just how DO you hide your IP address while online.....
Join an anonymous browsing service. These work by displaying a proxy ID to the world while your surf online. No one knows your real location unless you choose to reveal it.
Well, that depends upon exactly what you mean by this. My PC's IP address is a non-routable address behind a NATed firewall. The IP of the outward facing firewall can't be hidden. When you go to a website, your external IP is logged. THere is no way to prevent that.
As others have stated, you use proxies.
Personally, I use an Ad blocker called "Admuncher" www.admuncher.com.
It blocks everything, all ads, popups(gets them before firefox does), malicious scripts, you name it. It also has a neat feature called IP scramble. It collects lists of proxies and routes your requests through them randomly. It slows down surfing(proxies generally do unless you pay for the service), so I don't use it all the time just when I'm in the seedier side of the net(sometimes hackers have useful tools). It's got a 30 day free trial and it's layer 3. That means you don't have to configure proxy settings in your browser. It's a nifty program I stumbled across some time ago. Well worth the $30 dollar one time fee. Give the free trial a shot. When it complains in a month, uninstall. It's very clean.