Imagine calling your home to let it know you are about to arrive. It turns on dinner and turns up the heat. That home is here already. An ad on the Net for an automated home says...

Some of the Electronic Amenities are as follows:

• Driveway sensor that turns on the lights at night when someone arrives at your home.
• Whole house audio and video distribution with 16 zone capability.
• Several scenes programmed in to enhance your lifestyle. i.e. Party mode; Sleep mode; Away Mode; Vacation mode; and Romance Mode.
• HVAC setback automatically in various modes. When the fire alarm is activated, the air-conditioning system cuts off to prevent the migration of smoke throughout the house. Additionally all lights are turned on at night for 10 minutes then begin to flash to help the authorities locate your property.
• Interior lighting control via motion and time of day.
• Front door camera and intercom system that lets you see and talk to someone at your door. It even calls you on your cellular phone when you are not at home allows you to speak to the person at the front door. When you arrive home you have a video of activity for that day for both the driveway and front door.
• Surround sound system.
• The central vacuum system turns off with an incoming phone call or when someone rings the front door bell. A voice announcement is made throughout the house to inform you that guests have arrived or to tell you who's calling you on the phone!!!!!!!!!!!

An automated home won't tell you (yet!) if you're low on milk, but it will do some interesting things. And this technology is already here.

Why should you care about connection speed? Because with high speed connections, you can get live audio, video, and telephone in real time, with high quality delivery. Right now video and audio over the Net are jerky and almost unusable. By 2004, so many people will have high speed connections through their cable TV operator that the Net will be a normal delivery method for television, CD-quality audio and other bandwidth-intensive content.

The most apparent benefit of cable connection is the network speed. By tapping into the immense bandwidth of cable TV networks, cable connections will offer subscribers several hundred times faster connection speeds than conventional dial up modems and 100-200 times faster than current ISDN connections.

Want to know when your best friend comes on line? Well, new instant messaging products like ICQ and AOL Instant Messenger have a message to them in the blink of an eye. Instant messaging works like a chat room, except that it's a personal connection between two people, not 50,000 unknown characters. So you can say anything you want, without fear of some stranger flaming you!

You get the software by downloading from a sharewre source or AOL (AOL Instant Messenger comes with Netscape, and is in fact hard to turn OFF!). Install it, get a login name, and away you go. Cuts down on email, and it isn't trackable or recordable yet, so it won't do lawyers any good to rummage through your email box like they did Bill Gates'. If you really must talk to someone every day, throughout the day, and you don't want to pick up the telephone while they or you are at work, instant messaging may be for you. It's especially useful if you have friends in other countries who work at a computer. Sure saves on those long distance telephone bills!

It would not be appropriate or correct to leave you thinking that everything about the Internet is good, even though most things are. Below are a few of the bad things, which mostly consist of invasion of privacy issues.

At this point in time, there is already software available, thanks to the evil computer hackers and the demand from businesses, that allows someone to snoop around while you're working on your home or business computer, and even to control your PC from anywhere. Scary? You bet! The best way to avoid these kinds of intrusions is to make sure no stranger ever gets near your computer, and to keep your virus protection up to date.

There is also software available for business networks that can control your access. Need that fast game of Quake to relax at work? Click the Quake bookmark and the screen pops up a message telling you that access is forbidden. Somebody installed filtering software on your business intranet!

But again, unless you trade in state secrets or goof off at work a lot, these things won't really bother you. Take it all with a grain of salt and a sense of humor!