Site Seeing

By JULES ALLEN
© St. Petersburg Times
published February 24, 2003

Feel free to browse

Cool isn't . . . cool?

www.HipsterHandbook.com/

When you walk into a Starbucks, you know what you want. You even know that a "tall" really is a small, and a request for a "vente" isn't an instruction to open a window, right? Does black make up a large portion of your wardrobe? You could well be a hipster, baby. This throwaway site is mostly to plug the Hipster Handbook. But there's enough material for a five-minute read. And it's fun enough for a chuckle or two.

Mind-bending

CyberGlass.co.uk/assets/Flash/psychic.swf

The crux of having fun with this site is being able to do simple mental math. Dragging out a pocket calculator, or launching one in one window while the browser sits in another, surely diminishes the experience. It's quite entertaining just the same. You play a little numbers game and let the site try to read your mind. It might be a good lesson for your kids or slower co-workers on how easy it is to make something simple look really complex.

The American Dream

www.Acme.com/licensemaker/

Ah, yes, to have one's name on a license plate. It embodies all that is wonderfully excessive about this individualistic land. Everybody passing me now has a memorable name to yell at as they viciously question my parentage and wonder just who on this Earth issued me a driver's license. If I wander into a parking lot full of AMC Pacers, there's no doubt which is mine. Sadly all the decent names for specialty tags are long gone. If you're lusting for a plate of your very own, you're going to have to settle for an electronic version.

Google's data

www.Google-Watch.org/bigbro.html

Google has become the No. 1 search engine by providing a user experience that people actually enjoy. No popups, no flashing banners, no hulking graphics. Just quick, accurate search results. But what of the data it tucks away about us after every interaction? Is it stored for a long time or discarded after it runs out of disk space? Therein lies the problem. Nobody outside of Google knows. This page raises some interesting points. If you're in the mood for malice, there's a link at the top of the page to nominate Google for the Big Brother Award. But hurry, you've got only until the end of February to vote.

Spam slayer for Macs

www.C-command.com/spamsieve/

People are attached to their software, and there's a number of reasons for that. In my view, time is the leading factor. Learning a new mail program, for example, is like asking a 4-year-old for your candy back. The mail application that's built into OS X is something that I might have paid for just a few years ago. The spam filter, once trained, does a pretty good job of clobbering and flagging the unwanted stuff before it gets to you. But if you've got a time and filing system investment in PowerMail, Entourage or Eudora, don't worry. For $20, you can have a spam fighter that's just as good as OS X's, and it even works with AOL.

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