Customized Web services are the rage and Yahoo, one of the original Web site roundups, has entered the fray with "My Yahoo". A simple and clear login screen ushers you in. Smartly, it includes a user-definable hint word for when you inevitably forget your password. After choosing which topics you want to receive from ten broad categories like music, recreation, sports and news, your summary page is assembled. You can edit each section further and any of the topics you click on leads to a list of other related pages. Our only gripe is the lack of a way back to a personalized homepage other than a browser's "back" button, but that's insignificant compared to the convenience of a personalized news page, contacts page, and Internet bookmarks page. "http://my.yahoo.com/"
Fans of A&E's Biography will be pleased to learn that the creators of the show have created a Web site along the same lines. More than an Internet commercial for the TV show, the site fascinates in its own right. One section contains the first chapters of several recently published biographies and autobiographies, while another hosts a Biography quiz and anagram game. Of particular interest is the large database of biographical information on some of history's greatest figures. A search engine and cross-referenced links provide short synopses of the lives of those who have most influenced the way we think, work, and live. This is a great and useful site, both in form and in substance, and a worthy companion to the Biography series. "http://www.biography.com/"
CHOOSE A VEGETABLE AND STICK BODY PARTS INTO IT
The Virtual Mr. Spud Head site is a strange little Web page that revives the spirit and tiptoes around the trademark of one of childhood's most memorable toys, Mr. Potatohead, by allowing visitors to interactively place graphical noses, eyes, and other body parts on a rasterized vegetable face. After selecting an appendage and clicking on an appropriate (or inappropriate) location, the browser's window will refresh with the digitally attached body part in place. Don't pass up the opportunity to choose a new vegetable... the eggplant was our idea. "http://jubal.westnet.com/cgi-bin/crywalt/pothead.pl"
The prestigious New York Times needs help. Famed for its "All the News that's Fit to Print" slogan (and the reporting, we guess), the newspaper wants a new slogan fit for their new Web site. The game: summarize, in 10 words or less, the news mission of the New York Times on the Web. A panel of judges which include editors from the Times will select the winning slogan. To enter the contest, e-mail your suggested slogan, name, address and daytime phone number to slogan@nytimes.com by October 1, 1996. The prize: $100. "http://www.nytimes.com/"
WALL O' FUN POSTS BIZARRE ADS AND PRODUCTS
The Wall o' Fun is part of the "Shop! Information Services" (SIS), an advertisement-free consumer news service directed at women. The Wall o' Fun features monthly the funniest or eeriest products the site's authors can locate, be it on the Web or elsewhere. Click on the issues links to find it. An always humorous feature is the "Disturbing Product of the Month" article, which has managed to dig up items as strange as designer water for cats and dogs - in "tangy fish" or "crispy beef" flavors. The "Home for Wayward Ads" section shines the harsh light of sarcasm at sexist or just plain idiotic advertising. Other than the humor page, the site overflows with helpful information designed to allow women to make the most informed consumer choices possible when it comes to spending their hard-earned buckage. "http://www.sis.org/"
VOICE OF THE SHUTTLE FOR HUMANITIES RESEARCH
Voice of the Shuttle, a humanities research Web site, is rather esoteric. (The name of the site stems from a quote by Aristotle.) However, those who love to immerse themselves in the study of art, archaeology, literature, and/or related lofty topics should be pleased with this site. Clicking on the linguistics link, for example, will take you to a page with links ranging from the Klingon Language Institute to the Oxford University Language Centre. "http://humanitas.ucsb.edu/humanitas_home.html"
INTEL INSIDE, OUTSIDE, UPSIDE DOWN
This information site about Intel chips and products is not in any way associated with Intel. It includes undocumented chip features, productivity enhancements, and programming tricks, as well as excerpts and pointers on programming articles. The site is mainly of interest to those who write code for Intel processors. It also illustrates what large companies do when they believe that their copyrights or trademarks are being infringed. "http://www.x86.org/"
FAIR USE AND COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
Speaking of which, the answers are many and complicated, but this site provides a large number of resources about the legal and non-legal use of another's copyrighted materials. Great for legal research and insight into the complexity of the idea of fair use, the site is sponsored by the Council on Library Resources, FindLaw Internet Legal Resources, and the Stanford University Libraries and Academic Information Resources. "http://fairuse.stanford.edu/"
GRAVESTONES OF THE RICH AND FAMOUS
Famous people just cannot be left alone, even when they're just a pile of ash. Talk about your living dead. This site reveals a whole new travel itinerary for the morbidly obsessed, with detailed guides to finding sites (from highway turn-off to a plot's row number) of all your favorites, including Liberace, Oscar Wilde, and Jim Morrison. Well written biographies and genuine appreciation of the best burial grounds, including a feature on New Orleans, make this surprisingly good fun. "http://www.teleport.com/~stanton/"
RadioTower holds great promise. It links to church, news, theater, music, sports, and talk radio stations in North America and overseas. Pick an AM or FM station and get a RealAudio stream of live real-time radio. Problem is, many of the links lack the "Tune" button that starts the download, so all you can do is visit that station's Web site. Hopefully, you'll be able to listen to all the listed stations once bugs have been worked out. Live streams on RadioTower are set at 14.4 or 28.8 kbps, so if you have an ISDN or network connection streams may sound distorted. Even so, it's fun, and you'll hear radio you never otherwise could without shortwave. "http://www.radiotower.com/"
Although it may sound like a hangout for audio-visual geeks, AVWeb is actually a well-respected site for those of the aviation persuasion. AVWeb features the latest in avionics, news, safety information, weather, airmanship, systems and products - and that's certainly not all. If you're a real aeronut, test your mettle with clever brainteasers and check out the recommended vacation spots for pilot types. To enjoy all of AVWeb, you'll need to register by filling out a simple form, though there's no charge for access. "http://www.avweb.com/"
Want to know what's on the menu, how much it costs, and what credit cards a restaurant accepts before leaving the comfort of your EM-emitting computer monitor? You will. The DineNet Menus Online Web site boasts a collection of over 1,900 restaurant menus from restaurants spanning the United States. Each restaurant's entry lists a short description of the type of food, the type of plastic needed to purchase said victuals, and a detailed menu describing the appetizers, main dishes and, most importantly, the prices charged. A handy search utility also allows netsurfers to cross-reference dining styles with restaurants available in the city of choice. As this dining archive and others like it grow, the answer to the burning question that has plagued all life since the dawn of time ("Where are we going to eat?"), may be nothing more than a mouse click away. "http://www.menusonline.com/"
O'Reilly, publisher of those great computer books with the animals on the cover, has produced a Net version of their "Dictionary of PC Hardware and Data Communications Terms". Beautifully done, it contains over 900 terms covering the Internet and TCP/IP, hardware, wireless communications, data communication, APIs, LANs, WANs, and multimedia. There are tips on how to construct a search and the ability to do a wider, concept-based search as well. This is an essential bookmark for everyone using a computer. "http://www.ora.com/reference/dictionary/"
URLCheck is a bulletin board that lets Web designers get objective feedback from their peers. To post a site for review, you must review another site, and you must review a different site every 24 hours or the link to your site is removed along with all reviews of it. Obviously, this catch will keep you busy if you want feedback for longer than a day. All reviews are based on a fillout form; most of the comments are brief, probably due to the ill-conceived daily requirement. Many of the sites reviewed here are personal pages. Racist, sexist, and pornographic sites are not eligible for review. "http://ohiocars.com/urlcheck/"
Getting ready for a trip to California? Or maybe you're already there and want to explore some different locales in the state. CoolSpots California is a nicely designed and useful guide to historical sites and monuments. Also included are photographs of and information about what the authors call "funky" spots. Check out the winners of the CoolSpot of the Week award: they range from Cool, Calif. to the Dinosaur Truck Stop to the Queen Mary. "http://www.coolspots.com/"
COVERING THE WIDE OPEN SPACES OF YELLOWSTONE
The Yellowstone Journal is online with beautiful photos and many articles covering all things wild and wonderful about the park. The park covers over two million acres and the range of topics at the site does the expanse justice. Read about geysers or the new grizzly bear research project. Find out about fishing, wildflower viewing, or hiking. You can also subscribe to the paper version, published five times a year. If you want a taste of this bit of heaven, visit this site. "http://www.wyoming.com/~yellowstonejournal/YellowstoneHome.html"
QTVR SEATTLE - VIRTUALLY NO GRUNGE
VR Seattle bills itself as the largest collection of QuickTime VR (QTVR) movies on the Web. Nicely arranged, including links for downloading the plug-in, there are over 20 sites where QTVR panoramic movies were shot. If you haven't experienced QTVR yet, this is a good place to start. You can move around 360 degrees inside the movie by clicking and dragging, which lets you look around much as you would if you were physically standing there. It's the only way to fly. "http://www.vrseattle.com/"
Depending on your clime, now's about the time to start planning for the dread dead of winter, to dream of bonefishing in the Bahamas rather than chilling your bones at home. Bahamas Accommodations and Travel resources is nothing fancy, just a good wad of information on hotels, bonefishing resorts, diving spots, travel agents, and the like in the Bahamas - about everything you need to plan an escape to one of the country's 700 sunny islands. There's information for the major spots such as Nassau, Grand Bahama, and Abaco as well as for the smaller outer islands. About the only thing you won't find is just what the heck "goombay" means. "http://www.bahamas-mon.com/"
Are you a fan of angst-ridden teen verse? Worse yet, are you a producer of same? Either way, you'll want to mope-dance your way to this site, which will help you post your work and rid you of the guilt of bringing that trash into the world. "http://www.cyberperk.com/angst/angst.htm"
If you enjoy "Gone with the Wind" or "folksy" humor, try this Web site, which offers original Southern humor, essays, and whimsical notes in an odd blend of bawdy chat and folklore. Click a link called Fresh Egg, for instance, and you get the author's experiences with and views on beauty pageants. "http://www.surfsouth.com/~mguice/"
GRAPHICS, FONTS, AND A SNOTTY HOME PAGE
David Siegel designs all three. Comments on his home page range from "I think you are a brilliant, egotistical prick" to "Sir, may I please bear you children?" to "Lay down and shut your computer off before you hurt yourself." "http://www.best.com/~dsiegel/home.html"
WOMBATS is the Women's Mountain Bike and Tea Society. If you're a mountain bikin' dudette who wants to impress wildlife with your physique or who needs to justify massive food consumption, this might be the place to be. "http://www.wombats.org/"
Balliver, the ball, originated in a boring meeting, grew, and with the help of friends started to travel. From Guatemala to Egypt and Africa, it's been more places than most humans, and it has the photos to prove it. "http://www.cochin.com/cochin/ball/Ball.html"
Adventure Sports Online offers information on outdoor sports and activities. Though the site primarily features products and shops, you can also browse an eclectic collection of FAQs, job opportunities, and other miscellany. "http://www.adventuresports.com/"
Total Baseball is the official encyclopedia of Major League Baseball and the whole thing is on the Web. If it happened on the field, it's in here, right down to the once forgotten, now famous Archibald Wright "Moonlight" Graham. "http://www.totalbaseball.com/"
Frame[zero] brings two hunt-and-click games to the Web, "Neurosis" (with QuickTime VR) and "The Enemy Within". The art is nice - photorealistic is how it was described to us - and the atmosphere oppressive. "http://www.framezero.com/"
Filler resembles Go; the object of the game is to capture hexagons and convert them to your color. The game will work in Windows 3.1 or Windows 95. "http://www.rinet.ru/filler/"
The USS Kitty Hawk, an 86,000-ton aircraft carrier manned by more than 5,500 sailors, has its own home page on the Web with nifty facts and pics. "http://trout.nosc.mil/~cv63pao/"
Cyberpuppy Software has gone whole hog and released PigMail, a Net browser of sorts for kids. The kid-friendly software presents a map of the world that appears to have the measles. Those red spots are cities and buildings young Net-heads can zoom into. Once inside, PigMail can link them to Web pages with city-specific information or, better yet, link to home pages or e-mail addresses of like-minded kids. It's essentially a visual, cyber pen pal club for kids. PigMail appears promising, but is currently available only in beta for Macs and, truth be told, there are just not that many PigMailians out there yet (unless you consider somebody whose interests include C++ programming and oyster shucking an appropriate pen pal for your kid). It's free at the Cyberpuppy site and, with time and enough kids, should keep 'em busy till the pigs come home. "http://www.cyberpuppy.com/pminfo.html"
SO MUCH SHAREWARE, SO LITTLE TIME
This is yet another site that attempts to tempt with a list of the top 20 shareware titles in a half-dozen categories. Their software picks are OK, but they seem more interested in art than in substance in the presentation of the site. However, the blatant copy of the Microsoft site format for listing files does make for some interesting browsing. Oh, and there's no Mac stuff. "http://www.clicked.com/shareware/"
THE REAL AUTHOR OF THE VIRTUAL FRIDGE
Inexplicably, we screwed up the name of the creator of the Virtual Fridge Web magnetic poetry site. A good sport, he writes: "I wanted to say thanks for the nom de plume de web I was given, 'Andrew Buhloone.' While I still go by the name 'Andrew Ryan,' Andrew Buhloone is certainly one of the possibilites I will consider if and when I ever change my name." It makes us so happy to know we touch so many lives. "http://www.ieor.berkeley.edu/~andryan/fridge/"
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