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The Cool Tricks and Trinkets Newsletter #195 5/23/02 |
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Welcome to the 195th issue of the Cool Tricks and Trinkets Newsletter offering weekly insights into new, cool, useful, fun, unusual and interesting sites on the Internet. In this issue: - Hotel
Rate Search Engine ~~~~~ Cool Tricks and Trinkets is made possible by~~~~~~ A1 Discount Hotels offers discount rooms in over 5000 hotels worldwide with choices from budget to 5 star hotels. Bookmark our site for you next trip. Visit us online or call our operators at 888-511-5743 http://www.a1-discount-hotels.com <Editor's Note> A1 Discount Hotels is our primary business and source of income. You can support Tricks and Trinkets, by checking us out the next time you're planning a trip.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Hotel Rate Search Engine Take a machete to the dense growth of hotel travel sites at Travelaxe, a free hotel search engine that compares prices posted on other travel sites, side-by-side. Once downloaded, the application searches hotel pricing and availability listed at 16 popular travel web sites. Recently launched, the site offers Daytona Beach, Fort Lauderdale, Lake Tahoe, Las Vegas, New Orleans, Orlando and Reno, with more destinations ahead. Once you select yours, the cheapest rates - and the savings you can pocket - are highlighted. Then make your choice, and the tool delivers you to the booking page to complete the reservation. Last minute trips, no minimum-night stays, check-in any day of the week and coupons for more deals give this travel tool a sharper edge. Atomic Time Utility (free) These days every second counts, and the nifty little utility available free at World Time Server keeps your computer on time, all the time. The Atomic Clock Sync (ACS) utility will automatically check users' PC time settings with the greatest accuracy available today, thanks to its connection to a time server operated by the very precise folks at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). A main screen displays the current Universal Time upon which all locations worldwide base their time (AKA, Greenwich Mean Time), then lets you choose to make adjustments. Your actual current time is not shown in ACS but in its usual position in the lower right corner of your Windows display. http://www.worldtimeserver.com/atomic-clock/ Old Time Radio The image of a family with chairs pulled up around a big walnut radio case, listening to the Great Gildersleeve, remains an appealing bit of Americana. So there's a nice ironic beauty in Old Time Radio, where 21st century families can listen to those old radio programs via their computers. "Broadcast" features mystery, drama serials and comedy programs updated daily with 12 hours of new programming from over 32,000 shows. "Jive" plays crooners, Big Band, blues and swing from the 20s through the 60s. "Features" delivers special treats, like recordings of rehearsal sessions and uncensored bloopers by Bing Crosby, Orson Welles and others. Now if you could only get the whole family to gather 'round the monitor. http://www.otrnow.com/otrnow/index.htm SHORT TAKES The Missing Link Yahoo Internet Life "Surf Guru" Charles Pappas helps find answers to questions political (What dictatorships are supported by mutual funds?), personal (Who's the creep living down the street?) and private (And how much did he pay for his house?) at his weekly Missing Link column found at Alexa, along with fun stuff like urban legends and censored cartoons. <><><><> Logical Fallacies Maybe false logic is better than none at all but you'd be wise to learn to spot non sequiturs, slippery slopes, equivocations and post hoc reasoning at Stephen's Guide to Logical Fallacies, where you can analyze precisely why the other guy's argument just doesn't add up. http://www.datanation.com/fallacies/index.htm <><><><> The World's Ugliest Buildings With a name like the Millennium Dome and a $1.25 billion price tag, it would be hard not to hate London's entry in The World's Ugliest Buildings listing posted at Forbes.com. But the dome is, regrettably, not alone. Even architects as revered as Frank Gehry make boo-boos, like the Experience Music Project in Seattle (reminiscent of the birthmark on Gorbachev's head). And when architecture goes wrong, erasing it isn't an option. See the building bloopers here. http://www.forbes.com/2002/05/03/0503home.html Enjoy
the newsletter? Tell your friends to subscribe by sending an email to: Seeing, Hearing, and Smelling the World Humans can recognize 10,000 smells (and half of them are probably in your teenage son's bedroom), distinguish between the touch of a feather and a leaf, and hear how full a glass of water is as liquid is poured. At Seeing, Hearing and Smelling the World, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute explains how we do it. "It's All in the Brain" shows the brain at work via visual illusion games. "Breaking the Code of Color" explains color-blindness and other perceptions of hue, and several articles dissect such odd sensory conditions as a woman who cannot see motion and a man who could identify "smell-faces" far more complex and distinctive than "sight-faces." Airline Meals Travelers who are chow-hounds might want to book an inter-Malaysian flight from Kota Kinabalu to Kuala Lumpur, judging from the full spread pictured at Airline Meals.Net, devoted to photos of in-flight airline meals. Even if you don't fly, browsing the photos is a cultural excursion as you see fold-down trays of sake and sushi on Japan Air Lines and herring salad on Scandinavian Airlines. The site creator started photographing his airline meals when he flew to Greece and thought his parents might like to see what their boy was fed. Now it's a potluck, with others sending in their airline food photos to create a visual feast of more than a hundred meals on some 50 airlines. Your Childhood is Here If the stress and responsibility of adult life is getting you down, perhaps its time for you to feel like a kid again. Nostalgia becomes humor at Yesterdayland.com, and anyone born in the last seventy years will get a kick out of the content on this website. 'Dedicated to the preservation of our pop culture', Yesterdayland is definitely a tour down the many memory lanes of childhood, from the TV shows we used to watch to the video games we used to spend all of our quarters on. Many of the sections are formatted into timelines, by decade, and include subjects such as Fashion, Saturday Mornings, Primetime Television, Movies, Lunchboxes, and Pop Music. There are featured articles and current news stories and updates on personalities from the past, as well as My Yesterdayland, where you can create your own user identification. Ahh, the good old days… **********Advertisement************** THE COOLEST COLOR BUSINESS CARDS These
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Useless Information Forgotten geniuses, a pudding lover, Teflon and contact lenses for chickens are some of the topics that fuel the flame for an Albany, New York science teacher with an odd sense of humor. He shares his passion for fascinating bits of obscurity at Useless Information, "stuff you never needed to know but your life would be incomplete without." How a melted candy bar and egg on the face led to the invention of the microwave oven, a history of the pink flamingo, and the origins of Band-Aids are a few of the featured stories. Links to other useless books and information and useless web sites let visitors drown in the obscure and the arcane. http://home.nycap.rr.com/useless/index.html Doctor Who After 39 years on earth - well, in England anyway -- perhaps it's time you discovered Dr. Who, a cult-popular BBC series that simply won't go away and, in fact, gets more popular with time. Makes sense, since it's about time-travel. Start at Doctor Who.com, the official web site. Travelling in their time and space machine, the Doctor and company began their adventures on November 23, 1963, by traveling back 100,000 years to help cavemen discover fire. With eight doctors in the interim, there's plenty of material to catch up on, including storylines, special effects, music, monsters (like Davros, part-man and part-machine) and videos, DVDs and CDs to order. In England, Dr. Who is his own cottage industry. http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/doctorwho/ If
you're interested in advertising in Cool Tricks and Trinkets, SUBSCRIBERS' SITES - Many of our subscribers have fascinating on-line projects. This weekly section will introduce you to some of these sites. Please let me know about your project so that I might mention it in this section. Write me at info@tricksandtrinkets.com ~T
Bone Photo - Skateboard photography work of Ted Terrebonne.
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better to be Silent and thought a Fool, Zen Saying oooO--------(
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