Eric Nehrlich's list of random cool things on the Web.

Eric Nehrlich's list of random cool things on the Web.

All home pages on the WWW have this list of links to places that the author thinks are cool, and, well, I'm no exception. There's no real rhyme or reason to most of these links, so I'll just list 'em with a brief description of each.

Blueberry Hill
Jessie's weblog. Since I know Jessie in real life, it's even more entertaining for me.
Joel on Software
Joel Spolsky is a guy who started his own software company after several years of working at Microsoft and Juno. This website is his chance to reflect on what works and what doesn't work in software project management, and how to build a software company, and how to write code. I tend to agree with what he has to say, so I've been working my way through the books he recommends.
User Friendly
Is it a comic strip or a community? You tell me. The exploits of a bunch of erstwhile ISP employees has served to unite a whole lot of geeks world wide in their appreciation. Illiad, User Friendly's author, recently shut the site down as an April Fool's Joke and was astonished at how much of an outcry it provoked.
SlashDot
SlashDot. If you have any connection to the geek world, you probably already know what it is. If not, it's a web site devoted to "News for Nerds". The dialogues tend to be overly flamacious, and underly thought-provoking, so I don't spend too much time there, but sometimes the news articles are pretty interesting.
Yahoo
Yahoo is the repository of information about the WWW. It has an enormous list of sites categorized, or you can use their search function to find a specific one. Very useful place to know about when you're wandering the Web.
Google
I've increasingly been using Google as my search engine. Because it lists the most followed links first, you are more likely to find the information you're actually looking for. Plus it's done by Stanford, and hasn't yet sold out to corporate interests as Alta Vista and Yahoo appear to be doing.
Alta Vista and Lycos
Alta Vista and Lycos are two other very good search engines. Alta Vista is better for totally random word searches throughout the Web, whereas Lycos is better for finding official-type sites I think.
MIT Hack Gallery
What's a hack, you might ask? It's what MIT students do sometimes when they're not tooling. Check out this page to see some of the more amazing hacks pulled at MIT.
Oceania - the Atlantis Project
This is a really cool venture which is trying to form a new country. Yeah, it sounds unrealistic, and while I'm not confident enough in it to take advantage of the initial offering of passports at $50 apiece, I'm still on their mailing list and rooting for them to succeed.
The WebMuseum
The WebMuseum is a most excellent depiction of the Louvre among other famous museums. It's a great use of the Internet to allow such resources to be viewable by all.
The Dilbert Zone
Dilbert's an excellent comic strip and Scott Adams and Unitedmedia conspired to make it available on the Web. Scott Adams also put some other amusing material there like how he got into cartooning and a photo tour of how he creates Dilbert.

Eric Nehrlich's WWW home page / nehrlich@alum.mit.edu