Today's date is Monday January 05, 2009

• www.google.com - A good generic search program for beginners and those in a hurry... It apparently orders it's search results based on feedback from other people who previously used the same search terms. As a result, the first page listed is often exactly the one most people are looking for.

• wikipedia.org

• wiktionary.org

• wikiquote.org

• world.altavista.com - The babelfish language translator at Altavista: Because of idioms and grammer differences, some translations look pretty weird, but it's good enough to get the general idea.

• www.imdb.com - Internet Movie Database - Great for finding that movie or TV show who's name you can't remember... If you remember an Actor, or even the name of a movie that actor was in, you can start with the one you remember and follow the chain of relationships to the one you're after. (eg, "That new movie with the guys from Dogma": Dogma -> Silent Bob/Kevin Smith -> Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back).

• groups.google.com - A great search engine / web gateway to the old usenet system, a sort of 'topic based email' system. Usenet is a great repository for little bits of critical information that might not make it to a regular webpage. For example, say you keep getting a cryptic error message when running a given program. You can call a technical help line for $10/minute and probably get bad information anyway, or you can search for the error message on usenet, find a message where someone had the same problem as you, then see what responses were posted, which will usually spell out exactly what the problem is and how to fix it.

• www.wunderground.com - Weather Underground - Current weather and forcasts around the world.

• http://www.dexonline.com/ - Look up a phone number/address.

• http://www.spellcheck.net/ - A spellchecker.

• http://www.m-w.com/ - A dictionary.

• http://www.qwestdex.com/ - Qwest phone directory.

• http://www.mapquest.com/ - Map a location and/or get driving directions.

• http://www.time.gov/ - Java applet with correct time withing .3 seconds.

• http://www.ucc.ie/cgi-bin/acronym - Acronym finder.

• http://web.archive.org/collections/web.html - Looking for the way a web page used to look, or for a page that has been taken down? Try the wayback machine... Enter a web address, and it will give you a list of dates upon which 'snapshots' were captured of the old contents.

And a few things for fun:

• www.slashdot.com - News for Nerds.

• regal.hollywood.com - Movie schedules.

• www.sluggy.com - A daily, online only, comic series. It only makes sense if you read it from the beginning (1997), but highly addictive once you 'get it'.

• http://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/index.html - Joy of Tech - political cartoons about the Tech industry.

• http://www.geekculture.com/geekycomics/Aftery2k/aftery2kmain.html - After Y2K - Cartoon series about a world where Y2K bugs destroyed all technology not powered by vacuum tubes.

• http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/ - Computer Risks Digest Archive - This could also be called 'Tech-enhanced Stupid Human Tricks': Confusing what *can* be done with technology and what *should* be done with a technology is a formula for disaster... Like when the Navy saved money by putting a Windows NT computer in control of the propulsion system of the USS Yorktown and had to tow the battleship home when Windows locked up... Read the stories and learn from them, or you may be the next story.

Last updated September 12, 2008