Commentary - Sites I Visit A Lot
My use of most of the sites listed in the sidebar is self-explanatory. As a walker and user of public transport it makes sense for me to visit the Bureau of Meteorology ('Weather') and Met Link Melbourne ('Transport') sites and having them here lets me forget the URLs. I happen to use Yahoo ('Communication') as my free web-based email. And the 'Strong Bad Emails' at Homestar Runner ('Silliness') are the only flash animation things I have consistently got into. So the only things that want some explanation are 'News' and 'Trivia'.
The Australian
I have been asked why I read The Australian rather than a Melbourne newspaper like The Age or The Herald-Sun. It’s basically a habit. It started back 1999-2000ish. At that time I was still getting hard-copy newspapers and The Australian were making an effort to get more customers in Melbourne by selling it for 50 cents an edition. The price was the incentive I needed. Then I started sending letters to the editor and on the occasions they got published it was lovely to get emails from an interstate friend saying "liked your letter in the Oz today". I imagine that was more likely to happen with the avowedly 'national' paper. So even now that I use the web for news I still have the habit of choosing the same paper as back then. The political stance of the paper is different to my own but I figure that is a good not a bad thing.
Wikipedia
Originally I had Word IQ (which uses Wikipedia as its source) but have since been using Wikipedia directly as it seems to have more up-to-date content. As Wikipedia can be altered by anyone it’s worth taking anything in it with a pinch of salt. Still as long as you are prepared to corroborate the info it's okay. I can kill a lot of time on a site like this and O the wacky things I have discovered...
Did you know that a slater is a kind of crustacean? Or that many old models of electric organ (Hammond) and electric piano (Fender-Rhodes) produce sound by having steel parts (tone wheels or tines) move in the vicinity of electro-magnets thus making them more akin to electric guitars than to electronic synthesisers? I could go on... and on... and on...
Update
To mark the third birthday of this blog I changed the template. In the process my customized links were deleted. In replacing them I have made some changes. One is to merge 'Sites I Visit A Lot' with 'Things I Am Involved In' and the other is to have changed some and deleted others. My life both off and on-line has become simpler in those three years and that is reflected in the current links.
The Australian
I have been asked why I read The Australian rather than a Melbourne newspaper like The Age or The Herald-Sun. It’s basically a habit. It started back 1999-2000ish. At that time I was still getting hard-copy newspapers and The Australian were making an effort to get more customers in Melbourne by selling it for 50 cents an edition. The price was the incentive I needed. Then I started sending letters to the editor and on the occasions they got published it was lovely to get emails from an interstate friend saying "liked your letter in the Oz today". I imagine that was more likely to happen with the avowedly 'national' paper. So even now that I use the web for news I still have the habit of choosing the same paper as back then. The political stance of the paper is different to my own but I figure that is a good not a bad thing.
Wikipedia
Originally I had Word IQ (which uses Wikipedia as its source) but have since been using Wikipedia directly as it seems to have more up-to-date content. As Wikipedia can be altered by anyone it’s worth taking anything in it with a pinch of salt. Still as long as you are prepared to corroborate the info it's okay. I can kill a lot of time on a site like this and O the wacky things I have discovered...
Did you know that a slater is a kind of crustacean? Or that many old models of electric organ (Hammond) and electric piano (Fender-Rhodes) produce sound by having steel parts (tone wheels or tines) move in the vicinity of electro-magnets thus making them more akin to electric guitars than to electronic synthesisers? I could go on... and on... and on...
Update
To mark the third birthday of this blog I changed the template. In the process my customized links were deleted. In replacing them I have made some changes. One is to merge 'Sites I Visit A Lot' with 'Things I Am Involved In' and the other is to have changed some and deleted others. My life both off and on-line has become simpler in those three years and that is reflected in the current links.
Labels: Internet Observations, Political
posted by Dan at
2.12.05
1 Comments:
Screw The Australian. That habit was entirely ended a few Federal elections ago once I read the editorial in which the paper basically declared its aim of destroying a political party (The Greens) that is supported by a significant minority of Australian citizens. Even if I identity as independent I was still incensed that a supposedly mainstream paper would declare such a partisan and sectarian objective. I'm now more of a Guardian Australia Online reader if anything...
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Dan, At
23 November, 2015
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