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Site Seeing
By JULES ALLEN Feel free to browse Take a standI'm pitiful, at least that's what this game tells me. I'm clearly fit to run a recently delisted telecom giant or perhaps an energy company because I managed to gain a mere 19 percent customer satisfaction rating and meager 3 percent popularity. But boy did I rake in the money. If you would like to try your hand at becoming a Lemonade Stand magnate or want to teach some basic economics to your kids (without messing up the kitchen), this site might be a fun distraction. It requires Java, which most modern browsers ship with. Cn U Rd Ths?Maybe all those years of taking shorthand aren't wasted and what's old is new again. Yes, barely intelligible textual communication is the height of fashion. If you have a fairly new cell phone, you can either spend hours trying to figure out what "*$s" means or plug it into this site (if you're too lazy to go look it up, that's shorthand for Starbucks). This text thing is wildy popular with Europeans in case you've been living in a box. I'm still not convinced it'll catch on over here. Broadband funI tend to keep away from modem-unfriendly sites because unless you've got the bandwidth they're a royal pain. Click, wait, make tea, wait some more, then disappointment at the mediocre content displayed. Worse is streaming, because the supposedly low-bandwidth movies are like watching dancing stamps. But this one is worth it. It's a collection of chuckle-inducing links that are mostly MP3 music and video files. If you're at work and avoiding your normal duties, turn your speakers down. Facts, figures, JavaQuick, what's the richest country per capita on the planet? Nope, not the U.S. of A. but teeny Luxembourg. And it may come as a surprise that the United States is the 13th most expensive place to live but that's nicely balanced by the fact that we're second only to Luxembourg. The Java-powered bits of this Web site refused to work on the Mac or a Linux machine but were fine on a Windows machine. So much for write once, run anywhere. Add this pick to your arsenal of world facts. Chewing typeCheshireDave.com/mastication/2002/07/0037a-btt.html In a previous life I was a type guy. Not typing guy but somebody who dealt with leading, kerning, points and picas while trying to please finicky art directors. Back in the dark ages, one wouldn't set one's own type on the Mac. Instead it would go to a type studio and grossly overpaid typesetters would put the words and spaces together. And I despised Cooper Black, that rounded, puffy typeface. But I must admit I'm rethinking this stance after watching this tongue-in-cheek documentary. Produced in VH1 Behind the Music style, it takes a camp romp around the history of this typeface and is quite entertaining.
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