·  www.bytetest.com: You can go here to get a free invitation to Google's e-mail service, but availability is limited. As of this writing, 7,680 slots were open. Google Mail is still in the testing stage, but it's been in the testing stage for over a year, and we've been using it for a year with no problems. It's Joy's favorite e-mail service and Bob's second favorite, after AOL. Google mail has a great spam blocker and will hold that spam for 30 days in a special folder in case you want to go over it. It holds your regular e-mail virtually forever, and that is its best feature; you can search previous messages, no matter how old.

 

·  www.spacekids.com: A science Web site aimed at kids. Science news and photos, some of which were snapped by kids.

  September 2005, Week 1  

·  www.wikihow.com: An online "how-to" guide for a huge variety of tasks. They range from the obvious, like how to fix a leaky faucet, to oddities like how to make an Abraham Lincoln costume.

 

·  www.drivesavers.com: This is a commercial site for a service that recovers data from damaged hard drives, but it's well done and has an interesting "museum" of hard drive "disk-asters." Check out the "Toasted Toshiba" and the "Sunken Treasure."

  August 2005, Week 2

·  www.fundrace.org: Find out how much your neighbors gave to political candidates and parties. You type in an address and ZIP code, or a person's name, and up comes a list of political contributions for that neighborhood. You also get each neighbor's occupation. The address can be anywhere in the United States. Interesting stuff.

 

·  www.sudokufun.com: Lots of puzzles from the new craze for Japanese number games. "Sudoku" is Japanese for "single number." The puzzles here change every few minutes.

 

·  www.vggallery.com: 2,194 works by Dutch artist Vincent Van Gogh. (And to think he sold only two.) Site is endorsed by the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam.

 

July 2005, Week 2
   We found these links at the SmartMoney.com Web site and thought some of them were worth passing along. The comments are our own.

·  www.ama-assn.org: The official Web site of the American Medical Association. It has a list of physicians available for consultation online and lists of specialists in your area. You can also find out if your doctor is licensed and where he or she went to school. Which reminds me of a joke that was current back in college: "What do you call the guy who finished at the bottom of his class in medical school?" Answer: "Doctor."

·  www.healthgrades.com: You have to pay $10 for this service, but it lists hospitals and their results for various types of care: cardiac, strokes, gastro-intestinal, orthopedics, etc. It also gives cost figures.

·  www.leapfroggroup.org: Rates hospitals on safety measures and best results for certain medical procedures. All hospitals are listed, but not all have ratings. Some don't report because they claim such reporting would interfere with patient care. Sure.

·  www.ratemds.com: Patient ratings for 8,128 doctors. These are entirely subjective and some are just plain silly. For example: Browsing the list we found doctors given poor ratings just because it was hard to get an appointment.

June 2005, Week 3

-- www.quackwatch.com Alerts and explanations primarily focused on medicine. (Could there possibly be medical quacks?). Also discusses questionable health foods, fad diets, needless surgery, dubious dentistry, etc. They list some "experts" by name, with links to other articles.
 
-- www.boundlessgallery.com A gallery of beautiful paintings for sale. There must be several of these on the web but this one impressed us for quality and prices. Artists can post their work for free.
 
-- www.kaboose.com  A search engine for kids. The result for every search is a site designed for children.
 

May 2005, Week 2 --The next voice you hear:

 

-- www.jiggerbug.com  It's like Netflix.com for movie rentals only this and the others that follow are for recorded books on CD. You can have unlimited book rentals, one at a time, for $20 a month or two for $25 here. Free trial available. What we liked about Jitterbug was the quality of the readers; our local library had the same books, but with readers that weren’t nearly as good.

 

-- www.simplyaudiobooks.com More books on disk, $25 a month or $20 a month when prepaid for a year; take two at a time, get more when you return them. Also has a free trial.

 

-- www.recordedbooks.com   For $30 a month you can have three at a time, and keep returning them when you finish. All their books are unabridged. First month free when you join.

 

April 2005, Week 5

-- www.mathforum.org. Answers to your math questions from grade school through college. Many areas are covered: algebra, statistics, number theory, etc. The best feature of all is "Dr. Math," who explains the reasoning behind each solution, which our teachers never did. The site also has math puzzles.

 

-- www.40mpg.org. The site tells you what kind of gas mileage various cars get and how much money you would save if you got better mileage. The Honda Insight was the best economy winner, getting 63 miles to the gallon.

  April 2005, Week 3  

-- www.live365.com  Links to commercial-free radio stations around the world. Has listener ratings for most.

 

-- www.mapsouthpacific.com  Dreaming of a real getaway? Maps and guides to the islands of the South Pacific. (Say! That might be a good title for a musical.)

  April 2005, Week 2 -- Are they pulling our Lego?   -- www.henrylim.org. Personal site of a guy in California who builds fantastic things out of Lego blocks. His full size Lego harpsichord can even be played.
-- www.amyhughes.org/lego Amy has built a Lego cathedral, and it looks fabulous. It's seven feet by five and made from 75,000 pieces. The interior will seat 1,372 Lego people. Gotta see it.   March 2005, Week 5 -- the singing physicists

-- www.physicssongs.org A wry collection of songs about physics, astro and otherwise, maintained by a professor at Haverford College. There's one by  James Clerk Maxwell, generally recognized as the 19th century scientist who had the most impact on the 20th century, who often sang it while lecturing, and another by J.J. Thomson, discoverer of the electron.

February 2005, Week 3  

·  www.Find-a-Drug.org.uk: Download free software and this nonprofit scientific organization will be able to use your computer when it's idle. The Find-a-Drug project, based in Britain, looks for molecules that inhibit the progress of HIV, cancer, malaria and other diseases. It has discovered about 100 molecules with anti-cancer or anti-AIDS properties. Partners have included Oxford University and Intel. The program runs as a tiny screen saver in one corner of your screen.

·  If a file is too big to e-mail, try www.yousendit.com. This is a free service that lets you e-mail up to 1 gigabyte of information. You can send it on a secure server to protect your privacy.

 

·  www.3dgameman.com: Quick video reviews of computer products: cameras, keyboards, networking, video cards, storage devices, etc. The show is hosted by Rodney Reynolds, who started this as a hobby and does about three reviews a week.

  February 2005, Week 1    Let's go museum hopping. Museums, arguably, are the world's treasure houses.  

·  www.mcn.edu: The "MCN" stands for Museum Computer Network. It's based in Ottawa, Canada, and intended as a resource for museum directors. But what we liked about it, and you will too, is that it has links to more than 1,700 museum Web sites and sites that have links to even more museum Web sites. Gotta go here.

 

·  www.museumstuff.com: "Dot com" means it's a commercial site, so the listings here aren't always logical, or even sensible. The list of museums of Italy, for example, includes the Victoria and Albert, which is an absolutely great museum, but it's in London, which is definitely not in Italy. If you ignore the slightly strange organization, however, this is a terrific site for searching for both famous and very obscure museums (like the Dick Tracy Museum in Woodstock, Ill.)

     Complaints aside, this is a very useful site, and here we pick up places like the Estonian National Museum (www.erm.ee) and the Dungarvan Museum (www.dungarvanmuseum.org) in Waterford, Ireland. There's even a museum devoted to oranges, in -- where else? -- Valencia, Spain; Qeb address: www.museonaranja.com.  

·  www.aam-us.org: Official site of the American Association of Museums, and the place to go if you're interested in a career working in museums.

     Notable: The Smithsonian Institution (www.si.edu), founded by a gift from James Smithson, an Englishman, is America's premier museum and its largest. It's so big it even issues its own credit card. Here you can learn about not only the exhibits, but trips, festivals, films and original recordings of jazz, blues and folk artists.  

January 2005, Week 4

www.epa.gov/waterscience/fishadvice/advice.html A long web address that finally ends up giving you information about dangerous mercury levels in specific kinds of fish and seafood. Go easy on the swordfish. But you knew that, right?

-- www.epa.gov/airnow  Shows a map of the U.S. with a depiction of what's going on weatherwise each day. It shows where there's unhealthy air for that day, including particle and ozone pollution.

-- www.worldcommunitygrid.org  An organization that's trying to create a giant public computer grid. They ask that you donate time on your computer when it's normally idle. One project involves searching all the possible shapes a protein can be folded into. They don't ask for your identity when you sign up.  
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