Selected Links
- NOAA - National Weather Service
- Everybody's interested in the weather, at one time or another. I figure the best place to go for information—or maybe just an excuse for when I'm just feeling a little too lazy to go ride my bike—is to the National Weather Service. Oh, I know some of you don't trust the government and all, but would they make up the weather forecast?
- The Dictionary of Mountain Bike Slang
- A year after I got into mountain biking, I still didn't know what the posters on the DORBA forums meant when they referred to "Betties", "Freds", and "Barneys". These and other revelations can be found in this compilation of lingo maintained by Doug Landauer and Jim Frost.
- Kurumi.com
- I thought I had some obscure interests. Published by Scott Oglesby, a self-proclaimed "roadgeek", the site is primarily about the minutiae surrounding highways. The strange thing is that it's actually a fairly interesting look at a topic that most of us would never think about (or want to, after a particularly hellish commute), though I'd never mention it to my wife, who already thinks I'm into some pretty weird stuff.
Oh, and here's the joke that prompted me to go Googling to find out where I-280 was, in the first place:
As a senior citizen was driving down the freeway, his car phone rang. Answering, he heard his wife's voice urgently warning him, "Herman, I just heard on the news that there's a car going the wrong way on 280 Interstate. Please be careful!"
"It's not just one car," said Herman. "It's hundreds of them!"
- Oracle of Bacon
- You've probably heard of the game where you have to try figure out the links between Kevin Bacon and any other actor. There's even a television ad for some credit card company, in which Kevin Bacon tries to prove his identity by producing several people who link him to the proprietor in some way. Anyway, the CS department at University of Virginia have come up with a fun little search engine that will do all the heavy lifting for you.
I found it interesting to learn that I'm separated from Kevin Bacon by only three links, due to my small role in a low-budget slasher film, Haunted-ween (1991).
- The Obscure Store and Reading Room
- Tired of reading the same old news? Check out The Obscure Store and Reading Room for a collection of the strange and interesting side of current events.
- Hi Monkey!
- Who'd have thought that the web site of a small, terry cloth simian could be so entertaining?
- Annoyances.org
- Boy oh boy, have I been looking for this site for a long time. Loads of information about how to customise Windows and answers to such questions as "Is it safe to delete those .chk files that are cluttering up my Windows directory?" (It's 'yes', incidentally.)
- The Institute of Official Cheer
- You know those cheesy TV adverts from the 50's? The Institute lampoons all those questionable marketing campaigns and other pop culture oddities in such a believable manner that it's hard to say how much of its content is a joke and how much is documentary.
- Urban Legends and Folklore at About.com
- We've all had it happen time and time again. Aunt Martha has spent 10 of her 50 free AOL hours, and all of a sudden she's an expert on computer viruses and e-mail warnings of dire terrorist threats. You know that there's no such thing as an e-mail tax, but how can you tell her in some gentle way that she doesn't know what she's talking about? Send her here. Maybe she'll get the hint, but don't bet on it.
- Dead People Server
- Okay, you know what? Go ahead and wrinkle your nose and groan at how morbid and gross this is, but how many times have you been sitting around with some friends and the question comes up about whether or not some actor you remember from your childhood is still alive? If you say it's never happened, you're being disingenuous. People, this is a very handy site!
- Catenema.com
- So you thought I had too much time on my hands? Check out this guy's site. Putting aside the cringe factor of the domain name, it's an entertaining look at what happens when you bring together a basic knowledge of HTML with an obviously non-functioning personal anectdote filter.
