Cool Links


Yes, it's here! That's right! By popular demand -- well, no one really asked, but that's besides the point -- here's the latest version of my Cool Links List. Last updated, oh, within the last decade or so. ;) Enjoy.

Montgomery Blair High School's WWW Server
Montgomery Blair High School's Upside-Down WWW Server (MMM)
These are my high school's two main home pages. The first one is the mainstream page and very nifty-looking, IMHO; Dan Sandler made most of it. There's also Hobbes and the Maryland Virtual High School home page, and there are probably at least a couple more WWW servers running out of our computer lab right now that very few people know about.
Washington, D.C. Satellite Weather Map
This is a complete satellite map of the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area. It is zoomable down to a resolution of one meter per pixel. If you spend enough time tinkering with it, you can probably find your neighborhood/house/etc.
WebCrawler
Lycos
AltaVista
These are my favorite Internet search tools. WebCrawler seems to do a good job at indexing document titles; Lycos, while slower, seems to index more document content. Finally, AltaVista, the newest of the three, is the most comprehensive of all, and also indexes Usenet newsgroups. To find a company's home page, I'd use Webcrawler; to find something more obscure, I'd use the (slower) Lycos; and to find something really obscure (like a person's name), I'd use AltaVista.
SkyView
This incredible tool from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center allows you to input all the relevant parameters and choose the type of photograph (visible-light, infrared, ultraviolet, etc).. The server returns to you an image of what you selected: a sky area, galaxy, nebula, or star.
The Hacker's Jargon File
Check this one out! It contains an amazingly dialect of the English language that you may not be aware of. Maybe it's just my warped, twisted sense of humor, but I found the section near the end (in Appendix A) on hacking to be particularly hilarious.
The Capitol Steps
If you enjoy political humor and Congress-bashing, along with spoofs of recent music, this one's for you. (I found it hysterical; your mileage may vary.) This group, made of former Congressional staffers, attempts to be "the only thing in the world funnier than the U.S. Congress." You can download samples of their songs in Sun .au format, usually playable through a Netscape "helper" or other program. Again, take a look.
On-line Stock Quotes Service
While I can't guarantee the validity of this data, it seemed to work fine for me. The stock quotes are updated every fifteen minutes.
Telnet to Internet-connected machines at MBHS (requires an account)
[ binx | goober | runcible | annex | hobbes | mvhs1 | baudwidth | calvin | rt | cyber910 | baudwidth | vax | papasmurf ]
Trixter's PC Demos Page
Wow! This is by far the most comprehensive demo page on the Web that I haver found. It has all kinds of interesting and unique stuff, if you're into the PC demo scene.
The 1995 Bobbie Awards
This site describes the winners in a contest dedicated to finding the most totally useless sites on the Internet! If you ever wanted to know more about Strawberry Pop-Tart Blow-Torches, for instance, this is just the place to go to. The 1995 first place winner is a totally unbelievable mnemonic device of such staggering coolness that I just had to mention it here.
Zarf's List of Interactive Web Games
There's some really cool stuff on this list, like an interactive Web script that generates Mozart-style music style and lets you download it in MIDI format. Sure, it's somewhat fake-sounding... but the script itself is quite a hack. There's also a poetry generator; you give it the first line, and it returns an entire poem that rhymes and even occasionally makes a bit of sense. Really interesting stuff. (And, of course, my own interactive Anagram Generator is listed. Yet another good reason to try it. :)
WHFS (99.1 FM) Home Page
This is my favorite radio station by far... WHFS is way cool. As of right now, their homepage is under construction, but I felt it was important enough anyway to mention here.
Loveline
This is a really funny call-in radio show that talks about love, relationships, and sex. It has not only given me many good laughs since I started listening to it around November '95, but it has also given me a good excuse not do do my homework at night! (Ha, ha. :) Loveline is broadcast via satellite to WHFS and a bunch of other stations around the country. I was delighted to find this homepage, even though it's unofficial.
lyrics.net
Here's a very nifty lyrics server. Obtaining lyrics to songs from any other site is nowhere near this much fun, especially since the former lyrics server at archive.uwp.edu has gone down.
The MP3Mobile
This is easily one of the coolest hacks I have ever seen.