Recommended Sites by Dylon Whyte

The point of this column is to introduce people to some of our favourite sites on the `net. So, what does a site have to do to get one of our recommendations? Well, it has to be either very funny, useful or just plain cool. We send out emails to recommended sites that include the logo on the right, in case they want to include it on their site for bragging rights.

First off this week is Amazon.com – http://www.amazon.com – Simply the world’s biggest bookstore, with over 3 million books online and growing. Plus they have books on tape and a full array of music CD’s. Everything you could possibly want and at discount prices! Almost all the books have reviews and all sorts of information, plus they tell you how long it will take to ship to you. Make no mistake, this company specializes in mail order, which is a bonus for islanders like us that sometime need to rely on mail order to get certain products. They even have an 800 number, if you’re not comfortable giving out credit cards numbers over the ‘net. We like Amazon.com so much all our music and book reviews in the M@Gazette will include links to Amazon. Amazon.com also has a resource so that you can add their powerful search engine to your site.

Next off is The International Lyrics Server – – This searchable database now has the lyrics to over 100,000 songs. Which I think is great, I’m always hearing songs on the radio and wondering just what the heck the group is singing about. In the words of Weird Al Yankovic “It’s hard to Bargle Noffle Zouss with all these marbles in my mouth”.) The search engine itself is a little wonky, if you want to find what you’re looking for you’re much better off using single keywords or names only. Beside that like bit of wonkyness this is a great ‘net resource for music lovers everywhere. Much like Amazon, The International Lyrics Server has a resource that allows you to add their search engine to your site.

My next recommendation is Mongolia: The Legacy of Chinggis Khan, presented by the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco – – A wonderful virtual tour of a great art exhibit from 1996. Boy, I wish I could have seen this exhibit in person, it’s simply amazing all kinds of Mongolian masks, costumes, statues, gold, paintings, calligraphy, etc… Every piece in the exhibit has high quality photos and quite a few of them have Audio, Movies and 3D views, along with excellent descriptions. A site for any art fans out there. I also recommend The Asian Art Museum of San Francisco‘s new site – http://www.asianart.org/

Here’s a couple useful sites for all you. With the current fluctuations in the Canadian dollar, The Universal Currency Converter(tm) – http://www.xe.net/currency/ – is even more useful than ever. Updated with fresh financial information from the around the world every 20 minutes, this is the place to head when you want to find out how many Italian Lira you can get with your British Virgin Island Pounds. Another useful ‘net resource is The WWW Unit Converter© – http://www.xs4all.nl/~janderk/science/unitconverter/ – Need to know how many rods there are in a chain? Bushels to Pecks? Light-years to Parsecs? This is the site for you, and not just length and volume, but also speed, force, weight, if it can be converted between two units of measurement this place has it.

On the light side of the web this month we have Anagram Insanity – http://WWW.Infobahn.COM/pages/anagram.html – The best anagram solver I’ve come across and a great hoot. This is just a plain old fun site. For any of you that don’t know, an anagram is the rearranging the letters in a word or phrase to form a new word or phrase. As in “evils” and “lives” or “silver” and “sliver”– these are simple examples. The ones from Anagram Insanity get much more interesting. For example: “Manitoulin Island” – “Dial noun mint sail”, “Soil nail mind aunt”, “Timid annual lions”, “Until domain slain”, “Adult snail minion”, “Nation alumni lids”, “Illumination sand”, “Inland simulation”. I suggest starting with looking up anagrams of your name.

This funniest site of the month goes to The Onion – http://www.theonion.com/ – America’s Finest News Source – These folks are twisted, just the way I like ’em.

Until next issue, have fun surfing, and if you come across any cool sites you think I should know about, drop me an email at [email protected].

– Dylon Whyte