"The future is stupid." - Jenny Holzer

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Resources on the Web

For any of these, just type in your search terms and hit enter.

Google Is Your Friend. They also have an image search engine (with my picture) and a periodic report on search trends. See the Google ~Guide for excellent advice on how to maximize your use of Google (including the "~" and "OR" operators). Point stupid people to here or here.
Wikipedia, an open, collaborative, free encyclopedia; also translations at Babelfish, and Etymology Online.
Google Groups (formerly DejaNews) has all recent Usenet posts all archived for searching and browsing. This is a great resource for getting quick info on nearly any topic.
Yahoo was useful for searching about a decade ago, but by now the listings are pretty much a joke. Still, they do provide some other services, all high quality and low bandwidth, such as stock market data. Their maps implementation seems to be a little better at finding street addresses than Google's. They've also set up a site dedicated to Atlanta listings.
Maps: international maps at UT Austin; Yahoo's maps started sucking when they screwed up navigation, but fortunately Google Maps came along and blew away everyone. They've opened up their API so that anyone can "mash up" a new web application using their maps; some great ones can be found in their best of 2006 and best of 2007 lists.
Find telephone and locations of people and businesses
Track packages: FedEx, UPS, and DHL.
Look up US Mail ZIP+4 codes, via zip code maps with this Google Maps hack.
I can't figure out where to categorize this, so I'm putting it here. What a great collection of links.

Movies

The Internet Movie Database.
Movie theaters in Atlanta: The newly independent Plaza Theater (purchased from Lefont in 2006) Landmark Midtown Art Cinema (woohoo), Regal / UA Tara, Starlight Drive-In, GSU's Cinefest, I.M.A.G.E. Film & Video Center, and the High Museum.
CL's listings and the MovieFone franchise.

Music (to my ears)

"I am terrified at the thought that so much hideous and bad music may be put on records forever."

- Sir Arthur Sullivan

The All-Music Guide provides an exhaustive, hyperlinked database much like the Internet Movie Database, above.

WREK Radio has been streaming on the net for over a decade (both 24 kbps and 128 kbps rates are available), and also has a 7-day mp3 archive so you can listen to your favorite show when you want, instead of having to tune in via radio at a specific time. My favorite shows:

Personality Crisis	Sun 10pm-12am	new wave, Brit pop, obscure nuggets	128kbps mp3 stream	[usually starts about 5 minutes late after show transition]
Underground Recordings	Tue 7pm-8pm	old Live@WREK tapes	128kbps mp3 stream	[check the website for a schedule, some real gems sometimes but also some stinkers]
New Forces	Tue 11pm-12am	60's garage rock, punk, powerpop	128kbps mp3 stream	[sometimes starts up to 15 minutes late due to Live@WREK or slacking]
Psych-Out	Wed 11pm-12am	psychedelic, space, folk underground	128kbps mp3 stream	[every year or two brings a new host and a new angle on this show, but it's always good]

And in fact, pretty much all I listen to is those WREK shows downloaded to my mp3 player so I can listen whenever I want. The trick is knowing WREK's secret mp3 download backdoor. Dave Slusher also pointed out this way cool list of public radio podcasts (aka downloadable mp3 radio shows). This is basically TiVo for radio and has dramatically increased the amount of really interesting music that I've discovered (or rediscovered) over the past year, simply because I now always have something new ready to go in my mp3 player when *I* am ready for it.
Atlanta show listings: atlantashows.org (punk, mostly), KissAtlanta / Preston Craig's events list (indie rock), plus other Atlanta lists Euphonic's list (diverse WREK-ee stylee), 404audio.com (electronic), and Live at WREK.
WREK has the best list of local music-related links.
Industrial Strength Promo / ISP is a new operation in Atlanta, near the EARL, whose name I can never quite remember exactly, and even if I remember, I can never find their damn website, so here it is; myspace also.
Eyedrum is pretty damn cool. They now take online donations here.

Journalism, Media, and Literature

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.

- H. G. Wells, 1920

Online News Sources
- Headlines from Reuters and Associated Press wires. The Google News service is an interesting experiment in "self-editing" news.
- CNN - The Cable News Network
- The New York Times web site, but you have to register. You can use this devious service to circumvent (uh oh, DMCA word) the registration requirement, as long as you have the full URL of the story you want to read.
- Local news from WXIA's wire, the Atlanta Business Chronicle, and the AJC's Metro section. The AJC now requires registration to view their pages, so head on over to BugMeNot and enter "www.ajc.com" to get a login without having to set up Yet Another Account.
- Creative Loafing, Atlanta's weekly alternative paper.
- AtlantaCuisine.com and OmnivoreATL.com, helping me spend my paycheck.
- Atlanta weather according to the Yahoo forecast, Intellicast forecast and The Weather Channel forecast.
- Live images from WSB-TV radar, WXIA-TV radar and WAGA-TV weather, WGCL-TV weather, the NWS still and looping, images updated a few times an hour from Intellicast radar and Weather Channel radar, the Weather Channel's regional animated radars, and the Atlanta radar from the Weather Underground.
Muckraking and other useless journalism: FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting), The New Republic, Mother Jones, The Nation, Salon, Slate.
I've been to Saudi Arabia, Singapore and China, and Reporters Without Borders illustrates why I found them absolutely creepy.
Culture jamming: AdBuster's campaigns, Google's listings, the BLF, the CDC and more.
I took all of the space links here and gathered them into a blog post about space.

Computing

Here it is again: Google Groups (formerly DejaNews) is the shit when it comes to troubleshooting the weirdest of problems in any platform, be it OS/2, Win95, Linux, whatever.
Mozilla Firefox is so compelling, I made a separate page for it.
Run the SETI@Home * screensaver on your desktop or laptop computer and help sift through the mountain of data coming in from outer space. Or have it crunch through data for one of the other BOINC projects. There are actually MANY other projects to throw your spare CPU cycles at, and so this guy did a nice analysis of the available options.
IT news: InfoWorld, PCWeek, news.com, Kuro5hin and and PCMag.
Ah, SlashDot, what a confounding mess. Set the comment threshold to 4 or 5 and you'll get some really great info. Like this commentary on hiring overseas programmers, this overview of electronic music, or these discussions on how to ditch MS Exchange or why Microsoft's XML spec for Word is a fraud (more evidence).
Hardware reports: Ars Technica, Tom's Hardware Guide and StorageReview.com.
Google's directory of Price Guides leads you to competitive pricing info for computing components -- PriceScan and Froogle (get it?) are two of my favorites. Everybody seems to like PriceWatch but I think it's shit. BizRate, ResellerRatings and Gomez rate online services (including banks).
Find software at Shareware.com and TUCOWS *.
Linux links:
- General: DistroWatch, Kernel Traffic summary, KernelNewbies.org, LinuxNewbie.org and emulating DOS.
- Debian: Debian, Debian Wiki, Debian Help, Debian Planet, Planet Debian (!), Debian Weekly News, the Debian IRC channel
- Ubuntu: Ubuntu Linux, their forums, Ubuntu Traffic, their Wiki, their IRC channel, DistroWatch's page and Planet Ubuntu
- Standards: Filesystem Hierarchy Standard, Linux Standard Base
- News: Linux.org, Linux.com, Google's Linux search service and CNET's 'Linux Center', AllNetDevices, LinuxHardware, LWN.net and their Grumpy Editor Guides to [things Linux].
- Pontificating: an editorial on why Linux matters, Salon's series about the whole movement, and a fantastic article by an IBM-er showing how Linux is really starting to develop into a professional operation.
Apple Mac links: David Pogue's excellent book, fixing the key bindings (Home and End), and the always helpful Macrumors crowd on IRC
QNX links: the basics, documentation, the IRC channel (link 1 2 3) and Audrey!
Here's some info on CDR blanks quality, but it's rather dated (for example, TDK outsources to a low-grade factory now). Taiyo Yuden is considered the best, but it's usually hard to tell what factory a brand's CDR's come from. There's this Usenet post on the topic. This blog entry about selecting for archival longevity confirms TY as the best, says that you should always stay away from the RW formats, and that DVD+R edges out DVD-R (if your drives can read/write it). Here's an excellent technical analysis of why DVD+R(W) is better than DVD-R(W); since your DVD-burning drive probably does both formats, just buy DVD+R(W) blanks ...
An analysis of rechargable batteries, and the Slashdot mob's take on PC power supplies.
BIOS info, a VI FAQ, and a great ASCII/hex/math cheat sheet.

Electrical Engineering / Work

The national IEEE home page, the local Atlanta and Georgia Tech sections, and the Atlanta ComSoc chapter
The national SMPTE website and the local Atlanta section.
Newsroom jargon: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; tape formats.
Digital TV: DV background, rec.video.satellite.tvro FAQ.
Satellite technical information from SatcoDX and LyngSat.
Broadcast / Satellite TV industry magazines: Via Satellite
Newsgroups: sci.engr.television.broadcast and rec.video.tvro .
D/M/S to Decimal degrees conversion: one and two.
I recently rediscovered this satcom webpage that I created back when I was working for S-A. A lot of the links might be broken, I haven't checked them yet ...

"It's absurd to divide the world into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious."

- Oscar Wilde

Who is this guy?

Years ago I worked in nuclear power, but that shit is pretty scary so I got out (even though the money was pretty great). Then I worked at ViaSat Satellite Networks (formerly Scientific Atlanta) for five years. In 2002 I started working at the teleport of Turner / CNN, located in midtown Atlanta. Here's more if you care, although it's stale. After many years of planning, I can now finally bike to work! Although I have to be careful to avoid the SUV death traps and oblivious cell- phoned " multi - taskers "; further, the summer heat and smog tends to rule out June through September. I think about living in NYC sometimes. I occasionally nerd it up and haul out my homebuilt telescope and look at things, and for that this Clear Sky Clock is very useful. Also, I do a bunch of things at WREK and Eyedrum. Generally this all means that I don't get enough sleep.

If you need to target an ICBM, here's where I live and here's where I work.

"Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public."

- H. L. Mencken

Chris Campbell / c-dot-campbell-at-pobox-dot-com / www.chriscampbell.org

Last updated mere seconds ago.