Cool Web Sites
by Don Singleton
Tulsa Computer Society
From the September, 2004 issue of the I/O Port Newsletter
Including links previously reviewed at
http://www.educationindex.com/index.html,
http://www.komando.com/,
http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/arch.htm,
and http://marylaine.com/neatnew.html
As you’ve heard, obesity is epidemic among American kids. What’s worse, even the ones that aren’t dangerously overweight are often not getting good healthy exercise. The GoGirlGo! campaign hopes to get girls and young women interested and involved in sports and athletics. Find out how you can pitch in, or see what they’ve got to offer visiting kids.
Your computer can catch a virus or pick up a trojan-horse program any day of the year (and alas, ours certainly do), but some critters have an extra surprise lined up for you on particular days. McAfee, the antivirus firm, keeps a calendar of when the various infiltrators are scheduled to deliver their payloads. It’s a sorry state of affairs that no day is entirely without trouble; for instance, today (May 30) promises special deliveries from fifteen separate infections. Nice to know that the people who do these things have no life year-round, isn’t it?
Ever think that you’d like to step back in to the classroom – to share what you’ve discovered in life with the next generation, to repay a debt to a much-loved teacher from your past, or to switch to a career that truly changes lives? If so, spend a few serious-minded moments at this site and ask if you might have a calling to head back to the classroom. With an unprecedented shortage of teachers just over the American horizon, it could be the most important self-assessment you ever make.
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Net pioneers back in the day, has set up a site sure to appeal to students of classical history, with tons of maps showing the geographic and political terrains of ancient sites in Greece, Egypt, Byzantium Constantinople, Crete, Iberia, and the Roman Empire. The maps may be used for educational purposes without cost.
If something has rattled your nerves, check out these ambient sound environments, delivered your desktop for relaxation and solitude. Choose a sound-and-slide-show combination to relax or work by – various watery environments, heartbeats, the soothing clack-clack of typewriters (what, it’s just journalists who love that?), or the comforting roar of Manhattan streets.
GiBill.com aims to educate veterans, active duty military personnel, and their families about their government sponsored education benefits. There's also information on the Relief Acts, compensation, and the latest military news from all over the world. Should your tastes lean toward history, the Military Heroes section spotlights 20 of the 3,440 individuals who have received the Medal of Honor. The Military Locator and Reunions will help keep you informed about individuals and happenings
The RIAA has filed another few hundred cases, but fans of downloadable music can still take heart: Many artists are seeing the good effects of making music available to potential fans. This site offers an interesting variety of files; whatever your tastes, you’ll surely find something here to listen to that won’t get you tangled up in blue.
Hosted by National Gardening, kidsgardening.com is a great resource for educators interested in incorporating gardens into their classroom curriculum, and for parents looking for ways to supplement home gardening activities with their kids. The site offers sections on Classroom Stories, a plethora of hands-on activities, articles, an online guide to school greenhouses, and more. This website also includes links to a Q&A Library, a resource directory, and information on grants and fundraising. Additionally, this site features a parents' primer with chapters on garden structures, plants, maintenance, and more.
Handy like its namesake construction gear, this site offers a constellation of tools useful for those investing or hoping to invest in the real-estate market. The company itself sells a variety of software packages, but there's a nice variety of free programs that are yours for the downloading. If you, on the other hand, have developed something handy for your own real-estate management uses, why not be a good citizen and share it with the community here?
For those of us who enjoy checking out our names in other languages, this charming site will take your name and match it up to a variety of possibilities in Hebrew, showing it both in the correct script (as a gif image, so it can be saved to disk) and transliterated for easy pronunciation. Fun
Who would win in a fight, Anna Kournikova or Mr. Ed? Who’s the better late-night talk-show host, Conan O’Brien or Space Ghost? These burning questions and many more can help you waste your day quite proficiently. Celebrity Battles displays two celebs and has you pick a winner; the random matchups range from the sublime (Johnny Carson vs. David Letterman? ouch) to the ridiculous (we’re still trying to figure out whether Winona Ryder is funnier than The Price Is Right host Bob Barker).
Many of you may have read or heard about some of the many bloggers who write about being homeless – Crystal Evans in Boston, Kevin Barbieux in Nashville, Morgan Brown in Montpelier, and the list goes on. If you find it deeply unsettling that there are folks in this country who can more easily find a home in cyberspace than off the streets, you’re not alone; this LiveJournal site is geared toward collecting stories both from those currently or previously homeless and those who simply hope to understand or help
Home appliances represent a significant investment, and caring for a washer on the fritz or purchasing a stove that turns out not to be the right one for your home can be maddening. This helpful site aims to advise you on appliance purchase, ownership and maintenance. Tips are plentiful, and standout tipsheets include information on when you should give up on your old appliance, understanding new appliance warranties, and what to expect if your new appliance should break down
This online version of the Smithsonian touring exhibit shows a variety of printed posters — for everything from movies to political movements — that have appeared in America over the centuries. As any college dorm-dweller knows, posters are a wonderfully democratic form of decorative art; this exhibit shows how poster art in the U.S. has evolved a distinctive style and visual vocabulary.
Reading clubs aren’t only fun for grownups. This excellent online book club gives kids, teens and parents a fun (not to mention safe and ad-free) place to discuss a monthly book selection or to review something they’ve recently enjoyed. The sites specializes in African American literature for younger readers (and anyone else who still enjoys browsing the kids’ section at the library); the selection for April has been Julius Lester’s Where The Beginning Began, and May’s will be on tap very soon if you want to start fresh with Addie, BeBe, Corey, Drake and Ms. Grits.
The Nobel e-Museum presents this well-designed Shockwave map showing the locations, types and casualties incurred in the 20th century’s deadliest conflicts. Glide the timeline bar to select the era that interests you; rolling over the icons will give you more detail on individual wars and uprisings, as well as information on who won Nobel prizes for peace during the years in question. A sobering reminder that America’s current awareness of war is old news in many parts of the modern world.
Created by the Missouri Botanical Garden's Butterfly House & Education Center as a companion site for visiting school groups, this site has great resources to offer both teachers and students. For students, the site offers Species Identification Pages, information on making a butterfly house, a description of metamorphosis, a gallery of beautiful photos, and more. For teachers, the site provides instructions for such activities as Raising Butterflies & Moths, Insect Scavenger Hunt, Design Your Own Insect, and Butterfly Arts & Crafts, to name but a few.
Internet professionals, not checking in regularly with this excellent site is a recipe for disaster. (If you don’t think that Net folk need to keep up with legal news these days, please be kind to yourself and read the rest of the Tech section’s front page once you’ve finished Hot Sites. It really is a jungle out there.) Each day brings a smattering of useful headlines to this indeispensable resource; you can stop there or delve to your heart’s content into the site’s well-stocked topic areas.
Here's an easy way of saving dough at the grocery store: Instead of clipping coupons from the Sunday paper, do it online. Enter your ZIP code on this site to find a list of local grocery stores that participate in the program. Click on your favorite store, pick the coupons you want and print out the page. Present the list at check out and count your savings
We tried Orkut, but we think that this site may actually say more about who we are – it’s a collection of screen captures of participants’ on-screen desktops. Anyone who’s ever puttered around their PC picking just the right wallpaper, icons, and so forth will instinctively understand why this is appealing, but closer scrutiny reveals a surprising amount about how different folks organize their virtual workspace and, by the extension, the other spaces in their lives. There’s one heck of a dissertation in here somewhere.
People without pets just don’t understand that living with an animal companion has its ups and downs. Those seeking advice about dogs, life and love are advised to pay a visit to the Dog Lady for enlightenment on how those things all fit together. Wait – dogs, life and love? As Dog Lady herself puts it, “It is impossible to live with a dog and not consider deeper matters of life and love. Dogs are our guides into all human relationships.” We have a feeling she’s already heard from more than one cat owner about that, so becalm yourself and just enjoy the site.
Benj and Jeremy Edwards are songwriters with the kind of fecundity you used to see in the Tin Pan Alley days, but they’re doing those old-time tunesmiths one better: They’re asking the Web for song ideas, and delivering a fresh composition once a week on Wednesdays. If you have an idea or phrase that you think might make for a clever song, send it along to these guys and, if it strikes a chord (ha! we bring the funny!) they’ll compose lyrics and a tune for it. A selection of past songs is available for free download, and the brothers Edwards offer CD collections of some of their more notable efforts. One of the Web’s more unusual creative efforts, but loads of fun.
The Baseball Almanac contains exactly the sort of information to amuse fans and settle arguments, without catering strictly to the sabremetrics crowd. The information is organized into a host of helpful areas such as those on the All-Star game, player stats, quotations, and humor & jokes. From the main page, visitors can pick up quick history facts, read profiles of players who have recently passed away, or find out what's been updated most recently on the site. We particularly liked the fabulous feats area, where visitors can learn such trivia as which players have hit two grand slams in one game and who’s had six hits in one game.
We love collaborative projects, and we really love the idea that strangers are essentially good and honest folk who will join in the spirit of a fun endeavor. Randompixel, therefore, is an idea for which we’re rooting: Send some disposable cameras out into the hands of strangers, with instructions to whomever gets them to snap a couple of photos and pass the device along. When a camera makes its way back to site proprietor Kevin Fox (and they do!), he posts the photos with commentary on where it appears the device has been traveling. It’s all quite charming.
Yes, it happens: Sometimes everyone’s favorite search site can’t deliver the goods. Wayne Radinsky is interested in what you, the unsuccessful searcher, have done to perplex Google, and on this page you can explain what you were looking for and how you went about it. If you’re really lucky, someone might even be able to help you tune up that feeble request. Otherwise, simply browse and enjoy these glimpses into some of the world’s more unusual questions.
Ever wonder what happened (or is happening) on a certain day? DateDex provides information on all manner of upcoming dates and "on this day" type material. For instance, Sunday May 9th is the day of Spain’s Formula 1 Grand Prix; it’s the Jewish holiday of Lab B’Omer and the Catholic feast day of St. Pachomius, said to be the first to have drawn up a monastic rule in writing; the Russian Federation marks it as Victory Day, and in many countries around the world it’s Mother’s Day – making this site both useful for the forgetful and fun for all.
As conservators scramble to figure out why the world’s most famous painting is deteriorating, the rest of us can catch up on what makes La Giaconda fascinating – the strange smile, the even-stranger eyes, the realism, the surrealism (notice anything odd about the background?), the stunning technique, and the artwork’s incredible history. This little visit to the doctor may be the most rest our girl’s gotten in quite some time; turns out it’s a full life and a merry one being a famous work of art. Read, as they say, all about it.
With fuel prices bad and getting worse, odds are you're happy to spend a few moments on any Web site that promises to point you toward the lower-priced pumps in your part of the nation. GasBuddy is actually a portal to over 170 local sites that track what stations in each community are charging.
As kitchen neophytes know, sometimes recipe books assume you know how to perform certain techniques — making a roux, for instance, or kneading dough or julienning vegetables — that you've never seen done before. One of the Web's oldest and most glorious sites comes through yet again, this time with videos designed to instruct the hopeful-but-inexperienced cook or baker in skills that too many cookbooks (and cooking shows) treat as common knowledge.
We watch it, all right; it piles up in drifts on our friends' plates. If you, on the other hand, are more conscious of the detrimental effect of a salt-heavy diet on the average cardiovascular system, this site can help you enjoy your food without kicking your salt and/or sodium levels over the moon. There are products to buy, if that's what you're after, but there are also plenty of nifty recipes and lots of advice on everything from toothpaste to picking a fast-food restaurant.
In a world where shopping malls are bona fide tourist attractions, here's a charming alternative: Organize a day trips to visit independent booksellers in communities near or far. This site, offered by tour organizer Larry Portzline, suggests how (and why) a trip to one or several bookstores could be just the thing to help you see a city – yours or someone else's – in a whole new light. And what's not to love about a mini-vacation that suggests its own souvenirs?
You don't need to be a geek to have made a complete ass of yourself at one point or another, or so we're assured by this funny, heartbreaking site. If you've ever done something entirely stupid to get the attention of a not-so-secret crush; if you've ever slightly lost your mind over a trivial obsession; if you've ever embarrassed yourself so thoroughly in front of a class or meeting that you thought you'd have to move to a cave in Antarctica, you'll appreciate this site, with stories submitted by the readership and lovingly illustrated by comics artist Maria Schneider.
For more information on the Tulsa Computer Society click here
Tulsa Computer Society 9/01/2004
Don Singleton, President