Why I will not be buying Windows Vista, and a gentle introduction to Linux
Steely Dan and Lisa Loeb à la Cybernetic Poet
Piet Mondrian meets Andy Warhol
Language: facts, fun, foibles, fascination, and faraway places
The canonical list of funny definitions
Sights and sites in Microsoft Flight Simulator
Astronomy in Microsoft Flight Simulator
Principles of good web design: how not to make me hate you
Links
This section is what originally spurred me into creating my own website. My bookmarks and favorites folder was getting too unwieldy to be useful, and if I was doing research at a computer other than my own, I couldn't access them at all. So I put them all on a page with a brief description to remind me which ones I needed at the time. You're welcome to peruse them, too. Since you're surfing this site, you obviously share some of my own interests, so you might find them useful. Though there's nowhere near a Google of them, they each come with a handy description, which you probably won't get in a search engine. Some of them are a little short or missing a description completely; these are sites that I bookmarked for future reference.
Links marked with 
are winners of the coveted retro-Yahoo smiley of the Larry Likes Lots award and, as such, are particularly recommended. Links marked with 
are in Spanish. Links marked with 
were not working at last verification, and will be removed if still not working at next check.
All links verified on 9 Mar 06 with KLinkStatus, a free link checker that is part of the KDE project for Linux.
- Reference (dictionaries, thesauruses, style manuals, etc.)
- Censorship links are on my "Free Speech" page
Classical music
Other music genres
Psychology (a separate page)
Miscellany (a separate page)
Writing
www.writers.net - WritersNet: Internet resource for writers, editors, publishers, and agents
www.writersblock.ca/archive/index.htm - Contains some useful tips and other interesting items
andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Writing/ - A handy reference on questions of grammar, usage, and style.
www.nwu.org - National Writer's Union
www.stc.org - Society for Technical Communication
www.benedict.com - The Copyright Website. Useful when a quick answer to a question about copyright law, what constitutes copyright infringement, how to register your work with the copyright office, etc., is needed, but not a lot of detail.
www.nolo.com/lawcenter/ency/index.cfm/catID/804B85E3-9224-47A9-A7E6B5BD92AACD48 - Trademarks and copyrights from nolo.com, "Law for All".
www.writersjournal.com - This bimonthly is outstanding for the amateur or professional writer. It is also available in bookstores everywhere.
www.wisc.edu/writetest - Some more links, these from the University of Wisconsin-Madison Writing center.
www.sfwa.org/writing/ - A collection of articles, mostly of the don'ts of writing, for all skill levels. Although targeted primarily at science fiction writers, the information that can be found here is widely applicable to other genres.
www.geocities.com/Athens/Agora/5949 - The Writer's Academy at GeoCities.
websearch.about.com - About.com's compilation of material on searching the Internet.
www.theslot.com - The Slot: A Spot for Copy Editors. This is an excellent site, if only because Bill Walsh, chief of the copy desk of the business section of the Washington Post, takes more time to explain what a copy editor is than I have time to. But there's more than just that: "Sharp Points" should be required reading for anyone who writes or edits.
www.sfwa.org/writing/copyed.htm - "A Writer's Guide to Understanding the Copyeditor" by Terry McGarry. As a freelance copy editor myself, I found this essay to be a dead-on grasp of the thankless work that goes into producing polished, consistent writing.
www.publishersweekly.com - The International Voice of Book Publishing and Bookselling
www.favoritepoem.org/ - The Favorite Poem Project is an ongoing attempt to collect and archive favorite poems to celebrate the role of poetry in the lives of individuals. Although the one-year collecting period is over, they still accept submissions.
www.bdb.co.za/shackle/articles/eccentric.htm - Newspapers' eccentric names, an ebook by Eric Shackle.
www.bway.net/~hunger/ulysses.html - Ulysses for Dummies, a picture-book synopsis of James Joyce's masterpiece Ulysses. That's right, IDG, I said FOR DUMMIES! Sue me.
Reference (dictionaries, thesauruses, style manuals, etc.)
www.onelook.com - Automatically searches a host of dictionaries for your word. Accepts wildcards, in case you're not sure how to spell it.
www.refdesk.com - If you can't find it here, you probably can't find it anywhere. Almost anything you'd ever need it one spot.
www.bartleby.com - Bartlett's Familiar Quotations online, Gray's Anatomy, Strunk's Elements of Style, and many, many more excellent resources, all available free.
www.m-w.com/home.htm - Merriam-Webster online. Contains an online dictionary, thesaurus, word games, a bit on how a word makes it into the dictionary, and an excellent, concise history of the English language.
www.mla.org - The Modern Language Association's site contains the only guidelines on MLA style that are authorized specifically by them.
www.elite.net/~runner/jennifers/ - Various phrases in many languages. Excellent links, too.
www.ipl.org/div/FARQ - A very rich source for information of all sorts. Not a bad place to begin research.
www.link.cs.cmu.edu/dougb/rhyme-doc.html - Rhyming dictionary, thesaurus, spell-checker. Huge vocabulary of words.
www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/cmosfaq.html - The Chicago Manual of Style FAQ.
www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/041247.html - First chapter of the book "Tricks of the Trade: How to Think about Your Research While You're Doing It."
roland.lerc.nasa.gov/~dglover/dictionary/content.html - The Dictionary of Technical Terms for Aerospace Use.
www.geocities.com/TelevisionCity/5196/ - medspeak - the language of ER [sic.] is more of a general medical dictionary than an er-specific one.
1911encyclopedia.org - The eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Brittanica, published in 1911.
Linguistics
www.atanet.org - The American Translators Association has a test that can be taken for translation certification.
www.whoohoo.co.uk - British accents including Geordie (Newcastle), Brummie (Birmingham), Yorkshire, Scottish and Posh dialects. There's also an Ali G translator for fans of the British TV show.
www.zompist.com/langfaq.html - The sci.lang FAQ.
www.geocities.com/kbulger/ - Foreign language resources for teachers and students.
www.economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?story_id=975770 - An interesting story on the use of compression algorithms to identify and classify languages and authors.
www.rae.es - The Real Academia Española, the governing body of the Spanish language.
www.cml.bham.ac.uk/test - A diagnostic test to assist in determining what level of language aptitude one is at. Available in Spanish, French, Italian, and German.
www.essex.ac.uk//lang/span/socsp.html#newspapers - A huge collection of links to all kinds of resources in Spanish. This section points to newspapers, but there are many other sections on the page.
www.transparent.com/newsletter/spanish/index.htm - A neat site where you can read articles in Spanish alongside their English translation.
www.academie-francaise.fr/ - L'Académie française.
french.berkeley.edu/links/links_main.php - A very extensive list of links about French culture, language, and history.
babelfish.altavista.com - Translate text and web pages to and from English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian.
www.dictionary.com/translate - Dictionary.com's translator, based on SysTrans.
www.rinkworks.com/dialect - Translate text or web pages to redneck, jive, cockney, Elmer Fudd, Swedish Chef, moron, or pig latin.
www.verba.org - The Verba Universal Conjugator will conjugate verbs in ten languages. The only trick is that you have to know what verb you want. For example, I can't plug in "eat" and have it conjugate the verbs in other languages; I have to know "comer" is Spanish for "to eat" and then it will conjugate it for me.
Literature
www.beatmuseum.org - The American Museum of Beat Art, an exhibition of the writers of the Beat Generation such as Kerouac, Burroughs, and Ferlinghetti, as well as some visual artists, such as Marcel Duchamp and Franz Kline.
www.gradesaver.com/classicnotes/titles/ - Free Cliff's Notes-style study aids. Don't use these as a replacement for reading the book. If you do, you'll end up like George W. Bush: a clueless moron who is a complete failure in everything he's ever done.
sololiteratura.com/index.htm - Several Latin American authors, including Julio Cortázar and Gabriel García Marquez.
www.juliocortazar.com.ar/suvoz.htm - Audio clips of Julio Cortázar reading selections from his own works.
onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/ - The Online Books Page is similar in spirit to Project Gutenberg. It also has an excellent exhibition on banned works.
www-tech.mit.edu/Shakespeare - The complete works of Shakespeare online.
www.folger.edu - The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C.
www.ugo.com/staff/dfox/monkey.htm - The Fantastic Typing CyberMonkey attempts to answer the timeless question: could a monkey hitting a typewriter eventually pound out the complete works of Shakespeare? A brief but excellent summary of biochemistry follows.
www.kafka.org - When the page's domain name is the same as its subject, it tends to be rather good.
Classical music
www.allthingsstrings.com - Strings magazine
www.wclv.com/home.php - WCLV 104.9 FM, Cleveland's classical music station
www.telarc.com - Telarc International produces some of the best recordings in classical and jazz, with incomparable sound quality and exemplary performances.
www.classical.net - An excellent repository of information about classical music. Also over 2400 links to even more sites.
www.clevelandorch.com/html/index.asp - The Cleveland Orchestra, arguably the world's best symphony orchestra.
www.oberlin.edu/con - Oberlin Conservatory of Music
jsbach.org - Almost everything you'd ever want to know about Johann Sebastian Bach.
www.sit.wisc.edu/~drsillars/pdq/ - Of course, the preceding link shamefully ignored P.D.Q. Bach.
www.midiworld.com/cmc/index.htm - I haven't seen more classical music MIDIs anywhere.
Other music genres
mattangert.tzo.com - Scanned album covers of almost everything the Art of Noise or its individual members has produced.
ftp.tu-clausthal.de/ftp/docs/Archiv/songs/art_of_noise/yebo - Did you ever wonder just what the hell they were saying in "Yebo" from Below the Waste? Well, me neither, but the lyrics to it are here.
www.finalemusic.com - Although it is a bit expensive, Finale is an outstanding music transcription program. If it doesn't do it, it probably can't be done at all. Download the demo version here and see for yourself.
Philosophy
clubs.yahoo.com/clubs/ourpalnietzsche - Nietzsche chat group at Yahoo!
Visual art
www.mfa.org - The Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
www.clemusart.com - The Cleveland Museum of Art.
www.louvre.fr - The Louvre. Written in French, for no apparent reason, and some portions do not have an English counterpart. Still quite good, though.
www.philamuseum.org - The Philadelphia Museum of Art.
www.whitney.org/ - The Whitney Museum.
www.mcachicago.org - The Museum of Comtemporary Art in Chicago.
glyphs.com/moba - The Museum of Bad Art.
www.artchive.com - Mark Harden's Artchive: an exhibit of many artists. If it's not to be found here, good luck finding it anywhere.
www.imageexchange.com/exhibits/johngruen/3655.shtml - Photographs of various artists.
http://www.efn.org/~hkrieger/index.html - Photo essays by Herman Krieger. He has an exquisite feel for the power of the photograph to capture intimacy. I particularly enjoyed his images of small towns and their denizens.
library.thinkquest.org/16661/index.html - Totally Tessellated: An Introduction to Tessellations
www.geocities.com/ty_nay/ - An excellent representation of the work of M.C. Escher and his optical illusions.
www.smalltime.com/dada.html - Get your own personal Dada reading. Well worth the few minutes it takes.
www.madsci.org/~lynn/juju/surr/ - The Surrealism Server. Plenty to do here, with surrealist games and the Surrealist Compliment Generator
pers-www.wlv.ac.uk/~fa1871/whatsurr.html - "What is Surrealism?" essay by André Breton himself.
www-personal.umich.edu/~rmutt/ - This one is a gem. Written in the amusing flavor of Dada, with excellent places to visit, such as No More Words, Fashion Tips, Functionless Form, etc.
www.kalin.lm.com/despho3y.html - Photograph of many main figures of surrealism.
www.marcelduchamp.org/ImpossibleBed/PartI/ - A short essay on "impossible pictures" and optical illusions with example illustrations.
www.peak.org/~dadaist/ - Dada Online.
www.p22.com/projects/duchamp.html - Through the Large Glass: An installation of computer work based on the art of Marcel Duchamp. The story of the Duchamp font fiasco is a good warning against dealing with the Artists Rights Society.
www.toutfait.com - Tout-Fait, the Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal.
Computing
Artificial intelligence links are with the psychology links.
www.fourmilab.to - John Walker is the creator of Autodesk and AutoCAD, but his website also has a fantastic variety of other interesting phenomena, like UNIVAC Memories, a Java-based emulator of Babbage's Analytical Engine, assorted utilities, the Probability Pipe Organ, and a whole lot more.
www.opensuse.org - the OpenSuSE project is Novell's spinoff of the SuSE Linux project. I've been using SuSE for quite some time now, and I'm very happy with it.
www.debian.org - Debian is one of the oldest, and therefore most experienced, Linux distros available. Many of the best distros today are offshoots of the Debian project: Ubuntu and Kubuntu, Knoppix, Mepis, and Xandros, just to name a few. The outstanding apt-get and Synaptic package management system makes locating and installing new programs a breeze.
www.sysinfo.org/startupinfo.html - A huge list of Windows programs that often put themselves in startup. Useful for identifying what processes can be safely disabled.
www.tweakxp.com - Hundreds of useful tweaks to get better performance from Windows XP.
www.onecomputerguy.com/index.html - Bob Cerelli's Windows Page, another site with a huge collection of useful Windows tips. I hope to be able to create a site like his but with Linux information at some time in the future.
www.blug.linux.no/rfc1149/ - Information on the Carrier Pigeon Internet Protocol, including pictures and a log from the first ping session.
community.roxen.com/developers/idocs/rfc/rfc2795.html - There's also a protocol for the infinite monkeys project.
www.top500.org/ - The 500 fastest computers in the world, updated twice a year.
www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-genperl/ - Introduction to Genetic Algorithms from IBM DeveloperWorks.
www.routergod.com - Gary Coleman--yes, that Gary Coleman--explains priority queuing at Celebrity Router Tips.
www.cotse.com/winqr.htm - ALT codes and many other references for Windows, Unix, CGI script, etc.
www.pbm.com/~lindahl/real.programmers.html - "Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal", and old (1983) but still-funny look at programmers. Oh, for the good old days, when assembly language was something you did more than write a C++ compiler with...
www.rsasecurity.com/rsalabs/node.asp?id=2291 - RSA Labs's "Security on the Internet". RSA's website goes into a fair amount of detail on each topic it covers.
linux.wku.edu/~lamonml/algor/sort/sort.html - A nice overview of several common sorting algorithms, with source code.
www.linuxtoday.com/ - Linux Today, a magazine with the standard fare of articles and tips.
www.htmlhelp.com/faq/cgifaq.html - The CGI Programming FAQ from Web Design Group.
forums.devshed.com/sitemap/f-42-p-1.html - The Dev Shed forums are an excellent resource for C/C++ programming questions. All levels of questions are asked and experts post their answers.
faq.cprogramming.com/cgi-bin/smartfaq.cgi - The Cprogramming.com FAQ has answers to common questions at the beginner and intermediate levels.
www.cprogramming.com/tutorial.html - The Cprogramming.com tutorials cover topics ranging from the quite basic to the quite advanced.
www.php.net/ - All about PHP.
lynx.browser.org - The home of Lynx, a popular text browser.
www.trill-home.com/lynx.html - Extremely Lynx: a good collection of Lynx links.
www.w3.org/XML/1999/XML-in-10-points - XML in 10 Points: a brief introduction to XML by the W3C, the creators of the standard. In fact, the W3C is always a good place to start when learning new web-related things.
www.w3.org/MarkUp/html3/latin1.html - Supported character entity references in the ISO 8859-1 character set.
www.w3.org/Provider/Style/ - This is similar to my good web design prinicples, but deals with different topics. It is written by someone with a passing acquaintance with HTML: Tim Berners-Lee.
vancouver-webpages.com/META/ - A dictionary of META tags, with virtually any one you'd ever need.
www.webenalysis.com - WebEnalysis's free webmaster resources include some helpful things like code generators for keywords and rollovers and charts for HTML tags, CSS attributes, web-safe colors, and special characters, as well as a HTML color picker.
ftp://arnold.c64.org/pub - Your one-stop shop for all your Commodore 64 needs. Emulators (CCS64, PC64, and VICE are good), games... everything.
www.hvsc.c64.org - The High Voltage SID Collection is a huge compilation of SID files. sidplay2 and xsidplay come with OpenSuSE 10.0, Kubuntu, and many other Linux distros or, if you still haven't managed to wean yourself off of Windows, there are versions of sidplay2 for that legacy operating system too. This collection includes BOGG's rendition of Axel F from the movie Beverly Hills Cop. Consider that this was for a music chip that came as part of a $300 computer and you'll realize just how amazing this little thing's power was--the original song was produced on equipment that cost into five- and six-figures. And it's only 5.2K in size--many MP3's are 1000 times larger! (It's only zipped because GeoCities has a problem with filenames it doesn't recognize.)
http://remix.kwed.org - Over 1600 remakes of C64 music files.
c64takeaway.com - A podcast devoted to SID music.
Virus hoax debunkers:
www.trendmicro.com/vinfo/hoaxes/hoax.asp
www.scambusters.org
www.f-secure.com/virus-info/hoax
www.hoaxbusters.org
www.vmyths.com
