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Amusing, interesting, and otherwise notable pages that I've chanced upon in my travels across the net. Have fun! Should anything be redirected, or not exist anymore, I'd really appreciate a quick note :-)

High Flight One of my favourite poems, written during WWII by John Gillespie Magee, Jr. The most beautiful poeticization of flight ever concieved.

Project E.U.N.U.C.H I have to hand it to these guys... anyone that loads a freezer up with 486 bits, bottles of vodka, and overclocks the thing to 247 Mhz deserves a link here. Only the British, only the British...

My friend dreal's page. He writes extremely powerful and beautiful poetry, that I think many of us can relate to. Well worth the read.

A great C++ Library Reference by P.J. Plauger. The legal restrictions are lame, but the reference provides a decent, in depth explanation of the library.

OS 8 Developer Documentation. Another sunrise site, this time with a huge amount of information about writing programs under MacOS 8.

The Macintosh Programmer's Link Library has a giant collection of links related to all facets of programming and development on the Macintosh. This is another one of those sites that you load, begin reading, and when you look up again, the sun is rising.

The Dictionary of Programming Languages is an attempt to catalog languages both alive and dead for posterity. They include some amusing comments on INTERCAL, so I like them. It's fascinating to see the multitude of ways in which electrons can be conceptualized.

Procedures to be followed in the wake of detection of Extraterrestrial Intelligence. A document published by the SETI Institute. Very interesting and informative reading.

SETI @ Home is a distributed computing project that allows you to use the spare CPU cycles on your computer to crunch radio telescope data for UC Berkeley researchers looking for extra-terrestrial signals. Well worth participating in... and the screensaver that runs while it's operational is neat to look at, and a good conversation piece.

A really unusual Mac SE, that has a clear case! It's really interesting to see pages that document unusual versions of common system hardware.

Powerbook Utilities that look rather interesting. They're useless if you don't have a Powerbook, but as I have one, they could prove to be quite useful.

More cool Powerbook links. I'm not sure how many of them are up to date, but they look worth exploring at some point.

More electronics info than can swing a stick at. Well, you could swing a stick at it, but that'd result in a trip to Fry's to get a new monitor. A very comprehensive site with links to pretty much every electronics topic in existence. You lose points on your Geek Purity Test if you don't go here at least once.

Everything is a collaborative weighted network. Anyone can create nodes which contain scraps of information, then link them to other nodes in the network. It's a fascinating project, and I'm expecting it to become sentient in about a week or so. Go there and play before you find it coming to you :-)

Stockmaster is a site that provides comprehensive information on stocks and mutual funds. The level of detail on this site is amazing, ranging from simple daily activity tables down to the mind boggling detail of individual SEC filings, earnings statements, annual and quarterly financials, etc. Best of all, it's free. If you're at all interested in the market, this is a great site to explore.

Slashdot is a tech news site and discussion forum that tends to be very Linux focused. It's quite an amazing resource. The fact that it gets about 500,000 hits on an average day should give you a fair idea of just how cool it is.

AF 2025 is part of a strategic analysis by the United States Air Force of strategic situations and operational capabilities that may exist in 2025. If you skip past the boring flow charts, the majority of which are unreadable anyway, there are some fascinating descriptions of military technology given. I've yet to read the whole report, but other parts appear to be interesting as well, so you may wish to spend some time here.

NetCopter provides an up to date, comprehensive look at Internet-wide network packet loss and ping times. Quite useful information if you know how to use it.

Internet Weather takes a more visual approach to Internet 'weather' via a series of animated gifs and java applets that display ping latencies from various locations to the company in Austin, Texas. It's worth noting that what is now NetCopter used to be at www.internetweather.com, but Matrix Information and Directory Services, the trademark owners of 'Internet Weather' sued Clear Ink, the company that runs NetCopter. You can find more info on this particular issue at a page that NetCopter has set up, explaining the situation.

Dictionaries of every size, shape and color. Being the word buff that I am, this is fascinating. It could be a great source for AI research, especially in the field of psycholinguistics.

Textfiles is a collection of over 9000 text files that date from the 70's and 80's. There's a marvellous and diverse collection of stuff here. Even if you weren't online in the BBS days, you'll certainly find something interesting and humorous here. I've only just scratched the surface of the site, and there's literally days worth of material to read through. There's a good reason it's at the top of this page. Probably one of the most incredible and unusual libraries I've found on the net so far. The green and black monochromatic layout of the site is cool also, and really works well with the subject matter. This site brings back many many memories.

TIGRE is a Gamma Ray Telescope being developed jointly by UCR's High Energy Astrophysics department, and NASA. Cool!

As We May Think was written by Vannevar Bush for The Atlantic in July, 1945. In it, he talks about accessing and managing information by way of a device called a 'Memex'. He talks about the concept of hyperlinking, and other information access concepts that are only coming into play today. He would have loved the web.

Project Gutenburg is a library of literature. Extraordinarily comprehensive and valuable, it's worth bookmarking for all time as a valuable research resource.

Internet SMS (Short Message Services) This is a pretty neat link. By keying in the cell network, and a person's phone number, you can send a 150 character message directly to someone's cell phone, anywhere in the world. There's a very large number of networks supported.

Norwegian in Five Minutes a Month This is a well laid out site that teaches Norwegian in easy to digest bites.

Reptilian Associates Y2k Preparedness Site Whether you're technically literate or not, this document is a must read. Attempts to rectify problems in our information infrastructure are being done too little, too late. Your world will change in late 1999, and early 2000. The only question is by how much? This document provides a thorough analysis of what's happening, what's happened, and how you can survive. It also includes many links to related sites.

Unfiltered Metaspy An unfiltered look at current search terms being entered into the Metacrawler search engine by users. Very interesting to see what people are looking for. Click this link at your own risk. Content is unfiltered, and may (almost certainly will be) inappropriate for children and other sensitive groups. I take no responsibility for what you see if you click here.

Anonymizer The Anonymizer service allows you to navigate the web in privacy, without leaving behind tell tale domain, browser, and other info with every site you access. Other secure services are also offered. I'd be wary though. They're rumored to keep very accurate and detailed records of what their users are up to. Don't assume that you're safe, simply because you're using them.

TUCOWS is an awesome collection of Internet software with sections for almost every platform. Well worth browsing through to find useful utilities and new toys.

MP3 Masterlist is a great way to fill up your hard drive. This site has an extraordinarily comprehensive and well organized link library of MP3s.

PureMac is a great, well organized collection of Mac software. Well worth checking out!

The UCR Visual Cognition and Performance Laboratory My place of work. The web site is screaming for an update though.

The Altavista Photo Finder is one of the most incredible sites I've encountered in a long time. Type in a keyword, and it'll find photos relating to that keyword. It can even do neat stuff like search for images that are visually similar to those found, etc. Very very cool!!

Life without User Friendly just wouldn't be any fun at all. A great comic strip about the wacky neurotic characters of Columbia Internet. May the Open Source be with you.

Slashdot Lots of news regarding Linux, Open Source, and other interesting things. I saw the server the other day. It was big, white, and pretty nondescript, unlike the page, which often resembles a firestorm that puts Baghdad to shame.

The Onion... is America's finest source of really funny (albeit fictional) news stories. Great for bringing a smile to your face. Try it out.

Bananas at Large is a great, well stocked music store located in San Rafael, CA. They have a friendly staff who really know their stuff. Well worth checking out.

Macintosh Components Engineered (MCE) Is a cool company that exclusively serves the Macintosh Powerbook community. Lots of great products!

Cybermeals looks like a really cool service. It acts as a digital Waiters on Wheels, and allows you to order a meal from local restaurants over the net. I haven't tried it out yet, but it looks like a handy link to keep around, especially as I'm usually hungry and sitting in front of a net connection!

Bill Gates dressed as Hitler I think I'm going to make this the desktop picture... on my Mac :P

Cool toys A neat little /. feature that outlines some really neat toys to fill your pockets (and empty your bank account) with.

The ultimate nerd workstation. I want one. Mom, Dad? :P

The UCR Psycholinguistics and Computational Cognition Lab The lab across the hallway from ours. A truly wacky and cool bunch of people. They have their own t-shirts, a museum of Led Zeppelin posters, and good coffee which I've been meaning to go over and try to snag a cup of! They do some really cool research too. In retrospect, I should have added this link a long time ago.

Google! is a really cool search engine that uses referential link ranking to determine page importance. I tried it out, and the search results it produced were some of the most relevant I'd ever seen. Still in alpha, too! I made it my default engine. And the best thing about it? NO BANNER ADS! (But for how long?)

The home of Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) International, the de-facto standard for public key encryption over the net. Well worth checking out and downloading the software for. My security information can be found at my contact page.

The one.. the only...yes, it's the INTERCAL Resource Page INTERCAL is the official Programming Language From Hell. In the words of Eric Raymond, "...Expressions that look like line noise... Control constructs that will make you gasp, make you laugh, and possibly make you hurl." Well worth checking out, even if you're not foolish enough to take the challenge of actually trying to make a Hello World program in the language. You'll wish you'd tried to learn machine language for the Z80 instead.

More will be added soon for your enjoyment :-)


fib@lumiere.net
4.20.2000


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