Cool Web Sites
by Don Singleton
Tulsa Computer Society
From the May 1999 issue of the I/O Port Newsletter
Contains a lot of images devoted to Mother's Day and anything to do with Mothering including some beautiful weave wallpaper and also some great animations on page three, and the Original "Mother Of The Year Awards"
A free collection of Mother's Day Clip art. Much has been colorized (and reworked) by us from black and white clip art found at various free sources. Many are optimized to be small in size with transparent backgrounds, so you can use them on any color pages.
These antique images from our private Victorian Era collection can be freely used to make your mom or wife a special card or greeting. Just click on any graphic or thumbnail image, and it will enlarge to greeting card size.
Free java virtual postcards, which you can personalize and send in seconds!
Get ready for a Father's Day with stories, music, animation, and puzzles.
Trivia game, e-postcards, a tribute section for thoughts on dad, links and more.
Brief history of the day, dedications to fathers, poetry and links.
Virtual and printable cards, and gift ideas that run the gamut -- from a ready-to-print list of gift IOUs, to instuctions on how to make handy TV remote holder.
This large site has much to offer, including a slide show tour of the Smithsonian's Information Age exhibit, transcripts of interviews with Bill Gates and others important in the development of computers, and Adobe Acrobat files of important historical documents.
Program bugs and computer crashes always seem to strike just after you've lost the number for tech support. That's where SupportHelp comes in; they can't answer your questions, but they can point you to the folks who can. Search here on the company or product name, keyword, or category, and you'll get complete tech support contact information--phone numbers, e-mail and snail mail addresses, fax numbers, and Web links--for more than 4,500 technology companies. All the support in the world is worthless unless you know how to get it.
We can't all stay at four and five star hotels when we're traveling overseas. If you're a budget traveler, the kind with a backpack and a Eurail pass, then the Worldwide Hostel Guide is your key to finding places to stay. Pick a country from Australia to Zimbabwe, and you'll get a list of hostels with contact information for each, as well as pricing and network affiliations. There's also information on traveling cheaply by bus, drive-away car, or thumb, and a bulletin board where you can post your own experiences hostelling. If you're a traveler who prefers cheap adventures to expensive luxury, this is the place for you.
Oyez Oyez Oyez is a Northwestern University project that provides information about important Supreme Court decisions in easy-to-understand summaries that are linked to the complete text of the justices' opinions. But best of all, you can hear as well as read the Court's proceedings, since the Court began taping its sessions more than 40 years ago. At press time, this site included taped portions of cases going back to 1961. You can search here by date, subject, or parties involved. RealAudio files bring you opening arguments and/or other parts of the hearings. If you don't have a RealAudio player or the current version, the site will link you to a place to get it. Democracy in action, no farther away than your modem. Just the sort of thing for which the Web was made.
If cheddar's your passion, if you're not neutral about Swiss, if processed cheese food makes your artery-clogged gourmand's heart go pitter-patter, then you will find the stuff on Kyle P. Whelliston's CheeseNet so good, you will just want to "edam" up. Take the World Cheese Index: Select a cheese, and you will find its country of origin, a description of its taste, a picture of it, and icons that inform you about its texture and its firmness, whether it's cooked or not, and which animal donated the milk. Check out links to other cheese sites, and read the poetry and prose in the Cheese Literature section. Those of you whose parents never gave them "the talk" about the curds and the bries can consider this your education.
Give a man a bowl of Wendy's chili, and he'll eat for one meal. Teach a man to cook his own fast food, and he'll be set for life. At least this seems to be the theory behind the Top Secret Recipes Web site. In many ways, the site is a way to hype a series of books by Todd Wilbur, who has made it his life's work to figure out how to replicate famous fast foods so you will never again have to pay, or overpay, for the real thing. Along with the book offers, Wilbur provides something a bit more intriguing -- a few of these recipes free for the downloading. He adds new items to the list every month. Re-creations include such delicacies as Arby's sauce, Wendy's chili, Snapple Iced Tea, Orange Julius, and Mrs. Fields's Chocolate Chip Cookies.
You want a VCR, a toaster, a truck, a scanner, or some such thing. There's no one store that carries all brands, you can't find the relevant copy of Consumer Reports, and you just don't have the time to do research. Hey, check out Compare.net. Choose a product, set price and feature parameters, and you will get a brand-to-brand, head-to-head comparison of all available models with your specified features and options. You can ask for a side-by- side comparison of two items or click on any item for more detail. This site saves time, tire rubber, and eye-crossing comparison shopping.
Meter reading is always something of a mystery: some uniformed person shows up with a flashlight and a punch-in doohickey, looks at spinning dials, keys in the stats-and some time later, a big utility company wants your money. You don't even know if they read the meter correctly. But now there is a way to find out. Enter two meter readings taken a month apart, click, and you will get how many kilowatt hours were consumed and what you have to ante up.
Your guide to physics on the web.
A Christian E-zine. Information and entertainment for all ages.
You get tired of your Internet service provider, you move, or for some reason you now have a new Internet residence. At the moment, the post office doesn't provide you with e-mail change-of-address forms. Instead, you have to e-mail everybody you know to let them know where they can find you. Inevitably, you forget a person on your list, or you just don't feel like going through the hassle. The Find ME-Mail site offers a way for all those who want to stay in touch with you do just that. And it's free. You just register by entering your old e-mail address and your new one, and then selecting a password that will let you go in and change your information in the future should the need arise. Seekers of your e-mail address merely have to bop on over to this site, type in your old address, and voila-they have your new one. Of course, the catch here is that people have to know to come to this site. It's not second nature yet, but the idea is such a good one, we think this site or another like it could become a regular stop for a lot of folks, especially those who jump ISP ships frequently and those who lose their address books.
For those who are even mildly interested in what time or day it happens to be, we found a timely and truly awesome site. Today's Calendar and Clock Page will tell you, in a list as long as your arm (assuming you have a very long arm), the date; the time; which day and week of the year it is; and the date it is on the Hebrew, Islamic, Baha'i, Chinese, Buddhist, Coptic, Indian, and you-name-it calendars. It tells you how many years it's been since American independence, Queen Elizabeth's coronation, and the beginning of the atomic era. It provides the date on the Positivist, World, Galactic Milieu, and Goddess Lunar calendars. If you've been feeling lately that your timing's off, this should jolt you back into the here and now.
Maps
Focus on the Family began in 1977 in response to Dr. James Dobson's increasing concern for the American family. Dr. Dobson's method attempts to "turn hearts toward home" by reasonable, biblical and empirical insights so people will be able to discover the founder of homes and the creator of families - Jesus Christ.
Holidays are traditionally a time to eat well. But it's wise to be safe about it, too. Which is where the National Food Safety Database comes in. A wide range of topics are covered, and an ask-the-expert section handles those that are not.
Issues in Science and Technology has made the jump to cyberspace, and you don't have to be a scientist to get absorbed in the wide-ranging articles. Such as the latest on missile defense, environmental policy in the age of age of genetics and crime-fighting techniques.
Wish you could have a dictionary or thesaurus handy when you surf some Web pages? Let VoyCabulary from Voyager Info-Systems act as a substitute. You may be amazed how easy it is to click your way to definitions.
Journey through the stars with National Geographic Online. View the nighttime sky using National Geographic's popular Star Chart, including overlays of Hubble Space Telescope Images.
At Shepherd's Town, find links for email cards, homeschooling, resturants, search engines, kids, and web page helps (including graphics) as well as monthly devotionals, testimonies, Christian chat room, book reviews, inspirational writings, jokes, and kid's talk.
Non-English Font Archive
Crash Course in Wills & Trusts - the information you need on estate planning, estate tax, probate, the executor, the power of attorney, life insurance, long term care insurance & much more.
Library supporters create a celebration of their very own in honor of libraries.
So, Britian has a lower handgun death toll than America every year
Every year CNN announces the same statistic. You know the one, the fact that the handgun death toll is in the tens of thousands in the U.S and only like double digits in Great Britian. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to account for the difference, it's because handguns are illegal in Great Britian and they are legal in the U.S.
I would like to see them, just once, release the statistics of the number of Catholic/Protestant Pipe Bomb related deaths in Great Britian as oppossed to the U.S. I think we're kicking butt in that category!
The official web site of the PBS home renovation show
For more information on the Tulsa Computer Society click here
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Tulsa Computer Society 3/14/99
Don Singleton, President
djs@ionet.net