ON THE surface, Fremont is snoozeville.
It's a bedroom community with lots of nicely kept homes, schools, malls, broad boulevards, campuslike R&D facilities and clean people.
For a peek behind the picture Fremont presents to the world, you've only to sign on to the Internet. There you can peer into Joe Smith's hot tub via his Web cam, check out Dean Dierschow's resume or learn about the kind of female companionship Bill-the-engineering-projects-manager is looking for.
Then there's the Fremont municipal code, Weibel Elementary School's home page and a wonderful tirade against Fry's Electronics, the company we love to hate.
There are history sketches of the city, agendas for government agencies, cars, houses and pizzas for sale. You can even check out hang glider accident reports from the slopes of Mission Peak.
I began my latest foray into the Fremont of cyberspace by calling up a page that is handy for searches. Its address is http://www.search.com. Fill in the search blank with ''Fremont'' and you could be busy the rest of the day.
I came up with 20,000 matches.
FOR THOSE of you who aren't hooked up to the Internet yet, I offer here as a public service a brief sample of what I found.
For a fun time, take a look at ''Bill's Profile.''
Bill is a lonely 50-year-old with salt-and-pepper hair. He's an engineering project manager, smokes and drinks sometimes and is divorced, with three children. He's an agnostic and likes walking, camping, romantic dinners and trips to the wine country, the coast and Lake Tahoe.
He's apparently not entirely sure, but this is what he's looking for: ''a petite, passionate, sensuous, loving woman. If not petite OK . . .''
If you're in the market for a good microcomputer software specialist, look over Dean Dierschow's resume. He's not only proficient in English, but he also lists these as his other languages: C, C++, 80286/8086/8088 assembly, 8085 and Z80 assembly, PASCAL, PL/M, BASIC, Forth, FRED, dBase III and IV and PLATO Author Language Operating Systems. Or something like that.
One of our neighbors welcomes us to his house, Chez Inwap.
There you will find pictures of the Smiths and the O'Hallorans, three cats and two computers and the family house. They even have a camera over the hot tub, but not much more than water was there when I checked.
ONE OF my favorites was one of the many hang-glider pages. Hang gliding is a really big sport in Fremont. Enthusiasts throw themselves off Mission Peak. When there's a good wind lofting, that is.
These pages come up with the unexpected. For example, the hang-glider page includes a long list of computer viruses, such as:
Oprah Winfrey Virus: Your 200MB hard drive suddenly shrinks to 80MB and then slowly expands back to 200MB.
Airline Virus: You're in Dallas, but your data is in Singapore.
Adam and Eve Virus: Takes a couple of bytes out of your Apple.
My favorite Fremont Internet entry came from ''The World's Gay Directory.'' The summary entry read: Bars: none. Hotels and bed and breakfasts: none known. Hot spots: Coyote Hills Park.
And I thought Fremont was snoozeville.
Copyright 1996, The San Jose Mercury News.