MY FAVORITE WEB SITES
It's a whole different world
Sometimes I wonder how I ever survived without the World Wide Web.
The Internet -- and thank you very much, Al Gore -- has become such a big part of my life that it's sometimes strange to remember I have only been online for the last 10 years or so.
I got my first computer in 1989 -- a 286 with no hard drive and two floppy drives, if you can believe it -- and paid more for it than I did for the Pentium 4 we bought last fall from Dell. Don't tell me prices are always going up.
The 386 I got in 1991 that had a massive 120 megabyte hard drive cost me $2,400. Yeah, I know. They saw me coming. That's all right. It was part of an insurance settlement, and it was the first computer I ever owned that had a modem.
I started going online around that time, but there weren't a whole lot of websites. For me it was mostly just good old AOL until about 1996 or '97. That's when websites really started proliferating, and when I realized exactly how annoying "You've got mail" was.
So I'm with Earthlink now, and I've been with MSN too. I like both of them better than AOL and would heartily recommend either. But you don't need any of those service providers to visit the sites I'm going to recommend. All you need is something to get you to the web, and then you're on the loose in cyberspace.
Is there one particular site I visit more than any other? If there is, it's probably the Washington Post. It's not as good a paper as it once was, but it is the hometown paper from where I grew up and where much of my family still resides. I keep in touch.
I read quite a few other papers too. Hey, it is my career. The Inland Valley Daily Bulletin is where I have worked for the last 14-plus years, as sports writer, columnist, reporter and now business editor. If you want to see my professional work, go there and enter my name in the search engine.
The Boston Globe has always been one of my favorites. Great sportswriting and excellent news coverage. And of course, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times are two of the finest papers in the world.
I make an effort to keep up with the rest of the world from a perspective that's other than American. I want to know what others are saying about us. That's why I visit the British Broadcasting Corporation and two Islamic web sites (in English, of course) -- Al-Jazeera and Islam Online. For some reason, the links on those last two never work, but you can find them with a search. My French is of the high-school variety, but sometimes I tackle Le Monde, andI try my rudimentary German on the Frankfurter Zeitung.
I'm a pretty political person, and I get a lot of my political news from the Democratic Underground, from MoveOn.org and from Take Back the Media. I also check out the Weekly Standard and National Review to see what intelligent voices on the other side are saying and occasionally even Rush Limbaugh to see what the lunatics are saying.
Columbia Journalism Review's Campaign Desk website may be the best of the political blogs, and I'll admit to being caught up in the new Wonkette website out of Washington.
As a former newspaper columnist, I enjoy reading other columnists. I find most of them on the Drudge Report, but there's also the National Society of Newspaper Columnists site. Hey, I'll plug them. I'm a member.
I love the movies, so there's the Internet Movie Database, Hollywood.com, Moviefone and Fandango. Some of them are glorified ticket sites, but with a good computer, it's fun to watch trailers.
I can never get enough humor, so there's The Onion, White House.org (Bush satire), Bizarro Drudge and College Humor. Those only scratch the surface, but they're usually pretty funny.
To keep up with breaking news, there's always CNN and MSNBC, and for the "others," there's Fox News. For less serious television, I love Television Without Pity and Jump the Shark.
Baseball is one of my lifelong passions, and I'm a rotisserie player. So sites such as Rotoworld, Baseball HQ (a pay site), the official MLB site and John Benson (another pay site) are all useful.
So are ESPN and Yahoo for following the games themselves.
Clearly, Google is the best search engine, but I've used Switchboard a hundred times to get addresses and phone numbers.
Hey, the web is like a modern-day Alice's Restaurant. You can get anything you want -- even a page about Alice's Restaurant.
Last but not least, I should mention Free Stock Photos. It's where I've gotten some of the terrific shots I've used on these pages, and they ask that I link to them. Glad to do it. They're terrific.
