************************************************************** * * * CYBERSPACE * * A biweekly column on net culture appearing * * in the Toronto Sunday Sun * * * * Copyright 1999 Karl Mamer * * Free for online distribution * * All Rights Reserved * * Direct comments and questions to: * * * * * ************************************************************** Hot Sites for Cold Nights Soon, friends, February will be a dull, cold memory. Now, I warn you, March sounds warmer, but it's not. It can be just as cold and boring. If you're like me, you spend far too much time indoors waiting for the good weather. Fortunately, there are plenty of sites on the web that can help kill loads of time. These are some of my favorite time wasters. The Jargon File: www.ccil.org/jargon/jargon.html One of the funnier resources on the net is a document called the "Jargon File". It's a huge dictionary of hacker slang. It offers hours of readings and lots of laughs. It's a fantastic insight into the genesis of the original Internet culture. Yahoo's Personal Pages: www.yahoo.com/Entertainment/People/ There are thousands of personal web pages out there. Most are pretty boring, offering little more than dry resumes and a sickening amount of self-indulgent poetry. Some really stand out, however. Sometimes I like to browse through Yahoo's index just to see what kind of lives people are living. Project Gutenberg Home Page: http://jg.cso.uiuc.edu/PG/welcome.html The Project Gutenberg site has hundreds of electronic novels and famous speeches available. Most are in the public domain although some authors, like Bruce Sterling, have donated the electronic rights to a few works. Hot AIR: www.improb.com/ The ultimate parody of bad science is the Annals of Improbable Research. This site offers a full collection of its Internet edition. The journal includes such things as studies of blue Jell-O, bearded men, and the effects of metal spoons on wine. Weird Science: www.eskimo.com/~billb/weird.html The best thing to come out of Seattle since Microsoft is Bill Beaty's Weird Science page. Beaty has amassed a huge collection of files on the fringes of science. Strange electronic devices, papers on antigravity, and articles on electro-magnetic weapons are just some of the weird files at this page. If that isn't enough, you can even get plans on how to build some of this stuff. Corruption In America: www.europa.com/~johnlf/ After hunting high and low for an archive of Conspiracy Nation, a neat little ezine published on alt.conspircay, I finally found this site. Be warned, there's enough reading here to last you until August. I downloaded and merged just three months worth of Conspiracy Nation into one Word file. After setting the file in two columns and a nine point font, I had three hundred pages to print! eye's Movie Maps:www.interlog.com/eye/Listings/Movies/Maps/ Toronto's WWW Restaurant Listings: www.symsol.com/food/ A good last resort to occupy your time is eating and watching movies. Two Toronto sites provide a novel way of picking a flick and a place to eat. The eye movie site gives you an interactive map of Toronto. You can click on your favorite theater and find out what films are playing and when. If you're unsure of the picture, links are provided to an archive of film reviews. The WWW Restaurant Listings is a forms-based page that makes selecting a restaurant into something approaching an exact science. An advanced search engine lets you limit your search by geography, price range, and food type. You can play around with different combinations until you find something you like.