In the fall of my junior year in high school, I took the standardized Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test (PSAT), which most colleges use to identify potential applicants. Check the box that authorizes the testing service to release your name and the colleges hit you with a flurry of brochures, videos, applications and scholarship offers.

What I didn’t know was that the Defense Department would seize upon the scores, too. Much like their academic counterparts, the armed services pore over those scores for potential recruits. And, for some reason, the Navy’s computer decided I was a potential recruit.

For the past four years, the Navy has spent considerable time, effort and taxpayer money courting me. Only I didn’t want to be courted.

The search-and-recruit mission began innocently enough, with brochures about various Navy programs. Did I know about ROTC? Had I considered the GI Bill? Were there any other acronyms they could explain for me?

The Army and Air Force each sent me mailings from time to time, but never with the same frequency or volume as the Navy. It was not unusual to receive several Navy mailings in the same week or even the same day. Sometimes it would be the same letter but on different colored paper.

Then the calls began.

I had come home from school one day when I received a recruiting call from a Marine sergeant. He had obviously misplaced his list of a few good men and was trying me instead.

"I’m calling to talk to you about joining the Marines," he began.

"Well, I’m really not interested, but thanks," I replied and started to hang up.

But my sergeant didn’t take rejection as well as the other salesmen who call our house.

"Why is that?" he wanted to know.

I tried to explain. I get seasick. I can’t swim very well. I’m a little uneasy about making a four-year commitment at this point in my life.

"Uh, that’s a six-year commitment, son," the sergeant interrupted.

Fine, six years. I told him how antsy I was about signing up for anything where they put you in jail if you leave without permission. One acronym the Navy didn’t need to explain to me was AWOL.

Then I casually mentioned I had other plans.

"What, you planning on going to college?" he demanded. From his change in tone, it was clearly what a wimp would do.

Well, yes, I was. And if I changed my mind, I was quite confident the Navy would still be there.

I listened to the sergeant’s pitch awhile longer. When he would not allow me to end the conversation gracefully, I hung up. At least he would take me off his list, I figured. But the calls, and the mailings, continued.

By June of my senior year, most colleges had stopped sending me materials. A few brochures and applications trickled in over the summer from recruiters hopeful that I would change my mind, but most colleges had already moved on to the new crop of high school seniors. Even the Army dropped its efforts a few months into my freshman year at college.

But not the Navy. Convinced I was playing hard-to-get, the mailings poured into my house. My parents would just stack them up on my bed when I came home for vacation. We would all have a good laugh, I would throw them out, and then I would go back to school.

When I came home for the summer, the mailings and the calls continued. After receiving three identical mailings on the same day last summer, I had enough. For the first time, I called the number on the brochure. I told the operator straight out: I wanted off.

It’s not a response they get very often at the Navy Recruiting Command’s Philadelphia district office.

"You want what?" the operator asked me. "Why would you ever want to do that?"

"I have no real plans to join the Navy any time soon," I explained. "And I know it takes a lot of resources to keep sending me this stuff. As a taxpayer, I just felt that maybe the resources could be put to better use."

She transferred me to someone. He transferred me to someone else. Finally, they promised they would remove me from their list and stop sending things to my house.

Happily, I hung up. No more calls. No more mailings. And I had saved the taxpayers money.

After all, multiply the postage the Navy spent on me by the roughly 2 million high school students who graduate each year. We’re not talking small change here. Cut back on these mailings and the Navy would be a lot closer to that new Seawolf submarine it’s been clamoring for.

When I returned to school in the fall, despite the district office’s promises, the recruiting efforts continued.

Last spring, I received a call from a Marine sergeant. My mother told him what she had told all the others: I was away at school and still had no plans to sign up. She later brought in some of the mail to show to someone at her office who happens to be married to a rear admiral. The co-worker passed it on to her husband, who passed it to one of his deputies.

In June, my mother received a three-paragraph notice from the deputy commander of the Navy Recruiting Command. The commander wrote that he had verified that my name had been removed from all mailing lists of "Department of Defense advertising organizations." He then apologized to her for "any inconvenience this matter may have caused you."

Although the letter was a single sheet of paper, he sent it in an 8 1/2 by 11 envelope. The cost to the taxpayers? Forty-three cents.

It’s curious that the letter should be sent to her and not to me. It’s even more curious that it’s her inconvenience that the Navy regrets. Either way, I just hope the deputy commander really was sincere. Because he’ll soon have a chance to prove he’s a man of his word.

My younger brother, whose grades are far better than mine, takes the PSAT this fall.

—-

Microsoft Windows 95, possibly the most heavily promoted computer product ever, officially went on sale throughout the Triangle at midnight.

The newest version of Microsoft’s highly successful operating system should make personal computers easier to set up and use. Windows 95 will include better audio and video capabilities, and offer easy access to the Internet through the Microsoft Network, the company’s new online service.

Seven to nine million copies are expected to be sold this week alone, according to market research firm Dataquest Inc. Another 20 million copies should be sold by the end of the year.

And those figures may be dwarfed next year. Concerned about possible bugs in the system, many users are expected to wait for a later version of Windows 95 before plunking down $90 for a copy. Also, sellers of computer systems and hardware are expected to see a sales spurt as users realize they need new, or at least upgraded, systems to run the new program.

But Microsoft isn’t leaving things to chance. It is spending $200 million on the launch, which has riveted the world’s attention. The purchase of the first copy — by a student in Auckland, New Zealand, seventeen hours before copies went on sale in the United States — drew extensive news coverage. More than 70,000 people are expected to attend launch events in 43 cities today. Microsoft paid a reported $4 million to license the rights to the Rolling Stones song "Start Me Up" for Windows 95 commercials.

Windows 95, like all operating systems, is the software that determines how files are stored and different programs interact. The Microsoft empire was built on MS-DOS, the operating system that became the industry standard when IBM selected it in 1981 for its first personal computer. The two partners went their separate ways in 1985 when Microsoft introduced the original version of Windows, while IBM bet on an operating system known as OS/2 as a successor to DOS.

Windows found a following, but sales of OS/2 have languished. Nearly 80 percent of the world’s personal computers now run Microsoft operating software.

OS/2 may not be the only casualty. For many months, Windows 95 was known to the computer world only by its code name, "Chicago." But it might have better been named "William Tell," for Windows 95 could be an Apple-killer.

Windows 95 is supposed to make your PC more like a Macintosh. And some industry experts predict it may put the Macintosh out of business. With new features like longer file names and "plug-and-play" technology, a PC for the first time approaches the ease of use that made Macintoshes famous — but at a far lower cost.

Retailers such as Egghead Software in Cary started selling the software as soon as their clocks struck — or, in this digital age, beeped — midnight.

Tim Brown, an automation specialist at the Wake County Public Safety department, has paid $10 at Babbages in Cary Towne Center to reserve his copy.

"I’ll probably go pick it up in the afternoon," he said. "When people ask me whether it’s worth it, at least I’ll have some firsthand experience."

Egghead opened at 11 p.m. Wednesday to give customers a chance to browse. Then at midnight, copies went on sale. With Microsoft’s estimated installation time of 45 to 60 minutes, Triangle computer users could have had the software up and running by 1 a.m.

"We’ve had midnight madness events before and had very good turnout," Egghead manager Joe Mauk said Wednesday. "I really expect the store will be bursting at the seams. There may even be a line to get in."

More than 500 people have reserved copies so far, Mauk said. He had his full staff of 14 on hand until a 2 a.m. close. He plans to reopen the store at 7 this morning and stay on the job until 10 p.m.

As part of the launch, Microsoft will throw an invitation-only bash today featuring an hour long satellite address by CEO Bill Gates that will be seen by several hundred Triangle business executives and software developers at the Raleigh Civic and Convention Center.

"For all the hype we’ve heard, this is a good chance to actually see it," said Doug Haynes, a spokesman for Centura Bank in Rocky Mount, which will demonstrate online banking services that it plans to offer with Microsoft.

Other publicity stunts are a little more … … well, innovative.

Passengers flying from RDU to London should be sure to keep close to their airplane’s windows. Microsoft has painted fields in England with the Windows 95 logo so that they are visible from the air.

Four thousand boxes of Cracker Jacks will be given away with Windows 95 prizes inside in Chicago. The mayor of Fort Worth, Texas, will "officially upgrade" the city to Windows 95 in a ceremony today. Microsoft will pay for the entire press run of the Times of London — which will contain a Windows advertisement on the front page — and will give it away free, the first time in the newspaper’s history.

In New York, the Empire State Building will be lit in Microsoft colors this evening. In Toronto, the city’s tallest building, the CN Tower, will boast a 300-foot high Windows 95 banner. In Poland, journalists will be taken down in submarines to show them what it’s like to live "in a world without Windows."

The launch has become so much of an international event that Quebec Premier Jacques Parizeau issued a statement protesting delays in a special French Canadian version.

"We want to be there for the revolution," an aide told Bloomberg Business News. "And we want to be able to do it in our own language."

Until a few weeks ago, however, it wasn’t certain that the revolution would happen.

Microsoft first announced that the software would ship last year. As the company repeatedly pushed back the launch date, analysts began to wonder publicly whether the product was "vaporware," or software that is announced — usually to deter a competitor — but never reaches the market. An oft-repeated joke was that by the time it was ready, Windows 95 would have to be renamed Windows 96.

Then the Department of Justice threatened to intervene to stop distribution. Regulators were concerned that Microsoft had an unfair advantage in the online service market by making its online access available through Windows 95. The Microsoft Network is expected to draw 9 million users, almost triple the subscribers of CompuServe, the largest online service.

But the feds decided to not delay the rollout, and it came off on schedule. Although the anticipated reception has made Microsoft executives happy, it likely will make computer hardware manufacturers even happier.

To take advantage of the features, users will need more muscular computers than most of them now possess.

At least 39 percent of PC users will have to upgrade their computers to run Windows 95, according to a recent survey, and another 22 percent have barely enough power to enjoy its full benefits.

Virtually the only institution unimpressed with the hoopla was Wall Street. Microsoft stock closed at $97.875, down $1.438, in Nasdaq trading Wednesday.

Keep people in stitches. Laugh all the way to the bank.

No, she’s not a comedienne. She’s a seamstress. Evans owns Sew Well Learning Center & Manufacturing, a North Raleigh company that teaches people how to sew.

"Sewing is like typing," Evans said. "If you can type, you can get a job anywhere. If you can sew, you can always make money. People always need alterations."

So a year ago, she left her job working with mentally handicapped patients to try her hand at teaching sewing full time.

Evans rented office space on Wake Forest Road, bought a van, stockpiled sewing machines and purchased bolts and bolts of fabric.

By word of mouth and some innovative publicity, she signed up 33 students at $400 apiece for her 60-hour course. After a year of teaching classes six days a week, she’s finally starting to turn a profit.

Evans began by persuading fabric stores to display her brochures. In return, she refers her students to the stores.

"I keep people sewing and they keep people coming to my classes," she said.

She built up a mailing list from people who had seen her ads and called for sewing advice. She used her 14-year-old son and 11-year-old daughter to model her clothes at events.

"My kids are a very intricate part of this business," she said, laughing. "The pay’s cheap - an ice cream cone, a soda."

It’s no coincidence that her children are involved.

As a single mother, she’s found that sewing is one of the few ways for women to make a living while staying at home with their children. She’s working on a proposal for social service agencies to train mothers on welfare and put them into jobs sewing. So far, all her students have been women, usually 25 to 40 years old, many with children.

Evans says she customizes each class, so students learn what they want to learn. She takes students on field trips to wool mills and shows them how to buy fabric.

"I teach them how to make sewing cost-effective," Evans said.

She also teaches them how to make sewing profitable.

Evans uses the course’s graduates to do contract sewing for Triangle businesses.

"There aren’t that many manufacturers here. It’s a good industry to get into," she said. "I don’t think anyone is really filling that need for church groups and small organizations."

Because the students work out of their homes, she has lower costs. She has no minimum order and promises that no job is too small- Sew Well has made everything from day care workers’ smocks and nurses uniforms to doll dresses.

In part to gain her customers’ confidence, she makes just about everything she wears.

"Your business card is what you sew. Your advertisement is what you wear," she said.

With her business only a year old and already covering its expenses, she expects her manufacturing revenue to grow as more students complete her course.

She’s even thinking about expanding into other cities in a few years.

"I have visions of Sew Wells all over, not just in Raleigh," she said. "I feel fast growth.

He doesn’t have to worry about what his co-workers might think. Since July, he’s worked by himself, in an office above his garage.

When Jones agreed to leave his job at a Raleigh law firm to join a Columbia, S.C., company as vice president for business development, he insisted that he be allowed to remain in the Triangle.

"I didn’t want to move to Columbia," Jones says. "I can make an argument that, with the type of work I do, I’m more productive here than in an office with the distractions."

So he added a few phone lines to his garage and joined the burgeoning ranks of telecommuters, people who use technology to work from home or away from their traditional offices.

For employees, telecommuting offers the chance to bypass rush-hour traffic, to spend time with their families and to work at their own pace without managers hovering over them.

For employers, telecommuting cuts down on office overhead and costly corporate real estate.

Some 9.1 million employees worked at home during business hours for at least one day per month last year, up from 7.6 million the year before, according to FIND/SVP, an Ithaca, N.Y., research firm.

Work-at-home arrangements aren’t for everyone, employers and workplace consultants warn. An employee, of course, has to maintain a good supply of self-discipline. And for employers, telecommuting loses its appeal as a productivity booster if managers don’t trust home-workers or refuse to offer the necessary support to make it work.

Although the Triangle does not have the same traffic pressures inspiring telecommuting as cities like Los Angeles, it is slowly taking hold here nonetheless.

Some big employers such as IBM Corp. are giving increasing numbers of employees the chance to work at home. Computer retailers say their fastest-growing segment is the "soho," or small office/home office market. And even phone companies and office furniture retailers are beginning to capitalize on the trend.

Within a few months, GTE South, which has run local advertisements encouraging people to telecommute, will offer new service options for telecommuters, including connectivity, consulting and support. The local phone provider serves Durham and Research Triangle Park.

"GTE is trying to put together a complete package for working at home," says David Bryant, senior network engineer.

As part of the package, GTE will promote high-speed, high-capacity phone lines called ISDN, for integrated services digital network. One ISDN line can support two phone lines, making it ideal for home workers who want one line for voice and one line for a fax machine or modem. Prices range from $50 to $75 month, with a surcharge for data usage.

Triangle office supply stores say they are seeing more orders for home office equipment. Those computers, printers, and fax machines require furniture.

"We have more and more people coming in here saying they are working at home," says Angie Lebitz, showroom manager for Alfred Williams and Co., a Raleigh office supplier. "That’s been happening for at least the past year. We’ve noticed a significant increase."

A typical home office configuration might cost between $2,500 and $3,000, Lebitz said.

But employees who work at home don’t have to bear the full cost of a home office. Some Triangle companies are starting to pick up portions of the tab.

IBM Corp.’s Research Triangle Park operation now pays for phone lines for nearly half of its employees who do some sort of work at home, spokesman Jay Cadmus says.

For employees like Gary Brown, the company sometimes supplies computers, too.

Brown, who provides on-line customer support, has worked out of his home in Cary off and on for 10 years and full time since October.

What he may lose in office camaraderie, he says, he makes up for in productivity. "I’m relaxed, I’ve got music going," Brown says. "There’s no office chit-chat, no telephone ringing, no background noise. It allows you to write more politely.

Or it could be a treacherous and deadly landscape, swallowing up trailblazers and setting in motion costly financial flops.

Welcome to the world of cyberbusiness.

It’s easy to get caught up in the hype of the Internet as companies in the Triangle rush to go on-line. But, so far, success stories are few and far between as companies tentatively explore the intricacies of Internet commerce.

In fact, many companies have found they are more likely to use the Internet to save money rather than to make money.

"I don’t know of many nontechnology companies that are doing much revenue through the Internet in the area right now," said Cliff Allen, who advises companies on their on-line efforts as president of the Allen Marketing Group in Raleigh.

In the extraordinarily brief commercial life of the Internet, the people who have made money are Internet access providers, World Wide Web page designers and the cottage industry of consultants and speakers.

That’s about to change.

As the Internet moves from the playground of scientists and hackers to a robust business community, this could be the year that real fortunes are made and lost on the Internet.

"More and more people are going to be sitting in their living rooms browsing the Net," said Sarah Gray Lamm, manager of the Home Team Properties Inc., a Chapel Hill real estate company that launched a Web site with property listings last month.

Like most aspects of Internet commerce, market research is an emerging field, and no figures are available for measuring Triangle business activity on the Internet. But total sales on the Internet worldwide from September through July were $118 million, according to a survey of more than 650 Web sites by ActivMedia, Inc., a Peterborough, N.H., research firm. That figure is expected to skyrocket for the next few years.

"There is a novelty feature to ordering flowers or nontechnology merchandise over the Net," Allen said. "But there’s also no competition."

If the Internet has been a rough-and-tumble world so far, a semblance of order is about to arrive, in the form of big business.

Visa and MasterCard have teamed up to develop secure transaction software to prevent hackers from picking off credit card numbers. Several banks are exploring creating cyberbanking divisions. Wall Street has started to pour capital into technology companies.

With these developments comes a new critical mass of users. All the major commercial on-line services have pledged to offer full access to the Web by the end of the year. The newest online service, the much-touted Microsoft Network, could add another 9 million users to the Internet’s estimated population of 30 million users worldwide.

While electronic mail addresses pop up routinely on business cards from Research Triangle Park, more nontechnology companies in the Triangle are now considering establishing a presence online.

"It’s those merchants that are trying to decide whether they need to be up or not," Allen said.

Those Triangle companies that have ventured on-line have found a variety of ways to integrate the Internet into traditional business strategies. And some of them have learned something that Internet business evangelists don’t share very often: Most companies on the Internet aren’t trying to make money - they’re trying to cut costs.

Web sites can save staff and processing time, mailing and printing costs, and even long-distance phone bills, especially for calls overseas.

For instance, American Airlines, which launched its site May 18, has placed flight schedules on-line and plans to allow frequent fliers to check account information by the end of the year.

Initially, the airline hopes to speed up the reservation process at its five reservation centers, including its 1,400-employee operation in Cary.

"The concept is really to reduce the cost of business as much as possible," said Joe Crawley, the site’s webmaster.

Far more important are American’s plans to offer electronic booking of flights early next year.

In an industry where commissions to travel agents are the third-highest cost after labor and fuel, electronic booking could increase the number of tickets issued directly by the airlines, now just 20 percent. One day electronic booking could supplant reservation centers and travel agencies entirely.

Not to be outdone, a number of travel agencies have taken to the Web as well. PCTravel, a service of Raleigh’s American Travel Corp., has perhaps the most sophisticated system. Consumers can search for the cheapest flight and can reserve and buy tickets. PCTravel expects to do $2 million worth of bookings per month for this year, said David Lea, American Travel vice president for marketing.

But a major problem for PCTravel and other Triangle companies that sell goods and services on-line has been the continuing concern over the security of information transmitted over the Internet.

Technological advances in security have been unable to dispel a public distrust fueled, in large part, by the February arrest of hacker Kevin Mitnick in a North Raleigh apartment on charges of stealing 20,000 credit card numbers from the nation’s largest Internet access provider. PCTravel, the Durham Bulls and a number of Triangle businesses have turned to a new cyberbanking unit of First Union Corp. in Charlotte for help.

First Union is providing help for on-line transactions such as credit card verification and transaction security. The company also plans to tackle business-to-business transactions and soon will announce new cash management software that will enable corporate customers to check account information over the Internet.

"We want to be where our customers are," said Tom Kitrick, First Union vice president for strategic planning and Internet marketing. "What’s driving this industry is, how can businesses use the Internet to make their transactions easier?"

Another industry being driven by the Internet is marketing.

The Internet is a marketer’s dream tool. Precise files on individual users can be kept easily. The demographics are to die for. Web users are well off, with an average income of $69,000, and highly educated, with nearly 35 percent having completed college and almost 32 percent more earning an advanced degree, according to a University of Michigan-Georgia Tech study.

At WRAL-FM 101.5, a promotion to give away tickets to the movie "The Net" demonstrated just how powerful a marketing tool the Internet could be.

Listeners were asked to go to its Web site, leave a mailing address, and to fill out an optional survey. The station mentioned the offer on the air just three times in 30 hours.

"We were going to leave it up for a week, figuring we would get 20 responses," said Ned Attayek, an announcer who designed and maintains the page. "We put it up at Monday lunch and by Tuesday suppertime, the tickets were gone."

The station gave away 211 tickets and collected valuable demographic data in the process. And WRAL did it all without devoting staff time or hiring a marketing company to conduct the research.

"We were amazed. We’re trying to figure out how to make some money off this page," Attayek said. "It’s obvious that it’s an incredible marketing and promotion research tool."

It’s also an incredible tool for entrepreneurs like Gary Storr and two co-workers who launched a Web service called America’s Help Wanted to assist companies in their recruiting efforts a month ago. They expect to charge companies to post job openings and to buy resumes of qualified candidates from a searchable database.

"We’re hopeful that we’ll be able to get to a point where we can support this on a full-time basis," Storr said.

Venture capitalists are quite interested in the activities of Storr and entrepreneurs like him.

Internet start-ups received $47 million in venture capital financing in the first quarter of this year, $5 million more than all of 1994, according to a study by Venture One, a San Francisco research company.

Venture capital investments in Internet-related companies are growing about three times as fast as biotech investments did in the late 1980s, said Venture One spokeswoman Caren Cadile.

But before entrepreneurs or established businesses order business cards to go with a new Web site, they should take the time to do some old-fashioned research by spending some time on-line, posting messages and answering questions, Allen cautioned.

"When you get an e-mail asking for your catalog, you’ve found a market. When you get e-mail asking for your Web site, then it’s time to get a Web site," Allen said. "It’s the simplest market research you can do."

The packaging of the buoyant water toy says it’s from Tennessee, but the Funnoodle is really made right here in the Triangle.

So are Nerf arrows, parts of Seeley mattresses, and even the protective padding at those playgrounds McDonald’s provides for french fry-fueled youngsters.

"Those are applications that many consumers in the Triangle use and don’t know that it’s made here," said Marc Noel, the president of Nomaco Inc., a low-profile, privately held company that makes thermoplastic foam products.

With 460 employees and annual revenue approaching $55 million, Nomaco has quietly carved out a specialty niche as a leader in the "foam profile" industry.

At its plants in Zebulon and Youngsville, Nomaco melts plastic pellets, mixes in additives and coloring, and forces the concoction through a shaping device called an extruder.

What emerges are foam gardening pads, stadium cushion seats, hair curlers, race car roll-cage pads, pipe insulation, tree wraps and packing materials.

And, of course, the Funnoodle.

For those of you without young, aquatic-minded kids, the Funnoodle is a foam cylinder six feet in length and three inches in diameter that can support up to 200 pounds in water.

Typically selling for $2.99, the Funnoodle is the top-ranked non-video toy this summer, according to the NPD Group, a Port Washington, N.Y., market-research firm. And toy stores across the country are having trouble keeping it in stock.

"It’s one of those items that just took off," said Pam Kelly, a buyer for Toys ‘R’ Us. "It’s kind of like the pet rock thing. It’s a phenomenon."

But for all the hoopla surrounding the Funnoodle, none of it has filtered down to Nomaco.

In large part, that’s by choice. Nomaco’s name never appears on its products.

The company made a strategic decision in 1987 to stop selling products directly to the public. Instead, it concentrates on its technological advantages. So it signed alliances with companies like toy maker Kid Power in Brentwood, Tenn., to market and distribute products that Nomaco makes.

"When you’re so diversified, you cannot, or we cannot, distribute directly," Noel said. "That’s why our name does not appear on the product."

Unlike many distribution agreements, there’s also a fair amount of collaboration on product development between Nomaco and its partners.

"For a manufacturer, they are very market-oriented," Kid Power President Jamie O’Rourke said.

So far, the strategy seems to be working.

When Nomaco was wooed away from Ansonia, Conn., six years ago, the company started its North Carolina operations with 30 employees in Zebulon.

Since then, it has built its Youngsville plant and now employs 350 people in the Triangle. The company has another 110 employees and two plants in an Atlanta-based decorative products division.

Nomaco’s foam sells so fast that the inventory of its 85,000-square-foot warehouse in Zebulon turns over every two weeks.

And there aren’t many competitors on the horizon.

"We find ourselves more and more in a specialty niche," Noel said.

When Kid Power approached Nomaco about manufacturing the Funnoodle, the company had first researched the different foam producers.

"In North America, there are only 10 companies that could make one of them or a number of them," O’Rourke said. "But, in my opinion, Nomaco is the only one that could make them in the volume we needed."

Still, Kid Power originally split the order between Nomaco and Toronto-based Industrial Thermo Polymer Ltd.

But once production started, the company changed its mind.

"The difference between them was night and day," O’Rourke said. "We put all our eggs in Nomaco’s basket."

Not that Noel expected any less.

"Extrusion is our forte," he said.

Mailing lists, essentially an ongoing conversation by electronic mail. You need to sign up for these, and messages are delivered directly to you via e-mail.

Newsgroups, the equivalent of a global bulletin board where anyone interested can post or read messages without registering.

Sites on the World Wide Web, which link Internet resources. The Web allows you to follow highlighted links to other resources .

Here are some sites that may whet your appetite. You can use searching tools like Yahoo and WebCrawler to find food resources elsewhere.

World Wide Web

• Chocolate Lover’s Page, a guide to all the cocoa-based sites online:
  http://www.iia.org/chocolate/
• Dilip Barman’s Vegetarian Resources:
  http://www.cs.unc.edu/~barman/vegetarian.html
• Dining Out on the Web, a searchable database of restaurants:
  http://www.ird.net/diningout.html
• eGG: the electronic Gourmet Guide, a cooking magazine:
  http://www.2way.com/food/egg/index.html
• Fromagerie Belchvre, a specialty cheese maker:
  http://www.roblyn.com/chevhome.htm
• Lotsa Hotsa, a site that sells spicy foods:
  http://www.nbn.com/starving_artists/lotsa-hotsa/
• Recipe Archives from rec.food.recipes, a listing of previously posted recipes:
  http://www.vuw.ac.nz/who/Amy.Gale/recipes/recipe-archive.html
• Restaurant Le Cordon Bleu, cooking tips from the restaurant at the famous French cooking school:
  http://sunsite.unc.edu/expo/restaurant/restaurant.html
• Rolling Your Own Sushi, instructions on the art of Japanese cuisine:
  http://www.rain.org/~hutch/sushi.html
• The Triangle Vegetarian Society, reviews of vegetarian-friendly restaurants:
  http://www.trinet.com/tonc/tvspage.html
• WebCrawler:
  http://www.webcrawler.com
• Wing Wan II, a kosher Chinese restaurant in Boca Raton, Fla.:
  http://www.dive.com/wingwan/
• Yahoo:
  http://www.yahoo.com/

Entertainment/Food/Newsgroups

• triangle.dining
• rec.food.cooking
• rec.food.recipes
• rec.food.restaurants

Some sites are lovingly crafted tributes to favorite foods that are rich in description but short on information. Others are simply online advertisements.

Keep in mind that the Internet is global and that most of the world measures their recipes on the metric system. Even the definition of a pint varies from country to country. So be careful when converting recipes.

Be wary of any online site that asks you to send your credit card number by e-mail. A savvy computer hacker can pick off your account number.

Also, don’t change your eating habits based solely on what you may read online. Having a computer, modem and opinion on eating doesn’t make someone an expert.

But it may become one of the most important tools in your kitchen.

Long before there was cyberspace or the information superhighway, computer makers had food fans in mind.

The makers of the first personal computers thought people would use them to store recipes. Very quickly, they found out otherwise: Pencil and paper did just fine for most folks.

But with the emergence of the Internet, the global link of computer networks, people have started talking about computers and cooking again.

Food lovers are flocking to the Internet. There are sites devoted to favorite foods, newsgroups to exchange restaurant reviews and recipes, and real-life meals shared by people who met online.

"This is the same thing as a cookbook or a neighborhood discussion group, just on a worldwide scale," says Eileen Kupstas of Chapel Hill, a fan of rec.food.

cooking, with recipes and tips.

While it’s impossible to tell just how many people use these resources, the number of users and the number of sites have grown exponentially in the past year.

Kate Heyhoe of Crestline, Calif., sensed the growing link between cooking and computers when she left the movie industry to start an on-line cooking magazine.

"Food and cooking have always been my true passion," she says. "We saw an opportunity on the Internet early on."

So she launched eGG: the electronic Gourmet Guide last December. The site features regular columns, interviews and recipes. Last month, it even had a live feed from the Aspen Food & Wine Festival. The site is aimed at the "dedicated amateur and the professional," she says.

Another site that has been around for a while, and is perhaps the most useful food site on the Internet, is the archives of the rec.food.recipes newsgroup. Hundreds of recipes that have been posted are listed by category. It includes everything from soup to nuts, plus a list of other food sites.

When recipes alone are not enough, there are a number of Internet sites that include information about preparing specific foods, like how to roll your own sushi.

"From the cooking groups, I certainly find a number of recipes and a number of ideas," Kupstas says. "I’m interested in food allergies, and it’s a good place to get and spread information about foods."

If you’ve wanted to learn how to cook like a French chef but can’t afford the air fare to Paris, try Restaurant Le Cordon Bleu’s site. It has a full week’s worth of menus, complete with pictures, translations and detailed cooking instructions, all from the famous cooking school.

While intended to whet your appetite for the "Le Cordon Bleu at Home" cookbook, the site has links within recipes to explain cooking techniques and provide definitions. With one click of your computer’s mouse, from the recipe for Pommes de Terre Sautees a Cru, you can read about the fine art of sauteing and then return to the recipe. It’s better than flipping through a cookbook - you’ll never lose your place.

If you get hungry while looking at those dishes but don’t feel like cooking, check out the databases for restaurants - from those that feature chiles in their dishes to those that accommodate cigar-smokers.

Dining Out on the Web and the rec.food.restaurants newsgroup are good places to start.

Because the Internet can be accessed from all over the world, people sometimes request restaurant recommendations for a foreign country and get replies within a few hours.

"The Internet is a great resource if you’re traveling," says Dilip Barman of Durham, president of the Triangle Vegetarian Society.

When an Australian recently asked, "OK, from somebody on the other side of the world, can you explain what barbecue is?" he probably had no idea what he was getting himself into. After all, there’s barbecue and then there’s that stuff they serve in Texas.

If you want Triangle restaurant reviews, check out the triangle.dining newsgroup.

The Triangle Vegetarian Society page also lists reviews of vegetarian cuisine and plans to put its newsletter online. Barman also has a list of vegetarian resources that’s quite popular.

"A lot of people know me from my home page," he says.

The newsgroups and mailing lists are good places to find people who share favorite foods. Group visits to restaurants and potluck dinners are frequently arranged online.

You can also shop for all sorts of specialty food over the Internet. Many stores have their catalogs online, and some allow you to place orders electronically.

If you’re a hot food fan, you’ll want to make your way to Lotsa Hotsa, a Ramona, Calif., company that sells products with names like Hellfire and Damnation Hot Sauce. If you can’t stand the heat, get out of this site.

"The Internet needs products that are unique, that you can’t go down the street and buy," says Jack Alexander, the president of Starving Artists, a company that suggested the idea to Lotsa Hotsa and later designed the site. "We’re big hot sauce connoisseurs ourselves."

In the same vein, there’s Wing Wan II, a Boca Raton, Fla., based restaurant that promises to ship Kosher chinese food anywhere in the world.

Or try Fromagerie Belchevre, a Quebec cheese maker. The cheese looks great, but loses something in the translation. The page boasts that "Fromagerie Belchevre is the home of high quality 100 percent goat’s cheese. All our cheese is made from fresh goat’s milk."

Before you wrap up, make one last stop at the Chocolate Lover’s Page, a site that will melt in your mouth, not in your mouse. It has links to Hershey’s Chocolate Town U.S.A, Godiva Online, and every other chocolate site imaginable.

On second thought, maybe you should start there. Who said dessert always has to come at the end of the meal?

One great thing about grazing among food sites (besides it being non-fattening) is that even if you never get Restaurant Le Cordon Bleu’s Feuilletes de Saumon aux Asperges (puff pastry shells with salmon and asparagus with a lemon butter sauce) just right, you can console yourself by seeing how it should look:

Virtually good enough to eat.

A coalition of long-distance telephone carriers has sent the popular board game to every member of Congress and to newspaper editors across the country in a last-minute lobbying effort.

Much more than Monopoly money is at stake. The long-distance carriers are trying to keep federal telecommunications reform legislation from passing "Go."

The reform bill had cleared the U.S. House Commerce Committee May 25 by a 38-5 vote, with the long-distance companies’ whole-hearted support. Then on July 13, they learned that House leaders slipped in a provision that would simplify the entrance of the seven regional Bell operating companies, commonly known as the Baby Bells, into the long-distance market.

Although President Clinton said Tuesday he would veto the legislation in its current form, a vote could come as early as today.

So the nation’s roughly 500 long-distance carriers scrambled to strike back.

The three largest carriers, AT&T, MCI, and Sprint, each organized employee rallies around the country last week.

Last week, AT&T, which had been running advertisements in favor of the legislation, sent 3,000 employees to Washington on chartered buses and trains for a rally against the bill. It was the first political rally in the company’s 119-year history.

MCI organized a second round of rallies in Raleigh and eight other cities Tuesday. About 45 of MCI’s 1,000 Triangle employees braved the blistering midday heat to gather outside the office of Republican Rep. Fred Heineman in North Raleigh.

Heineman, who was targeted because he has not announced support for either side, probably will make up his mind today, spokeswoman Kay M. Ryon said.

"These bills are evolving, even as we speak," she said.

The legislation will provide substantive change to the regulatory framework that is still based on the 1934 Communications Act. The bill would deregulate much of the cable and phone industries.

For the Baby Bells, the bill represents a chance to enter the long-distance market while lowering costs and prices for consumers, BellSouth spokesman John Schneidawind said.

The bill also would allow long-distance carriers to enter the local phone market. The Baby Bells contend that the bill is fair because the long-distance companies can pick and choose the customers they serve while the Baby Bells are required to serve entire regions.

But it takes much longer to be able to compete locally than in long distance, said MCI senior policy adviser Liz Hogan.

Hence, the legislation’s label as the "Monopoly bill." And the mailing of the Monopoly board game.

The Baby Bells think it’s funny, but have no plans to respond in kind.