Author: A.T.

Here’s an e-mail from a fellow who wondering whether we might be cousins. He is a fee-based financial planner (the good kind, who don’t take sales commissions for steering you into particular products). His last name, coincidentally, is the same as mine. And in fact it does seem just possible that in the 15th or 16th Century we may have shared a common ancestor.

Anyway, here’s his story:

“I started my career as an accountant in NYC,” he says, “and went out on my own in 1980. I always enjoyed giving people advice, which is why I gravitated to financial planning.

“Since I’ve been in this business I’ve always found myself to have different philosophies from most of my colleagues. For example, when I was starting out I took a psychological test for a major brokerage firm. My brother-in law was branch manager, so I got to see the results. The test showed that I was the kind of individual who would feel the need to educate my clients as well as understand the investments I would be recommending. It even mentioned that I would feel the need to read prospectuses.

“It was actually pretty accurate. I was that kind of guy. But I was told I could not succeed as a broker with those attributes. And here I thought they were positives!”

So eventually he became a fee-based financial planner rather than a stockbroker.

“In the years since then, I have rarely agreed with most other advisors on issues such as insurance and investing. On a personal level, I don’t consider myself cheap, I just don’t like to throw money away needlessly. That’s why I wrote you. Seeing my beliefs in print written by someone else was amazing to me. Now I am convinced we must be cousins.”

Actually, Ben looks a little like my brother. (Well, just a little.)

Ah, the difference a single machine can make. The automobile, say. The telephone. Or how about a machine that can always tell when someone is lying — a sort of polygraph that truly works. Now wouldn’t that muck things up.

Such is the world imagined in a novel called The Truth Machine, which may be the first and only pre-publication novel posted on the Web. It won’t be in bookstores until October, but you can read it free by visiting: http://www.truthmachine.com.

Save yourself $22 by reading it on the Internet — and if you don’t like the way the plot thickens or his imagined world turns, click and shoot off a nasty critique to the author.

He is Jim Halperin, one-time Harvard whiz kid (like the book’s protagonist) turned mega-numismatist turned neo-novelist.

For me to be giving anyone advice about the Internet is laughable. But I do have one qualification: I’m as frustrated and mystified by it all as most of you.

So perhaps these revelations will be useful:

1. It really may be worth your calling AT&T at 800-400-1447 and requesting their free WorldNet software. If you are an AT&T long distance customer, they’ll provide the first year’s access free, up to 5 hours a month ($2.50 an hour thereafter) or unlimited access for $19.95. I found that even for me installation was easy, including the time I spent on that same 800-number with a human who walked me through the glitch of dual Netscape versions. More to the point, once set up, it seems to work fine. Somehow I don’t picture AT&T having quite as many glitches and busy signals as some of the newer kids on the block.

2. If you haven’t already, you should definitely visit and bookmark www.altavista.digital.com, which is the search engine from Digital Equipment. Yahoo and other search engines like it are similar to a Table of Contents at the front of the book, good for finding general areas of interest, whereas AltaVista is like the Index at the back of the book, good for finding specific items. Aha! Among other things, this makes it much better for research than the others I’ve used.

Being human, I first searched Yahoo for my own name and found nothing. I then tried it with AltaVista, and, just like an index at the back of the book, found loads of references (including one titled Andrew Tobias is a Slippery Sleazeball, or words to that effect).

3. I actually owe the revelation of this distinction between Yahoo and AltaVista, to a really neat site called www.eachmovie.com. As you’ll see if you visit, first you log in with your e-mail address, then you rate some movies you’ve seen. Then, based on your likes and dislikes, it tries to figure out some movies you haven’t seen that you might like. And it does so, supposedly, and interestingly, not just by noting that you like Demi Moore, but by building a confidential (they assure us) profile of how you rank various movies. This helps them find others who share the same tastes. Then (assuming I understand this properly, always an open question), if one of those people loved Vampire Drag Race Derby, it will suggest that you might like it, too.

In truth, the recommending part didn’t dazzle me. I doubt it works very well. But the concept is neat. (As the authors of this web site explain, if Yahoo is the Table of Contents in the front of the book and AltaVista is the Index on the back, then EachMovie is like a yellow sticker on the book jacket saying, “see page 211, I think you’ll like it”).

And even if none of that interests you, EachMovie is a quick way to find reviews and ratings and credits and summaries of hundreds of recent and soon-to-be-released movies. Was that Fear you were meaning to see or Primal Fear? Or Cape Fear? Before you head out to the wrong movie, check it out. (Have you seen The Truth About Cats and Dogs? Good flick! And shame on you for missing Sabrina and The American President! Rent them.)

4. Finally, speaking of yellow stickers, I recently installed 3M’s Post-it (TM) Software Notes. Like many of us, I use the yellow stickers a lot. Well, here’s a way to stick ‘em to your computer screen, as it were. It’s cheap and clever and the sound effects are fun. To get a free sample, click www.mmm.com/psnotes. So far, this little program hasn’t caused any loopy conflicts with my non-Windows software, or with anything else.

Yesterday I described a service that charges just a dime a minute for all calls within the 50 United States, anytime (not just after 7PM, a la Candace Bergen in the Sprint ads). If you’re someone who makes a lot of weekday daytime long-distance calls, check it out. (And if you’re an AT&T customer not getting a 20% or 30% discount and 5 frequent-flier miles for every dollar of calls, check it out, too.)

But all this phone talk made me think of something else.

You know how there’s this etiquette where, when you go to visit somebody, you have to make this big show of using your credit card to make long distance calls rather than stick your host with the 45-cent tab? (After all, it’s usually a weekend or an evening — what’s it gonna cost to call Chicago for a few minutes?) I’m not saying you can violate this behavioral code, but it’s becoming increasingly silly.

Sure, if you’re calling Kuala Lumpur or Bucharest.

Montevideo — sure. But New Jersey?

I mean, there you are drinking $4 of the guy’s Absolut and tonic, eating $14 of shrimp and that interesting chicken fricassee his spouse makes, but you’d rather spend $2 to make a credit card call than just dial direct and leave some loose change by the phone?

I do the same thing, of course. But whenever I see a guest of mine fumbling for his calling card, unless I know he does a lot of business in Japan, I insist he dispense with this foolishness immediately and just dial direct.

One thing you could do is dial via the 10811 DimeLine. If your host happens already to be a customer, already paying the flat $5 service charge, your call will cost him only a dime a minute, even coast-to-coast Tuesday at noon. And if, as is much more likely, he’s not a DimeLine customer, it will still cost him only a dime a minute. He won’t be charged the $5 access fee (unless some other guest tried the same thing last month). The first calendar month’s calls do not activate that $5 fee.

I’m not saying you should do this. I wouldn’t. But if you are going to beat your host out of the phone charges, you may as well save him a little money. (Remember, this works only on residential lines, and only really saves money in any meaningful way on weekday daytime calls.)

Boy, are the competing phone discount plans ever needlessly — and purposely — complex. It’s like life insurance: they don’t want you to be able to make easy price comparisons.

Sprint has a point about every call costing just a dime. But Sprint’s “dime lady” commercials are so cloying (even though Candace Bergen’s a swell lady), they’re reason enough to stick with AT&T. What’s more, there’s the teeny-tiny catch that the dime is actually a quarter every weekday until 7PM. That’s right: 25-cents a minute, not 10 cents.

Now comes a service called DimeLine. It’s not new, but new to me. And it really does charge just a dime a call. Anytime. Anywhere in the 50 states. Sort of.

I use AT&T. The basic daytime rate approaches 30 cents a minute, but I signed up for True USA savings, that knocks 30% off my bill if I make more than $75 a month in calls, 20% when charges run between $25 and $75 a month, 10% when they run $10 to $25. (You mean you use AT&T and you haven’t signed up for the discount? They must love customers like you. All you have to do to get it is call! Check your phone bill, and if you don’t see a line at the end talking about what you saved with AT&T True USA, try 800-222-0300.)

And I’m also signed up for AT&T True Rewards which gives me five frequent-flier miles for every dollar I spend. Assigning a value of 2 or 3 cents a mile, which is about what they’re worth to me, this becomes the equivalent of another 10% or 15% off my bill, for a total discount of 40% or 45%. (You mean you use AT&T and you haven’t signed up for this, either? They must adore you! This one doesn’t appear on your phone bill, but you get periodic statements of your rewards, and they try to get you to waste them on things less valuable than frequent flier miles. Again, call 800-222-0300 if you’re an AT&T customer who hasn’t signed up.)

After these discounts, night-time and evening calls aren’t much more than a dime for me anyway — sometimes less. But the daytime calls are still upwards of 15 cents, which no matter how you look at it is more than a dime.

I had a 76-minute call to Palo Alto last month for which I was billed $22.80, less the 30%, or $15.96. With Dime Line it would have been $7.60. I would have saved $8.36 on that one humongous call alone, plus another 46 cents in tax. Total saving with the tax: $8.82. Instead, I got 80 frequent flier miles (5 for each of the 16 or so dollars AT&T charged), worth about two bucks.

So why not switch to Dime Line for all your day-time weekday calling? A few possible reasons:

• It only applies to residential phone lines. Sorry, Sears.

• There’s a 3-minute minimum, so for those calls where you just get an answering machine and hang up or leave a short message, you’re billed 30 cents, compared with the 15-20 cents it might have cost during the day on AT&T (after your discount and frequent flier miles).

• There’s a flat $5-a-month access charge, so if you normally make $30 a month in calls on AT&T — which works out to $24.00 after your 20% True USA discount, and $21.00 after figuring in the value of your frequent-flier miles — Dime Line would save you little or nothing. Indeed, if a good chunk of that $30 was for calls after 5PM (evening rate) or after 11PM and weekends (night-time rate), then you might actually wind up spending more.

• On the other hand, for someone with, say, $100 a month in AT&T weekday long distance charges before 5PM, the savings would be on the order of $30 or $40 a month — maybe $400 a year. Not half bad! Home-office types, take note.

• If you are someone whose long distance bill is near one of the AT&T break points at which the discount falls, from 30% to 20% or from 20% to 10% (or, below $10 of charges, to zero), then carving the weekday day-time calls out of that and making them with Dime Line could be doubly dumb. First, you could lower your AT&T usage from $26, say, to $24, and knock the discount down from 20% to 10% (thus losing about $2.50). Second, if you only used Dime Line to make a few day-time calls, the $5 flat fee would swamp any savings you got from the low dime-a-minute rate.

• There’s the hassle of dialing 10811 before proceeding with the usual 1-area code-and-number.

But you don’t have to wait for a second dial tone, you just dial “straight through.” And you don’t have to do anything to sign up for this service. You’re already “signed up,” in the sense that you could start using Dime Line this instant, and would simply find a separate place on your local phone bill next month tallying the charges. And because the first month the $5 access fee is waived, you really have little to lose by giving it a try.

The Dime Line customer service rep I spoke with (800-583-5801) answered promptly and avowed that parent VarTec Telecom, Inc., a privately held company headquartered in Dallas, was founded in 1989 and is now the nation’s 7th largest long-distance carrier. (And here you thought there were only three, so how impressed can you be?) You don’t have to remember to call and cancel the service if you don’t like it, he explained. The $5 access fee is only charged in calendar months when you make calls. So you could try it a few times today, and until the end of this calendar month, with no $5 access fee, and no need to cancel the service. (Or so they promise. Don’t blame me if there’s a billing glitch! I just work here.)

There’s actually a way to beat the $5 fee altogether, it seems to me, if you’re the kind of person obsessed with cutting costs yet possessed of more than one phone number. In May, make all your day-time long distance calls on Phone #1. You’ll be charged just a dime-a-minute with no $5 fee, because it’s the first calendar month you’ve used DimeLine. For the next few months be sure not to use DimeLine with that phone number — even once. Instead, switch to using Dime Line with Phone #2. And so on.

I think the slate wipes clean after 90 days of non-use. If so, and if they don’t change it, you could just keep rotating the phone line you chose to use. Of course, you could always do the decent thing and, if you decide to become a DimeLine customer, just pay the bill. I’m going to try it for a while — for weekday day-time calls only.

Some statistics lie, but others tell the blunt truth:

Tax on a Pack of Cigarettes in:

I came upon this while filing some old stuff — the figures are dated January 17, 1995, and will have changed somewhat, with currency fluctuations if nothing else. For more up-to-date statistics, and a whole bunch of other stuff, try The Smoking Cessation Location.

This just in: I followed one of my own recommendations just now, and I can’t resist sharing the outcome.

Remember where I was railing against IBM’s less-than-perfect customer service a week or two ago, contrasting it with the amazing folks in places like New Hampshire? Well, I was about to order a CD with 80 million home addresses and phone numbers on it (a mere $39, if you can believe the miracle of it all) +. . . was all set to fill out the order form the publisher, ProCD, provided +. . . until I noted the $9 shipping charge. Hmph, thought I.

So on a whim I called the New Hampshire outfit I had recommended here (PC and Mac Connection: 800-243-8088). It was Saturday night but I got a human on the first ring, ordered the CD for their price of $29.95 plus $5 shipping — already I was $13 ahead — and asked when it would arrive. This was Saturday night, remember. She said: Monday. Get outta here! I said. But darned if it wasn’t true. They ship Airborne every day of the week including Sundays. The package arrived Monday morning. Now, that’s service.

I recently had occasion to ogle a business plan for what may wind up being a major Internet player in a few years. It’s smart and backed by people with proven track records, and there were the obligatory pie-in-the-sky, worst-case/best-case projections.

After all, what can we know about the future?

And this being a fairly complicated business, with all kinds of variables, there were a lot of different worst/best possibilities, all multiplying together to various potential profit outcomes.

Why am I telling you this?

Because while I was mostly struck with an enormous feeling of “why didn’t I think of this great business, I was also struck by something else:

Every variable had a worst/best scenario but one. That one — an “Internet price-earnings ratio of 75.”

In other words, it was anybody’s guess whether this company would be making $2 million or $50 million — who could say? But at least one thing was clear. Whatever profit it made, the stock market would presumably multiply it by 75 in deciding how high to bid the shares.

And of course this may be true. Indeed, these days, for anything vaguely related to technology or innovation of any kind, 75 is a fairly chintzy multiple.

I would just like to point out for you youngsters in the crowd that once upon a time a multiple of 75, even for an exciting, fast-growing company with great prospects, could not be taken for granted. Maybe that will be the case again some day, though I hope not. This is much more fun.

And while it lasts, it does have one highly positive effect, even if most of these valuations are absurd: it fairly sucks money into new ventures and innovation, which bodes well for America and the world.

You’re probably too young to remember what Europe was like after the War, or even in the Sixties, when I first went, but it was the era of Europe on $5 a Day. Now it’s like $40 for orange juice and a cup of coffee.

But in 1967 it was like Gulliver in the land of the Lilliputs. We and our giant wallets. I remember once in Tossa, Spain, getting a hotel room not far from the Mediterranean that was $4 a night — including breakfast and dinner. We felt rich as kings!

Now, I’m not saying the Bright-Life mail-order catalog fully duplicates the post-War Mediterranean experience, and I’m not vouching for the quality and durability of all its offerings. But talk about feeling rich! Or at least affluent. The Sharper Image catalog makes me feel poor. Neiman Marcus leaves me gasping. But this thing?

How about a 12-foot roll-out pre-seeded flower garden (“plant a beautiful row of flowers — automatically!”) for five bucks? Feeling rich? Take three for $13. Your choice: flowers or herbs. (The herb roll-out mat could save you quite a stitch in thyme.)

How about an electric hook-hanger of the type you may have seen advertised on late-night TV — hang pictures without having to bang nails into the wall, and remove the hooks if you change your mind without leaving a hole — not for the $29.95 price that two-A.M. cable-TV viewers have come to expect, but just $9.95?

How about the razor-blade hair trimmers I’ve plugged from time to time (“cuts any style — long or short hair — no skill required”) that can save you hundreds of dollars a year on haircuts. (You needn’t go to extremes and never get a real haircut. But what if you got them just once in a while and used this doohickey between times?) The cost of this particular tool was always an afterthought, as far as I was concerned — I think they were $12.95 or something, which you’d recoup the first time you used it. But they’re not $12.95 at Bright-Life. No way! Just $5.95, three for $14.

Miracle Scissors? Three for $13. A 10-in-1 Multi-Fishing Tool (screw-driver, tape measure, fish scaler, pliers, weight scale, line cutter, knife, bottle opener, hook disgorger)? I don’t even fish and I couldn’t resist this at $9.95.

Not to mention the World’s Lightest Shoes for Men (“like floating on clouds — as if your feet had wings”) at $25 for three pairs. Hey: I’m a guy who sometimes spends $25 for one pair of shoes.

Solar powered radios; $69 “giant” inflatable swimming pools; “vacuum-air, soft-suction blackhead removers” ($4.99); three dozen fake long-stemmed roses that last forever ($13). I am not a religious man, but I bought three Micro Bible Key Chains (“Entire New Testament, just 1-1/2′ x 1′ — always there to comfort you wherever you go”). At $5.95, how could they not make great gifts?

I didn’t buy everything in the catalog, but for the price of a couple of things from Sharper Image, I could have. Many of the items might only have made good joke presents (the Exotic Balancing Birds struck me as such an item). But hey! The call for a catalog is free (800-206-9849). And one man’s kitsch is another man’s car freshener.

[Along the same lines, you might want to request a Lillian Vernon catalog if you aren’t already on their list — 800-285-5555. I have half a dozen American-flag donut-shaped floats making my pool look tres Olympique and they haven’t sprung a leak yet. Cheap!]

Massachusetts Congressman Studds is leaving the House after 26 years. Voluntarily. (He won with 69% of the vote the last time out.)

His farewell non-fundraising letter contained much that was wise and classy (or maybe it was just such a joy to get a letter from a politician that didn’t ask for money), but I liked this best:

“If working with six Presidents has taught me anything about leadership, it is that the world is not divided into good and bad. Human nature is not that simple.

“We all have the capacity for insecurity, prejudice and fear. It is to the darker side that the demagogue plays.

“Each of us can also evince strength, tolerance and compassion, and it is on these ‘better angels of our nature’ that the leader calls.”

If any of you happens to have Jesse Helms’s e-mail address, could you forward this to him?

Tomorrow: Bright-Life Catalog