Dan'l's Links

I detest pages that consist primarily of links to other people's personal pages that consist primarily of (etc., etc., ad nausaeum, ad infinitum). I have three categories of links to offer: Links to websites that seem tome to be genuinely useful; links to websites that seem to me to be examples of where the web and business (separately or together) need to be headed in the next few years; and links to websites about my personal obsessions.

First and foremost, please put The Hunger Site at the top of your bookmark list. Go there and donate food to hungry people, without paying a penny, without spending tax money. The deal is simple: You click the button. A page comes up with little, tasteful links to their sponsors. The sponsors each donate food to the United Nations World Food Programme -- as much as a million cups a day. The sponsors get a nice tax writeoff, you feel good, and hungry people eat. If you want to be especially virtuous, click through to one or more of the sponsors to help keep THS's clickthrough rate high.

One of the most important things the Web can do is disseminate information freely. And one of my favorite forms of information is the written word. (Oh... you'd noticed?) An awful lot of interesting texts, some classics, some offered freely by their writers or other copyright holders, are available at one site or another. The On-Line Books Page attempts to index as many of these (in English, at least) as possible -- ten thousand titles and still counting. They also list serial archives of magazines ranging from Vanity Fair and The Ladies' Repository to Scientific American and Wired. Most worthy.

If you don't know about The Internet Movie Database (IMDB), you should. Unless you absolutely detest movies, of course. Easily searchable, indexed in a dozen useful ways, the IMDB is the first place I go when I want to know, well, pretty much anything about pretty much any movie. Want to know who played that bit part in the movie you saw last year? What Sylvester Stallone's first film appearance was? Look no further.

The web has, as everyone is tired of saying and hearing, inspired a whole new set of models for doing business. One that I'm particularly impressed by (quite aside from the fabulous music) is...

Discipline Global Mobile, a music company founded and run by Robert Fripp (best known for his work with King Crimson). Check out their aims (visible immediately upon opening the site). Check out the music too -- if you find Crimso obnoxious, which is everyone's right, try Fripp's "Soundscapes" series. Meditative music for those who don't think meditation means "check your brain at the door." By the bye, this is not a King Crimson fan site; that would be Elephant Talk.

Since I've started with the music sites, I should probably plug the Eel Pie site operated by/for Pete Townshend of the Who (except when he isn't). Not as extensive or as wide-ranging as DGM, but I was pleased by the ease of ordering and the quickness of response I received.

Another hobby of mine is travel. Actually... being places. I hate travelling, but I like being places. If I'm going to travel, I want to be fairly certain in advance that I'll like being where I go. So a good resource is the Rec.Travel Library, a sizeable collection of travel reports by people who have been just about everywhere. (I particularly recommend any report by Mark and/or Evelyn Leeper, who are verbose enough to be informative without becoming dull.)

As those who've seen some of my writings know, I am unabashedly a Christian of Romish leanings. A couple of resources for those with similar beliefs... First, when arguing over some nitpicky, trivial point of theology there's nothing like being able to whack your opponent over the head with a good, hefty set of "proof texts." Search The Bible Gateway and let the infidel have it between the eyes with both Testaments. If you want to know more about foul Romish practices and beliefs, you can check out The Catholic Goldmine, but if you really want to know the absolutely official straight-from-the-Vatican truth, in a fairly easy-to-digest format, you'd best check out The Catechism of the Catholic Church, which is a compendium of the RC faith.

The other guiding star in my life is the non-Aristotelian principles of General Semantics, an antidote to muzzy thinking. I highly recommend learning about and applying this technology. There are two major organizations teaching GS: The International Society for General Semantics (ISGS) and the Institute of General Semantics (IGS). By the way, yes, this is the study that supposedly gave rise to sf novel , but you won't learn anything useful from the novel.

As always, if you find any of these links becomes obsolete, please drop me a line so I can update this page.