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Site Seeing
By JULES ALLEN Feel free to browse We are amusedMurder, prostitution and corrupt lawyers, oh my! It's not a John Grisham novel, but a little slice of history from London during Victorian times. This copious collection of transcriptions and papers of the day is fascinating. Illustrations are scant, but that only reinforces that the content is worthy of your attention. It's sobering to think that as time marches on, humanity continues to hold itself in enlightened awe while we repeat the follies of yesterday. The Victorians were no exception and you'll see what I mean as you wander here. Focus pocusFor every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Therefore, at the high end of staged photography you've got heavyweights such as Diane Arbus, David Bailey and Ansel Adams (and I'm not knocking their craft). In the same way I can appreciate the richness of the Florida Orchestra, I can enjoy a jazz jam with rank amateurs. Street Photography is a visual jam session without the usual constraints of framing one's shot, focusing and so forth. Shocked as you may be, it works well indeed. Given the subject matter and flippant disregard for the rules of photography, it's not a huge shock to learn it's all based in New York. Areas of interest include the summer, night streets and more people than you can shake your lens at. Send them this wayMacromedia's Flash (www.flash.com), love it or hate it, is something you're going to have to live with. It's everywhere you are on the Web. When it's not trying to catch your attention as pitchman for banner ads, it's trying to be a replacement for HTML, the stuff regular Web pages are made from. And just because you've got the money to afford the software, that doesn't make you a designer. Some badly designed Flash sites are enough to drive a man to strike a close relative, not to mention co-workers. If you're trying to reform your ways of bad taste or know somebody Flashy that's in need of a make-over, this site's packed with goodies for wanna-bes and pros. Odd museums ride againSomebody stop me from visiting these museums! Although this column is being filed from sunny London, I'm not talking about the Natural History Museum or even the oh-so-hip Design Museum by the Thames. No, my perverse lust for kitsch continues to dredge up such gems as the Condiment Packet Museum. It's a no-nonsense, nothing-but-the-packets affair. Wander over the barbecue, hot sauce and seasonings sections before going into the specialty galleries. It's like watching a car wreck and you just can't stop yourself. Keeping tabs on the PCOne of the things I'm most curious about is how hard I drive my computer. True, it's nerdy, but if you've ever had decent monitoring tools you'll know what I mean. In most cases, I barely make the machine sweat. But when I'm in a hyperproductive mood and have multiple applications going, I feel like I need an explanation of where those precious CPU cycles go and why they seem to work against me rather than for me. Enter XMonitor, stage left. It's a nifty utility that'll keep an eye, rather than an elbow, on how hard you're thrashing your disk, network and CPU. The author has a sense of humor: You pay him how much you think the thing is worth. I gave $10 because it's well worth that.
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