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© St. Petersburg Times, published April 14, 2003
Fell free to browse
www.FamousLocations.com/
Remember when the Soreno Hotel was blown up to make way for, well, nothing much? Yes, back in St. Petersburg's grungy days, prior to the city being the bastion of the new hip, somebody actually made bits of a movie here. Part of that legacy was filming the flattening of a hotel while Danny Glover and Mel Gibson's stunt doubles moved away at a speed appropriate for self preservation. Yet are we featured in the Famous Locations site? No. We're hardly Notting Hill or San Francisco, I suppose. If you can overlook that one rather large omission, this isn't a bad site for the film and geography buff in your house.
www.worth1000.com/galleries.asp
Digital camera aficionados can be annoying or, dare I say, boring when ranting and raving about their equipment. But they don't hold a candle to that most dangerous of bores: the Photoshop Guru. It's the one item of software that has a sadomasochistic learning curve almost on a par with really difficult programming languages. But once you get a handle on the thing, the results are spectacular. Consider the examples on this site. It's loaded with images that have been enhanced well beyond what the photographer originally envisioned. Some funny, some beautiful and some downright scary.
www.LostHighways.org/radebaugh.html
My TiVo has picked up on the fact I like old science fiction. It regularly leaves me little gems such as Forbidden Planet for my viewing pleasure. Oh sure, hardware-oriented films such as the Terminator or the guilty pleasure that is The Matrix ooze glitz, but they lack that camp, flashing lights thing early Star Trek provides. If any of this resonates with you, click over to this site and enjoy the lush, curvy, retro future that illustrator A.C. Radebaugh envisioned. The free online exhibit is chock-full of wild imagery that's sure to tickle your fancy.
hydra.globalse.org/
Spend your life in Microsoft Word? Then you're surely aware of the revision feature. Multiple authors can work on a document and make multiple changes. Then somebody gets the horrible task of merging those changes into one coherent document. There has to be a better way. And there is. It's Hydra, an editing program that allows many Mac users to collaborate on a single document in real time. It's the smartest use of Apple's Rendezvous technology I've seen and a great example of smart thinking. It's well done, and currently free.
www.chem.ox.ac.uk/mom/
"Mom," in this case, isn't the nice woman who raised you, but Molecule of the Month. And if it was the nice woman in question it would be "Mum," because this site is put together by Brits. It's fun for science nerds and humans alike. It's a collection of molecules that the authors have deemed wildly interesting. In addition to an informative description, they've taken the time to render each gorgeous molecule in 3-D. Given the hoopla about chemical warfare and weapons of mass hysteria of late, it's topical and might even be educational.