Site seeing

By JULES ALLEN

© St. Petersburg Times, published July 31, 2000

Feel free to browse ...

Your name here?

www.sfhbs.com/home/

SFHBS is a shortened version of the Society for Future Husbands of Britney Spears, which is, unless I'm getting really gullible in my old age, as serious as brain surgery about its mission. The idea is that you, ridiculously intelligent and attractive as you are, enter a bunch of demographic information in the site and wait for Britney to break your door down wearing a wedding dress. Why, oh why, didn't they have a Jamie Lee Curtis site when I was marrying age? Ah, no World Wide Web servers, that was it.

Bunk or not bunk? You decide

www.ColorQuiz.com

Here's a fun five-minute waste of time while you wait for your instant noodles to inflate. You guide your mouse over a color chart, lovingly created from "years of research by color psychologists" (sic), and -- presto! -- your every defect is mapped out for your review. Tell a friend how messed up you are with the handy post-interview e-mail tool.

All caffeine, all the time

www.BeveragesDirect.com

I've been in the high-tech world most of my working life, and the varying degrees of one-upmanship between individuals fascinates me. Knee-jerk issues revolve around CPU speed and disk size, but I'm coming across a growing interest in beverage snobbery. Techies want lots of sugar, high caffeine content and interesting containers. Mainstream soda takes a back seat to brands such as Red Bull, Battery and the classic Jolt in most of the shops I've seen in the past few months.

Good question!

www.OldWoodies.com

Whatever happened to strapping large bits of wood to the sides of automobiles? Oh sure, the walnut trim in your Jaguar is oh-so-dashing, but large chunks of non-aftermarket Detroit-sponsored birch is where the action clearly is. A quick click to the site reveals a treasure of trivia, images and links to a termite's automotive dream.

History can be fun

www.bell-labs.com/history/unix/

Ah, those young Linux upstarts. How little they know about their rich history of scruffy, bearded Unix guys working software magic into the wee hours. Who could sleep at night not knowing what AT&T did with this operating system in the early '80s? Personally, I find history fascinating, and the more I learn about the past, the more I realize humanity is damned to constant reinvention, especially on the computer front. This site offers a non-technical history of the Unix operating system in the days when that certain company in Redmond, Wash., was known as Traf-O-Data.

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