Dear George,
We didn’t buy a home computer
until 2004. We were one of the
last – maybe the last --of our
friends and acquaintances to do so.
Because I used a computer at work all day, I decided I shouldn’t repeat
that activity at home too. That
was silly. Fortunately Katja went out and bought an Apple. Now I spend more time at the computer
than anyplace else except sleeping.
I can’t imagine what I used to do in my spare time. And I can’t imagine how I even survived
without a computer’s assistance.
Like practically everybody else, I use it to keep in touch with
acquaintances, check the weather, pick movies or TV shows to watch, find out
travel directions, store and manipulate photos, get airline tickets and make
motel reservations, check campsite availability at state parks, practice line
dancing, watch Patti Page and Groucho Marx, buy stuff, and retrieve information
about any topic in the universe.
There was only one website in
1991, but there were 23,500 by 1995.
As of today (July 27), it’s estimated that there are over 1,013,000,000
websites on the Internet. This
means that if you visit a thousand sites per day, it will take you 2,775 years
to get to all of them (and, of course, there will be a lot more by then if the
Internet and/or the world still exists).
Probably every user has a
unique set of websites that they frequent which reflect their their interests
and purposes. Because some of
these might be of interest to others, I thought I’d make a list of some of the
websites that I have bookmarked on my computer. I’ve put these in three groupings as follows.
(1) Hugely Popular
Websites. These are sites that get
tons of usage and that many people including myself visit regularly. I’ll just mention some of these briefly
here: google, yahoo, bing, youtube, facebook, wikipedia, amazon, ebay,
craigslist, groupon, expedia, travelocity, orbitz, flickr, cnn, nytimes, google
maps, google news, huffingtonpost, factcheck.org.
(2) My Favorite Bookmarks.
Right now I have about 490 websites bookmarked on my computer. Aside from the ultra-popular sites
listed above, here are my personal favorites (many of which I’ve run across in
the course of doing this blog):
- Charity evaluations:
www.charitynavigator.org.
Charity Navigator, Information regarding accountability and transparency,
financial performance, revenues, expenses breakdown, and overall
rating. Remarkably helpful.
- City statistics: www.city-data.com. Detailed information for U.S.
cities and small towns, e.g, income, education, race, employment, weather,
air polution, water systems, cell phones, sex offenders, home sales,
etc. Practically
everything you might want to know about towns or cities. (also see Sperling’s Best Places,
www.bestplaces.net).
- Gallup Poll:
www.gallup.com. Current and
past Gallup Poll results on politics, economy, well-being, and world.
- Games:
www.games.aarp.org. Card, word, sports, arcade, brain
games, etc. (my favorite is Spider Solitaire).
- Historical events: www.infoplease.com. News and events, history and
government, science and health, business, etc., organized by year.
- Medical: www.webmd.com: health information and
medical news for consumers and professionals on just about everything.
- Menominee and Marinette news: www.ehextra.com. Online edition of local twin
cities newspaper.
- Menominee county biographies:
www.linkpendium.com/genealogy/USA/MI/Menominee/sur/ Menominee County, Michigan:
Surnames. Biographical
information for a hundred or so prominent Menominee County residents in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (including my
grandfather, V.A. L. Sr.).
- Menominee county history:
www.books.google.com.
(search book title in Google). "Centennial History of Menominee County" by
E. S. Ingalls (1876), 76 pp.
Lumbering, government, finance, education, religion, business,
farming, etc., in Menominee County in the 1800's.
- Movie reviews: www.imdb.com. Internet Movie Database. Movies (current and past), TV,
Celebrities, Indie News.
(Also see: Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic, Movie Review Intelligence,
and QuickTime Movie Trailers)
- Nextdoor: Allows you
to share useful information with people in your immediate neighborhood or
community (plus sell stuff, ask questions, seek lost dogs, etc.).
- Quotations: www.brainyquote.com. Thousands of quotations, organized
by authors and topics.
- Radio stations: www.addictedtoradio.com. Free Internet radio and video
stations. (also Itunes
radio)
- Reviews of local businesses:
www.yelp.com: Members’ recommendations about everything from
restaurants to yoga instructors.
- Rhyming dictionary: www.rhymezone.com. Rhyming dictionary and
thesaurus. Includes Shakespeare
quotes, quizzes, "Great documents", and more.
- State rankings:
www.census.gov/compendia/statab/rankings.html. U.S. Census, The 2012 Statistical
Abstract: State Rankings.
States ranked by age, income, race and ethnicity, health
statistics, education, crime, traffic fatalities, etc.
- Run maps: www.mapmyrun.com. Map My Run. Enables you to map a walking,
running, or driving route in your location of interest, with information
about mileage, bike paths, traffic, weather, etc.
- Travel reviews: www.tripadvisor.com. Information and reviews for
hotels, vacation rentals, restaurants, and local destinations.
- Weather forecasts: www.weather.com: Daily, hourly,
weekly, monthly, etc., forecasts plus weather tips and news.
- Website stats: www.alexa.com. Alexa, The Web Information
Company. Information about
popularity of web-sites including national and world ranking, who goes
there, links, etc.
(3) Other Interesting
Places. Of course, one discovers
lots of different websites while looking into this or that. Here are some additional sites of
particular interest:
- Art:
www.google.com/culturalinstitute/project/art-project. Collections, artists
artworks.
- Cincinnati news: www.cincinnati.com. News, sports, things to do, etc.,
from the Cincinnati Enquirer.
- Collections: www.publicdomainreview.org. Collections of images, books,
film, and audio, centered on the surprising, the strange, and the
beautiful.
- Football: nfl.com: official site of the National Football League; in-depth
team pages for all teams.
- Googlefight: www.googlefight.com. Allows you to compare the number
of Google results for any two keyword searches.
- Health:
www.healthfinder.gov. Health topics from A to Z from the
US Dept. of Health and Human Services. (Also see www.cdc.gov;
www.fda.gov; www.health.nih.gov)
- How-to info: www.ehow.com: how-to articles from
professionals and users on a wide range of topics.
- Humor:
www.theonion.com. A fake news source that presents
satirical, laugh-out-loud stories on politics, entertainment, sports,
business, etc. (also see
theChive; Cracked; Break; CollegeHumor)
- NYC images: www.nycma.lunaimaging.com/luna/servlet. NYC Municipal Archives. Over 870,000 images (photos, maps,
motion picture and audio records) related to New York City.
- Photography: www.masgters-of-photography.com. Images listed by
photographer.
- Pinboard: www.pinterest.com: An online pinboard
where people post collections of things.
- Politics: www.politico.com
News, columns, videos, candidate blogs, etc. (also see DailyKos, ThinkProgress; GovTrack.us;
OpenSecrets.org; Salon.com, SourceWatch.org)
- State parks (camping): www.stateparks.com. America's Parks. All of America's park resources in
one easy to find location.
- Topics of all sorts: www.dp.la: Digital Public Library of
America: based on documents, photos, etc., from the country's libraries,
museums, and archives; gives virtual exhibits on myriad topics (e.g.,
Boston sports temples).
- U.P.: www.yoopersteez.com/blog. Upper Peninsula Michigan history,
stories, information, etc.
- Urban maps:
www.projects.nytimes.com/census/2010/explorer. Mapping America: Every City, Every
Block. Local data from the
Census Bureau's American Community Survey showing community and
neighborhood distributions for race and ethnicity, income, housing,
same-sex couples, and education.
- White House: www.whitehouse.gov. Obama White House website, with
news, photos, topics and issues, White House daily schedule, etc.
- Ted talks: www.ted.com. Ted: Ideas Worth Spreading. "Riveting talks by remarkable
people, free to the world" (technology, entertainment, science,
global issues, etc.).
O.K.,
now I have to go off and do a Google search. Fortunately there are a billion plus websites left to
discover.
Love,
Dave
G-mail Comments
-Donna D (7-27): omg
that's a lot of websites, david. wow. donna
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