Site Seeing

By JULES ALLEN
© St. Petersburg Times
published January 20, 2003

Feel free to browse

Handheld help

www.plkr.org/

Are you rolling in time and money? Then you're probably in love with the current crop of so-called high-speed mobile wireless services. I find them quite bothersome because they're slow, expensive and tedious to use. The sites I call my favorites rarely fit within the confines of a PDA's screen. Or they are mangled by the various attempts to reformat them. So I dig Plucker. It's free software for your Palm-powered PDA that does an admirable job of fitting badly designed Web sites into handheld confines.

Dumb lawsuits

Snopes.com/legal/lawsuits.htm

Have you been bombarded with the stupid lawsuit e-mail recently? Oh, it's a goodie: It's full of supposedly real lawsuits that want to make you cluck, throw your hands up, chuckle and do something stupid so you can sue somebody and retire. All at the same time. Much as we want to wonder where the country is going and why it is in a hand basket, these examples of lawyers gone bad are all fabrications (as if they didn't have a hard enough time with public relations). So, it's ace myth debunker Snopes to the rescue. It dug out some real dumb lawsuits that will make you cluck for sure, and then it provides a lively short essay on why lawsuits like those illustrated aren't all that bad. I'm no lawyer and I don't play one on TV. But I think I understand just a teeny bit more about the law after reading this page.

Apple's strategy

pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20030109.html

I like history and the mechanics of politics. I especially like computer history and its politics. There's so little of it, and even knowing a smidgen makes you an instant stud muffin at nerd gatherings. And it's been said that the more you know about the past will translate into a greater understanding of the future. This interesting article from the usually interesting Cringley over at PBS takes a broad look at Apple's recent move to extract itself from the belly of Microsoft. It's a quick read, and I like it because it offers a fairly sound explanation of why the lame Apple III computer failed in oh so many ways.

Must see . . . oops

LSSU.edu/banished/current/

I always look forward to seeing this annual list from Lake Superior State University. It's a wordie's romp around the most overused, annoying phrases of the recently expired year. Rather than being a sterile pick by career education types, it's a mix of goodies submitted by the likes of you and me, plus blatantly exposed cullings from popular media, of course. This year's retrospective proves to be as entertaining as ever.

A uniform hobby

www.UniformFreak.demon.nl/

Everybody should have a hobby, something to distract from the day-to-day trivialities of life on Earth. Some people, it seems, drive in from Mars every day, then put up Web sites detailing their hobby. Strange as this collection might be, I can't stop clicking. Seeing Pan Am, British Airways and Braniff flight attendant uniforms from the '80s whisked me back to my misspent airborne youth. Strange, yes; fascinating, certainly.

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