June 2007, Week 4

SciAm.com/podcast  is a site run by Scientific American magazine. Along with a lot of other information they carry audio podcasts describing recent developments in various fields of science. Depending on your Internet connection, the podcasts may take a minute or two to come in, so it’s best to minimize the site and do something else on the computer while they’re loading.

SeinfeldScripts.com  has all the scripts for eight years of the Seinfeld comedy show.  Our favorite is “The Marine Biologist.” 

June 2007, Week 2

·  Eons.com describes itself as a web site for those "on the flip side of 50." We especially like the travel section, which featured the new cantilevered glass walkway stretching out over the Grand Canyon. The Fun section has games like Sudoku, crossword puzzles, Scrabble, trivia questions, etc. The Groups category is where you can join special interest groups, meet new people, create a blog and so forth.

·  Whfoods.com  discusses the World's Healthiest foods and provides recipes using them.

May 2007, Week 2

 Wize.com  has a search routine that hunts for user comments for thousands of products. It searches more than 6,500 Web sites and ranks more than 30,000 products by user satisfaction and media buzz.

   This is pretty much the way we all shop: We ask someone we know what they use and like, or we look up published opinions. But we've mentioned the problems with this before. Some songs of praise may be coming from people connected with the manufacturer or people who know a friend who works there. Some critical opinions may come from people at competing companies or someone bearing a grudge. It's always a judgment call, and common sense should be applied.  

April 2007, Week 4 

 Marketocracy.com  lets you create a portfolio of stocks and trade and track them. Joy has read the two books Bob wrote on investment software and advice but didn’t really get into it until she bought some virtual stocks through this web site. (She’s up 5 percent in the first week.) You can invest up to $1 million of virtual money. If you create a dud portfolio, dump it and start over. (Some brokerage firms also allow you to create test portfolios and track them, by the way.)  

 ·  81Nassau.com/apnews  brings up a map of the United States showing the locations for recent news stories from the Associated Press. Click on a city or town and you can read the story.

·  DuctTapeGuys.com  will take care of any free time you might have by telling you about dozens of things you can do with duct tape. You'll learn how to make a wallet or a tie or pants or a dress out of duct tape. Duct tape gowns and tuxedos were all the rage for high school proms a couple of years ago. You can make a munchies bowl in your car by taping a plastic bowl to your cup holder. Tape the box to the back of your "page a day" calendar and you have a place to put the torn-off sheets you want to save. Ah, the myriad uses of duct tape. Comes in colors too.

 ·  Classes.Cnet.com offers free classes on using Vista, the basics of wireless, digital cameras and many other subjects.

 February 2007, Week 3

1.) FastFoodMaps.com  provides maps showing outlets for the 10 largest fast food chains in the United States. For example, El Paso has 106 of them, while Chicago, which is roughly five times the size of El Paso, has only 266. The map provides addresses and phone numbers. This kind of information is critically important if you have a sudden Big Mac attack or are traveling with children.

2.) SkiBonk.com  provides maps of ski resort locations in the United States and Europe. Click on a site and you'll see the current snow conditions, lift waits, temperatures, etc. It also has comments on whether the natives are friendly and photos for some places.

February 2007, Week 2

   At Stardoll.com  you can move clothes around on models. This is the Web site equivalent of playing with paper dolls, but the dolls you play with are pictures of celebrities like Cameron Diaz, David Hasselhoff and Beyonce. You drag and drop clothes onto the models from closets on the side of the screen. The site is aimed at children aged 7 to 17 and has visitors from many countries, about a third of them from the United States.

February 2007, Week 1

   For $10 a month, HappyNeuron.com promises to train your brain for high performance. Each time you log on, your digital trainer suggests games that help you improve logic, concentration, language and spatial skills. We tried some of them and felt a little smarter afterward. Of course, we couldn't go anywhere but up.

    YSN.com  stands for "Your Success Network." Once you've got your brain power up, you can read some career advice and self-assessment tests. The site was founded by Jennifer Kushnell, best-selling author of "Secrets of the Young and Successful -- How to Get Everything You Want Without Waiting a Lifetime." There are lots of career areas to inquire about, and when you go to them, you can read advice from people who actually work in that field. Many of these felt their college education had little value and experience was what mattered most.

 January 2007, Week 5

 1. We found several Web sites that let you send out nice-looking party invitations and decided we liked Evite.com best. Second choice was MyPunchbowl.com. The main difference was that Evite has hundreds of finished e-invitations you can customize with your photos or theirs, and MyPunchbowl has the same basic template into which you drop clip-art or photos.

   Both services are free and allow you to send out decorative invitations by e-mail and collect responses. Invited guests can leave comments when they reply. With Evite, they can also see who else has replied and who will be there. With MyPunchbowl, a map and driving directions are included with the invitation.

2. BabelFish.Altavista.com is one of the oldest multi-lingual translation sites. We tried new ones like Fox Lingo, a plug-in for Firefox, and found BabelFish was still the best. It will translate Web sites or any text you paste into a window, between many languages, including French, German, Spanish, Chinese, Portuguese, Korean, Dutch, etc. The translations are far from perfect and sometimes nearly nonsensical, but if you work at it you can sort of figure it out. The service is free.

 January 2007, Week 3

 ·  OnlineNewspapers.com. Our previous go-to site for newspapers online was ecola.com. We know, it sounds like a disease, but that's spelled with a "b." This new site has hundreds more newspapers than we could find before, including 22 of them from Azerbaijan, for example. Who knew they had so many newspapers?

·  AmericanFolklore.net. You can find a lot of the classic tall tales here, like stories about Paul Bunyan and Pecos Bill. There are four categories: Tall Tales, Myths and Legends, Spooky Stories and Children's Stories. Under this last category there are even tongue twisters, like: "I wish to wash my Irish wristwatch." There are also bedtime stories to read to your children.

January 2007, Week 2

    1. AskSam is a well-known and well-regarded random access database, but the company also operates a Web site, askSam.com, that lists hundreds of databases, each divided into areas called "Surf Reports." Each of those reports, like "Science," "Health," "Biographies," "Government," etc., has links to dozens of sites related to that topic. Think of it as a bibliography of pre-screened Web sites.

   2. Travelistic.com lets you explore the world through short travel videos. Most are supplied by advertisers and tourist bureaus and have little feel of what the place is really like. But a few are created by individuals who actually know the area. We really liked the ones by a young woman who shows you a bit of what Newport Beach and Palm Desert, Calif., look like. She was as charming as the Travel Channel's popular Samantha Brown.

December, 2006, Week 4

   BobVila.com is a how-to site for home repairs, construction and crafts projects. Bob Vila himself used to host "This Old House," a home repair program on public television. What interested us most about this site is the section called "My Projects," where people show off their personal projects and describe how they did it and what they used.

December 2006, Week 3

 ·  WorldStart.com will deliver free computer tips to your desktop either daily or weekly. For instance: You can open Windows' Task Manager by right-clicking anywhere on the task bar (blue bar at the bottom of the screen) and see what's running and what you might want to stop. If a menu on your screen freezes up, you can clear it with a right-click of the mouse anywhere on the desktop; select "refresh" from the little menu that comes up.

·  Epocrates.com  has detailed information on more than 3,000 drugs, their use, side effects and possible conflicts with other drugs. The Web site says that about 65 percent of people who visit a doctor's office leave with a prescription, and it is often a wrong one. That could well be; last year we saw the results of a study that found medical mistakes were the fastest-growing cause of death in America.

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