posts out. If you want to be technical (or at least "statistical"), I guess you could say that TOURBUS has a probability distribution centered around Tuesday and Thursday, with a standard deviation of a day or two. :)
Just have them send an e-mail letter to LISTSERV@LISTSERV.AOL.COM
with the command
SUBSCRIBE TOURBUS YOURFIRSTNAME YOURLASTNAME
in the body of their letter, replacing YOURFIRSTNAME and YOURLASTNAME with their first and last names.
We do receive a lot of suggestions from the TOURBUS riders (like "get a life"), but most of the sites that we write about are sites that we accidentally find while surfing the Net. :)
Well, actually, we've never met.
We knew each other from the NETTRAIN list, and have exchanged hundreds of e-mails (and about five phone calls) over the past couple years.
Bob contacted Patrick shortly after the end of the last Roadmap workshop with the idea of creating a sponsor-supported, two or three week workshop of neat Internet sites. Patrick suggested that the workshop be an on-going thing ... and the rest, as they say, is history. :)
The "squirrel story" comes from the fact that the squirrels living in the trees on the campus of the University of Alabama have developed quite a taste for power lines ... especially for the power lines leading into the University's mainframe computer center (if you are not electrically inclined, let's jusy say that energetic squirrels and power lines do not mix well).
Back when Patrick was running the Roadmap workshop (that online Internet training thingy in 1994), he was really concerned that if the University of Alabama's mainframe was taken down by a squirrel (which was a regular occurrence at the time) and he was not able to deliver that day's Roadmap lesson to the 64,000 people in the workshop, the workshop participants would panic and mailbomb him with 64,000 "where is today's lesson?" messages.
By telling the subscribers up front to expect a squirrel attack, he kept himself from being mailbombed, elevated Alabama's squirrels to Net-legend status (people around the world were even rooting for the squirrels), and gained a really neat "trademark."
The TOURBUS subscribers send them in to Patrick.
Yep! Just point your web browser to http://ua1vm.ua.edu/~crispen/word.html
A couple of alert TOURBUS readers have informed us that you can also find a couple Southern Word dictionaries in your local bookstore:
How to Speak Southern
by Steve Mitchell
ISBN 0-553-27519-4
Price: $3.99 (US)
More How to Speak Southern
by Steve Mitchell
ISBN 0-553-27392-2
Price: $3.99 (US)