Take spare moments from summer fun and/or work to find reprieve on the Web
By TIMOTHY MEIER
Online Editor
With the ending of the school year, at least for me, thoughts turn to how to spend the summer. Some will diligently continue their studies over the break. Others will spend the summer on the beach in some sort of haze. And yet others will spend their summer, as I will, trying to make as much money as possible before school starts up again. For these, the summer will be filled not with fun, but with what seems like a never- ending number of days at work (and this is from someone who likes his job!) Enough of my complaining; onto the “Sites of the Week.”
http://www.mrqe.com/ With the sheer amount of movies coming out to the theaters now that summer is here, how are you supposed to sort out the good from the bad? Other than watching Roger Ebert or reading the reviews in the paper, your options were limited to word of mouth. But now you can check the reviews for all of the films that are out, plus you can usually get several different opinions about the movie from different professional reviewers.
http://www.cobaltgroup.com/~roland/x-files/warehouse.html Have you ever wondered what the government does with all of the alien artifacts, items that prove the global conspiracy, or where exactly the bodies from Roswell are kept? Wonder no more. This site has a complete listing of the location of all of these artifacts and their location within the warehouse at Area 51. Now you can find where the crate containing the Ark of the Covenant is kept, the vial with the cure for the common cold, and the prototype for the HAL 9000 computer.
http://www.angelfire.com/ut/aylett/eth69.html In keeping with the conspiracy vein that we’ve got going, this site supposedly has proof that the Apollo moon landings were faked. After checking out the pictures for myself, I just was not impressed. If you are going to doctor pictures, at least don’t put the changed picture right under the original. Warning: there are a lot of images, and it may take a while to download the entire page.
The cool toy of the week is Seti@home which is available from http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/
It’s a screensaver. It’s also a way to see if there is intelligent life outside our own solar system. It’s a floor wax, and a dessert topping all in one. Well, maybe only the screensaver and way for looking for life parts are true. After you download the program and do the restart thing, the computer will ask you to sign up with the server. Once this is done, then the server sends a chunk of data from one of its radio telescopes your way. Then when your computer is sitting idle, the screensaver kicks in and the program starts to sort through the data that the telescope received.
Now most screensavers are fairly boring, except for some of the After Dark ones, but the display that Seti@home shows is kinda cool to look at. Then again, I’m easily amused by shiny objects that move. You do need a computer with a bit of muscle to run this though. If you got the power, run the program and maybe your name will be known as the one that found the aliens that conquered the planet.
If you have any questions or comments, send them to runner@csubak.edu. Until next quarter, have a great summer and keep checking the web.
Runner@csubak.edu
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Wednesday, June 9, 1999
2:03 PM