The Inner Child in Me

 

By David Shamah, The Jerusalem Post, Jan. 23, 2004

 

Help! I’ve made a horrible discovery recently – apparently there’s some sort of incoherent being living inside me, a nasty little bloke who surfaces from time to time spewing the most ridiculous nonsense. Last week he started up when I was trying to convince the bank manager that I’m really a good credit risk, and that the 20,000-shekel overdraft I’m running is just temporary. Hold on… oh-oh! He’s back!

 

Doods! i got to clu u in on won of the kewlest things evuh! U r not going to believe it!”

 

See what I mean? It’s as if he seems to know when I’m doing something important, and makes his appearance at exactly the wrong time – like some antisocial teenager!

 

Which he may indeed be. I may have picked up this stupid kid hanging out in one of those IRC chat rooms, which is full of these characters. IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat. It’s got a reputation as the “bargain basement” of Internet communications – and tends to attract even more antisocial teenagers (and adults, for that matter) than newsgroups, ICQ and MSN Chat Rooms combined!

 

The IRC network consists of about 50 major chat servers where users can communicate with each other in real time, as a group. When you open your chat client program, you get a list of available servers and the channels – the specific chatrooms – available on each. There’s also a list of users so you can see who’s currently participating – usually funny-looking nicknames like NixBoy, Blacksheep, and Dedzed. Names no rational adult could ever possibly think of.

 

Actually, there are adults on IRC, too – and not just middle-aged teenagers. Universities often have their own chat servers with channels dedicated to specific classes or faculties, and some large corporations run servers for internal, secure communications. CNN also has a public chat server for people who have nothing better to do than comment on the news – it’s sort of like the talk radio of the Internet. But there’s no question that many IRC chat sessions contain lots of teenage-style bravado, nefarious discussions about hacking and other wholesome subjects, and the inevitable swapping of music, software and video files.

 

What’s heaven to a rebellious teen is hell to a parent, and IRC is just too big and popular to ignore. If you’ve got net-savvy kids around the house, chances are good they’re already wired into IRC, so you may want to check it out for yourself. If you’ve ever tried to download an IRC client, you may have been put off by all the funny looking characters and commands you need to run in order to get anything done. Even I, the great Newzgeek, was intimidated by IRC for the longest time – until I found a great free chat client called IceChat (http://www.icechat.net).

 

Because IRC is an older, text-based communications protocol, all IRC clients (programs that run the IRC protocol and can log onto servers) are somewhat clunky-looking by the smooth standards of messaging programs like ICQ, AIM, etc. In order to log onto a server, you need to type in a command like “/server irc.servername.com” – there’s just no way around it. IceChat takes all these arcane commands and gussies them up with buttons and contextual pop-up menus. For example, once you connect to a server, you’ll want to list the channels available – normally done with the command “/list.” With IceChat, you click on the question next to the command line and click on the List Channels command, which will automatically type this command into the correct dialog box. Click OK and your channel list appears. The same pop-up/contextual menu scheme works for all the other major commands. IceChat’s charm is in making the process easy, but not prettifying it too much; you see the commands listed and executed in their natural text format, even though you clicked on buttons and lists.

 

Unlike many chat clients, IceChat makes running IRC scripts easy. A script is a preset list of actions that you can take when something happens – for example, if a young ‘un gets a little ornery and starts cussing (how’s that for metaphor?), you can set up a script that will identify the offending term and the user it came from automatically, and either warn or “ban” that person from your group. Banning is an extremely popular activity in the IRC world, and users or channel operators are constantly threatening other users with bans for all sorts of infractions – and heaven help you if you get caught trying to sneak back into a channel with a different user name!

 

IceChat has a good help file, and the program’s Web site has tutorials about the program and IRC in general. But to really understand IRC you have to use it for a while – it’s really a whole subculture unto itself, and if you were to pick one term that succinctly encapsulated the IRC experience, it would be “freedom of speech.” Anything goes on IRC, and if you don’t like the way the chat’s going in the channel you’re in, just start your own! On some servers, you will see hundreds of channels with only one participant listed – most likely the person who started the channel because they didn’t like what was going on elsewhere, or because they were banned in another channel. Some servers are considered more “serious” than others, and some servers seem to attract the illegal software and file trading groups, the wannabe hackers, etc. One feature IceChat has that other IRC clients lack is a “stop” button – to stop loading the channels list on very popular servers (the Undernet server, one of the most popular, has about 10,000 channels!).

 

As Ralph Kramden used to say, “Youth is wasted on the young” – and there is no better example of that adage in action than IRC. I really shouldn’t knock it too much, though – I still have that kid to worry about. If I push him too far, I may end up getting banned myself!

 

Download IceChat from http://www.icechat.net; for all Windows systems.

 

Send questions to ds@newzgeek.com or check out http://www.newzgeek.com