BIRD-DOGGIN' THE INTERNET

BIRD-DOGGIN' STUFFS YOUR STOCKING

By Dr. Steve O'Neil, Micro Mo Electronics, Inc.

Last year one of our most popular columns was the end of the year roundup of fun, educational, and useful sites. In the course of cruising thousands of sites throughout the year, we are pleased to offer you another selection of what the Big Dog thinks are surf-worthy for those snowy or sunny holiday interludes.

Start the transition from day to day concerns with a succinct but focused History of Computers at http://www-stall.rz.fht-esslingen.de/studentisches/Computer_Geschichte/index.html. Here you can go back in time to calculators and counting machines from the pre-Christian era, check out early modern developments, or revisit the rise (and fall) of Apple, Altair, and Geoworks. If this leaves you yearning for more information on the technological bases that drive these machines, Intel has a good basic tutorial on the making of transistors and microprocessors, and capsule biographies of their related luminaries. Part of the Intel Museum in Santa Clara, the site at http://www.intel.com/intel/intelis/museum/ allows entry with either Shockwave enabled browsers or html. Great for kids and marketing people.

For shots at the sane, sacred, and inane, the Glossary of Mathematical Mistakes at http://mathmistakes.com holds nothing back in excoriating reporters, zealots, sociologists, or inept scientists who commit errors in logic, statistics, or just plain math, which are expropriated to support various views. A new feature is their "mistake of the month" column which takes some timely issue to task on rational grounds. If you can make it through the white and yellow text on black background, it's worth a visit. For an extension of the same type of criticality, the Urban Legends Reference Page at http://snopes.simplenet.com  is a frequently updated site which takes a look at what is real and what is not in the news and untraceable views that constitute urban legends. Whether it's Halloween, horror, sex, the infamous "Twinkie defense," or the origin of Christmas as a holiday, here's where you'll find the scoop.

For more scholarly diversions, you may have heard that the Encyclopedia Britannica has converted from a subscription site to a free access site. Save yourself stiff monthly fees or a $1200+ tab for the print version by going to http://www.britannica.com. By the time you read this, sufficient capacity should have been added to get the site back up after up to 10 million hits a day brought it to its knees last month. A good companion work is the Encyclopedia Mythica at http://www.pantheon.org/mythica/. Occasionally updated, the site currently has more than 5100 definitions of legendary animals and objects, gods and goddesses from around the world, and supernatural creatures. There is also an extensive pronunciation guide and nice links to outstanding mythology, literature, and ancient culture sites. Another outstanding literature site is Project Gutenberg at http://www.promo.net/pg/. A work in progress started by Michael Hart in 1971, this resource has downloadable classics in prose and poetry, drama, reference works, and modern literature. It also has a search engine, title and author index, and numerous ftp mirror sites in the USA and UK. Find everything from Aesop to Emile Zola in full text. If you're the volunteering type, they need you!

A couple of other useful sites that I use regularly in the work a day world are Local Times Around the World at http://times.clari.net.au/ and The Universal Currency Converter at http://www.xe.net/ucc/. The former has UTC/GMT times (no Daylight Savings) for all continents, countries, and islands around the world. Many are linkable down to the local level where they include latitude and longitude information as well. The latter site allows you to convert an inputable amount of currency "from" one unit "to" many others. The major currencies are listed in drop down menus on the home page and are updated once a minute. There is also a "full" converter that will link you to 180 other currencies for over 250 geographic locations.

With the Internet becoming more and more audio friendly, you will also want to take a look at Select Surf at http://www.selectsurf.com/internet/netevents . On this page you will find direct links to Cyber-Times, NetClock!, OnNow, Red Flash Internet, Yack!, and Yahoo!Events. These are frequently updated directories to live broadcasts, interviews, and other online events that are upcoming. Resources like these help you avoid having to look through daily print guides and news sources for time-sensitive live
Internet events.

And, of course, this being the shopping season, you may want to pay a visit to the American Bar Association's Safeshopping site at http://www.safeshopping.org. There are 10 short sections on this site which tutor surfers on security, privacy and payments, delivery, shopping tips, and complaints. It's well worth visiting if you're still skittish about using the Net for those growing mountains of online shopping bargains!

Steve O'Neil can be reached on the Internet at Steveo@micromo.com

URL Alert! We recognize the URLs printed in these articles may change by the time you try them out on the Internet. Most of the past Bird-Doggin' articles we've printed, with updated URLs and links, can be found at http://www.micromo.com/related.html .