Dr. Bob's Hot TipsDr. Bob's Hot Tips
The page's Web-Counter
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eed a little "spice" in your life? Getting bored with
the usual surfing products on the net? Want a little different
slant on the Web? Dr. Bob Lade spends a bit of time each day surfing
for those unusual yet entertaining Web sites he thinks most of
you CyberNetters might find amusing. Some of these links are serious,
some just plain fun. We'll try to update the listing monthly,but
if a hot URL shows up, it will be added ASAP.
spent a lot of time discussing real audio in February and email and internet connectivity
in March
so this month will be spent on the subject of Newspaper and CyberNews on the internet.
o here it is, early in the morning, the coffee pot is perking, my wife and cat are sleeping and I'm ready to answer that question. It's pretty simple: I read! I don't have a sound card (yet), and my machine is too slow for video, so I do the next best thing (or is it the best?) and read just a minute fraction of what's out there on the net.Of course, I read my email first and answer all letters that require a response. Then I fire up my web browser (leaving my mail client active, but minimized) and head for the newspapers. How many papers are available on the net? I don't know the exact number, but there are hundreds of them. NandO Times keeps a pretty current list including foreign as well as domestic selections.
bviously, these papers don't put their entire issues on the net, but some come pretty close to it. Plan on getting a capsized form of the news here, but there are some surprises too. For example, both the New York Times and USA Today feature their crossword puzzles for those of us who can't start our days with out a puzzle fix. (There are *at least* two of us in the area who fall into that catagory.)I have found that the general news is best read from ones local paper and that the best way to utilize the net is to extract technical tidbits from it. So, I still subscribe to the News Press even though by the time I get to it I've spent a few hours reading other papers.
y first stop in the morning is at the New York Times' CyberTimes. If there's some hot info, the Times will usually scoop the rest of the pack. Since I've been reading at this site, they have *never* failed to update their pages on a daily basis. That's more than you can say for a lot of paper web sites. The Times suffers in cyberspace from the the same problems it has in printed form. They are highly liberal, and quite provincial. I have the feeling that most of their writers don't even know that other parts of the world exist beyond the borders of their city! Just my opinion, of course.
After getting the news from that point of view, I move over to the other side of the country and check out the tech news at the San Francisco Gate. Here you find the Silicon Valley News gleaned from both the SF Examiner and the Chronicle. When the page is current, it is a wealth of information. Unfortunately, it looks like one of these long-standing papers is going the way of the New York News and other evening papers. I would expect this to be reflected in there web site, but for now I highly recommend it for your technical perusal.
s you probably know, Yahoo! is affiliated with Reuters NewsMedia and is a good source of news. I still check it each day, but find that especially on the weekends they don't update their pages much. Too busy playing in their hot tubs out there, I guess...Another good source for technical news is Raleigh, North Carolina's NandO Times. The NandO Times is one of the early internet newspapers and to their credit, they have maintained an excellent site for over a year now. The above link takes you to a form where you can select one of many sections of the paper, but their Info Tech section is *very* complete.
A late entrant into the internet newspaper field is The LA Times. I've only been reading in this site a few days now, but I find it complete and very up-to-date. The LATimes has a neat feature that I especially like--personalized news. After registering with them you can set up a personal page listing only the news items you're interested in. For example, I included Tech News, Football, Personal Computing and ISDN News as my catagories. The latter is a special one that I defined and the paper does a search of all news stories to find specified key words in articles. A neat feature if you have some specific area you want to keep track of...
f you like the idea of searching for topics, you might try NewsPage. This site allows you to select from a list of technical topics and presents the latest news on that topic to you in a format similar to the typical search engine output. They also track specific Corporation news from a list of about 1,500 companies and can do stock market studies too. It's worth a click to check it out.Don't forget to contact me if you would like to be put on an e-mail list for announcements for the Internet Special Interest Group (ISIG) meetings in the southwest Florida area. We plan on normally holding them monthly on the first Tuesday of the month. This month's (May) meeting will be held on May 7th. The meeting time is 7 p.m. We'll once again meet at CyberStreet's new office complex at 1721 Hendry Street. That's just one door south of the Dunkin' Donut place on Hendry in downtown Ft. Myers. Walter will have the 26 inch monitor set up and this week he's putting a sound card in (whatever that is!! ;-) Don Carlson will give a presentation of Real Audio. Don said he plans to show you how to get it, how to install it and how to use it. I've heard Don give presentations before, so believe me when I say this one's worth the drive downtown to hear. Rumor has it we may even have a T1 line to hook up to!!!
New schedules for the introductory internet course are being drawn up. If you have an interest in this class, or know of someone who is, drop a note to me , or give me a call at 772-8229. Have a friend interested in joining the fun on the internet? Have him call me and we'll get him started with an introductory package.
In addition to the introductory class, I am also available for advanced instruction on the internet, Windows95, Word Processing, or what have you. My rates are $25/hour. Reasonable for individual instruction, I believe. Give me a call at 772-8229, or send me an e-mail message and we can talk about your particular needs.
Comments about this page should be sent to Dr. Bob Lade .Reactions, positive or negative will be carefully considered. You're also invited to visit my Web Page to learn a little more about me, my family and our lifestyle.
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