Our March 2006 meeting was a presentation by all the board members, who each talked about
their own favorite web sites. Here are the Board members and their favorites sites, as
reported in The Voice. The website URLs have been turned into links for your convenience.
Lenny Bloom, a member and club Guru since 1981, showed us the genealogy
site www.ancestry.com. Some searches can be made without joining, but
membership costs between $30 and $300 per year.
Lynn Bloom showed us www.stratford.k12.ct.us, a site about the
Stratford school system; similar ones exist for other towns. But
the most interesting place to go is www.internet4classrooms.com, where
we can all learn. Go to "online practice modules" and you can find
tutorials, prepared by professional teachers, for such things as
PowerPoint, Word, Excel, Internet Explorer, DreamWeaver, Works and
Netscape, to mention only a few. A site your reporter will be
bookmarking shortly. . .
Bea Mull, who joined in 1998 and used to run the web page, mentioned
www.menupages.com, a NYC site with maps, menus and comments for many
city restaurants. Unfortunately it was down (and was later when tried
at the Editorial Mansion). Maybe this had something to do with the
story she told about later visits to Health Department sites showed
that a number of the top locations were in fact not as clean as they
might have been. (Though you can, she said, be docked 15 points for
simply not displaying your city licence properly!)
But Bea moved on to www.ct.gov/dot and we were soon looking at the
throughway traffic cameras. The pictures are still, refreshed every
five minutes or so, but anyway. . .
She then went to www.earthcam.com and we were regaled with pictures of
live camera shots from Times Square. Fascinating stuff, if not too
useful; but Bea said she uses the I-95 pictures site when starting home
late from work, to see what the weather conditions are like. (A laptop
literally on the lap while driving? Yikes!)
Yet another site followed: go to www.archive.org and check out pretty
well any site (they say 55 million are covered) and you can go back in
time to recover material long replaced on the current site itself.
A fifteen-minute break ensured that the crowd partook of Ed Deadrick's
generous portions of cookies and apple juice. It seemed plenty would be
left over?
Martha Fleischer (2000) showed two ways, it seemed, of keeping her
grandchildren amused. www.strindbergandhelium.com shows strange surreal
cartoon movies, and www.angryalien.com supplies shortened (30-second)
versions of major movies, played by cartoon rabbits. Titanic was run,
to great applause; it covered the story and we really didn't have to
sit through all that again. . .
Charles Bryk (1988) had no favorites as his job in market research
means each query involves a different hunt. But he mentioned a KFC ad
which had been rejected by ABC TV. He finally found it included
instructions to viewers to allow them to record the ad and play it
back slowly, thus revealing further important messages. ABC said this
was subliminal advertising. Also, faced with the need to supply a giant
replica of a product, he thought of inflatables and found four
suppliers.
To cover the paucity of his actual demonstrations, maybe, he had a
riddle and three little-known facts (factoids?). Three old ladies were
given tickets to a baseball game, so they took a bottle of Jack Daniels
to mix with the soft drinks. The game still had some time to go, but
the bottle was nearly empty. What inning was it and what was the
condition of the game when this happened? The answer will be held until
later. Meanwhile: The longest recorded flight of a domestic chicken was
about 13 seconds; A donkey can see all four feet at the same time (if
that's without moving his head he must surely be pretty pyramidical?);
and "rhythm" is the longest word in the English language without a
proper vowel.
Andy Burns (1990) mentioned Google and the fact that its search
criteria have changed as time goes by, so that the same search can
sometimes bring up different results. He then showed us www.townhall.com,
a news commentary site where people like Chuck Colson, Ed Meese and
other names from the past provide commentary to warm the conservative
heart.
Jim Sullivan (1990) showed us www.finance.yahoo.com, a stock trader's
joy. (A discussion arose as to whether www was needed or not, but it
seems to this memory that Mike Brotherton wrote in his Deep End series
that name resolution was done from the tail forwards, so that if it was
resolved before www was reached the www was not needed. However, Mike
was not there to straighten this out and the way it is written above is
the correct way for this site.) He also showed www.bigcharts.com, which
gave even more esoteric plotting of stock price variations.
Bill Hart, the Editor of the Voice (1982) had four offerings, of which
only three were shown. Studiers of early Christianity can find the Nag
Hammadi scrolls (parchments? papyri?) on www.gnosis.org/naghamm/nhl.html.
This is only one of a number of sites where one can recover the content,
and some pictures, of the so-called Gnostic Gospels, like the now-famous
Gospel according to Thomas, believed to be one of the earliest
recordings of Jesus still around after the pogroms of about 300 AD.
www.gutenberg.org/catalog is where volunteers are providing for
posterity copies of out-of-copyright authors' works. He waved a large
tome made from standard letter paper, of all the short stories of Saki
which had been created by downloading and re-formatting those files.
The last he showed was one, he said, of a number of such sites he visits
occasionally: www.orchidcars.co.uk/stock.html shows 1920's-era vehicles
currently for sale at this dealer in Britain. We could now guess where
some of the automobile pictures on page 3 come from. . .
Sadly, he missed showing www.bodley.ox.ac.uk, the site of the Bodleian
Library in Oxford, England. Here, if you follow your nose correctly,
you can unearth some fascinating pictures and documents in original. It
is another source of out-of-print material which your reporter followed
up the next day (see this picture).
Finally, Ed Congleton (1981) started by asking who watched the Oscars.
Answer: not one person present had bothered to do so! (Round of laughter. . .)
He then gave us www.laphamcenter.org, a site "designed by amateurs"
about the New Canaan center; then www.imdb.com, where you can type in a
zip code to get data about movies showing in your vicinity;
www.ct.gov/drs for state tax help; www.jdr-be.com about Brazilian
embroidery; and www.eftconnect.com, another investment site whose page
had won awards. But Ed was incensed by this, saying it had not enough
contrast and the type was too small to make it easy to use. He asked
the audience to go home and e-mail the webmaster to complain.
In the final minutes, Bea Mull mentioned www.networksolutions.com for
checking whether site addresses exist or not ('fcug.xxx' is taken for
com, net and org but tv, cc, bz, de, co.uk, us, info, name, biz and ws
are still open) and Walt Graham gave us www.gethuman.com, where you can
find how to "get human", that is, bypass those awful Voice mail
automatic response machines we all face now when calling different
corporations (and even your reporter's doctors' offices!). A big round
of applause closed the proceedings and we slid back into the freeze. . .
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