WebWalk!

Computer Life column for August 22, 1998
by
Richard Gordon

It's been a while since I've subjected you to some of my idiosyncratic Web browsing.

Let's warm up with some online games. Yahoo now provides an array of games from Chess and Backgammon to Bridge, Gin Rummy, and Hearts (play.yahoo.com/). All these games are free and do not need any additional software or plug-ins; however, your Web browser must support Java.

Next, we'll visit the Canonical List of Weird Band Names (home.earthlink.net/~chellec/). I scanned the list to see if any of my band names were on there--they weren't. But I wonder what "3D House of Beef," "Those Darn Accordians," "Goober Patrol," or "God Hates Computers" sound like?

Let's try something goofy at Alta Vista (www.altavista.digital.com). If one of the web documents you find is not in English, you can use Alta Vista to translate the document.

Use your mouse to copy the URL, then click on "Translation" in the right hand frame to go to Alta Vista's translation service (babelfish.altavista.digital.com). Paste in the URL, select the translation desired, and click on "Translate."

Terrific!--except that the resulting prose reads more like my bad translations of Julius Caesar back in 8th or 9th grade Latin class.

The title of a Spanish language article about a Cuban baseball player translated into "Me I am going them to eat." And the first paragraph came out like this:

"The printing at the moment has a incalculable value of deep ambition and Julio Caesar R‡udez is hungry of glory, wants to knock down the door of history and to become a national sport hero. For that he must win to him to Cuba, something that not to say impossible is little probable that it happens." [sic]

Next, let's visit Abbott and Costello's home page (www.city-net.com/abbottandcostellofc/). No, the latest advances in Web design have not reached to the other side of the grave. This is a Web site officially sanctioned by their families. It includes clips, facts, biographical information, and, of course, merchandise--but it's great if your kid, like mine, has been introduced to Abbott and Costello on WXPN's Kid's Corner.

What do you mean you've never heard of Kid's Corner (xpn.org/sections/kids_corner.html)? It's only the coolest radio show around, mixing goofy songs from past masters like Alan Sherman and Spike Jones, with new kid's songs from the likes of Trout Fishing In America. The show's host, Kathy O'Connell, interviews experts on a variety of topics every weeknight, invites kids to call in, has brain-teasers and research questions.

My son and I listen to it any weeknight we are in the car between 7:00 and 8:00 p.m. That's where he first heard Abbott and Costello's "Who's On First?" routine.

At home, Nickelodeon rules that time slot. If your kids haven't yet visited Nickelodeon on line, take them there (www.nick.com). I was horrified at how many of the RugRats trivia questions my son got right.

Next, we visit a site with a lot of ups and downs: Encyclopaedia Brittanica's introduction to roller-coasters (coasters.eb.com). This site presents a timeline about coaster designs and designers from the 1800's to the future. Along the way, kids will learn some history and the factors that went into designing the tracks and the propulsion.

The Exploratorium's "Your Weight on Other Worlds" (/www.exploratorium.edu/ronh/weight) is another site that lets you sneak some "book learning" into your kids. Kids think it's cool to see how little they'd weigh on the moon or on Pluto and how much they'd weigh on Jupiter or a white dwarf star. But the site goes on from there and explains that the concept of weight comes from measuring the relationship between an object's "mass" and the "gravitational forces" of other large objects--like our planet.

And finally, as long as you have the kids' attention, take them to the Boston Museum of Science's exhibition about Mount Everest (www.mos.org/Everest/home.htm). Even though it's really a tease for their live exhibit, the site has lots of cool facts and still pictures.

Copyright © 1998, The News Journal Company

Computer Life Index