obligatory favorite links

Here's some links to corners of the web ...

folks

Just some of my friends and a couple of strangers I've read along the way.

friends

Lori Bowden: Lori's a graphics programmer I worked with at Island Graphics. She's from Ohio and designs games when she's not herding her passel of kids..
Ben Boyd: Ben's crazy, talented, and crazy: in no particular order. When we worked at Island Graphics, he was a technical illustrator, but everybody knew that he was really a cartoonist beneath the professional façade.
David Brawley: David works at the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, and he paints when he's not forced to be earning a livelyhood.
Roger Corman: Another good friend from my Island days. No, Roger is not that Roger Corman. He's a programmer, and in his spare time, he's written his very own Common Lisp implementation.
Ralf Dietl: I've known Ralf since 1982. He lives in Bonn and teaches at the Gesamtschule Bonn in Bad Godesberg. He's been into computers since the Commodore C64 days and is fond of Honda Goldwings. When I lived in Bonn in 1985, he introduced me to BAP, Kölsch, and Karneval. Alaaf!
Doris Eraldi: Doris is my cousin, and we grew up together in Sonoma County: heart of the Bear Flag Republic. She now lives in Mendocino County (who can afford Sonoma anymore?) where she trains horses, weaves web pages, and writes books. Well, one that's been published so far, and it's rather good, too. (We're waiting on novel number two.)
Ian Evans: Ian's somebody I met working on a contract at Inprise. It used to be a company called VisiGenics, when I worked at Oracle, and then it was swallowed by Borland. Borland changed their name to Inprise, though now they're back to Borland. Phew! He studied philosophy at UC Santa Cruz and is from San Diego.
Dean Gooch: Dean's my oldest friend in the world. We've known each other since second grade at Flowery Elementary School. We went to Altamira Junior High School, Sonoma Valley High School, Santa Rosa Junior College, and UC Berkeley. At Cal, he studied entomology, while I studied etymology: this confused and confounded our friends. Later, he went to Sonoma State University to learn all about group theory.
Dean Lent: Dean's a good friend from my film days at Sonoma State University. He's not online, but we shouldn't hold that against him.
Ilya Lipkind: He's from Sankt Peterburg, his nickname is Vano, and he's quite the Preferance fiend. I worked with him at Oracle, and we had a lot of fun discussing Isaac Babel and Ostap Bender. Later, he went to NYU to study computer science, but last we spoke he was back in the Golden State working for the Industry.
Rand McKinney: I worked with Rand at Lutris until it went away. An interesting fellow and a crackerjack technical writer. He's also a relative of the famous Texas Jack Omohundro.
Andreas Ramos: I worked with Andreas at a software company that Dante wrote about in the 34th canto of the Divine Comedy, placing it in the ninth circle, fourth round. Like Garcia-Marquez, he's from Colombia and has a degree in philosophy from the University of Heidelberg. He also lived in Denmark for a while. We're both members of the STC and the IWU.
John Serna: John's a good friend that I met in the software testing gulags at Broderbund. Later, we started a computer consulting firm called C2, not to be confused with C2 dot com, the home of the fabulous Wiki Wiki Web on software design patterns. Later, C2 morphed into Bitzone LLC. Today, John works for Microsoft where he's the web producer for the development tools web site.
Timothy Smith: I met Tim during the dark days in the belly of the beast. We took an instant liking to one another because of a mutual background in linguistics. Turned out his advisor at UCLA was Peter Ladefoged, and he was a good friend of my phonology professor at Cal. Tim did a dissertation on extrinsic tongue muscles and taught for a decade at UC San Diego.
Brian Wilson: Brian was one of the four people I worked with at Island Graphics whose names people constantly confused with other peoples' names. Who were these people? Roger Corman, Gerry Brown, Brian Wilson, and Frances Powers. I don't know. He's a programmer, and he's been involved with human-powered bikes: International Human Powered Vehicle Association.
Erling Wold: Erling works at Muscle Fish, which got swallowed by Audible Magic. We wrote an opera together. He composed the music, and I wrote the libretto.
Mason Woo: I met Mason through John Serna, so he's a part of what I called the Connecticut Connexion, though Woo's from NYC He went to Brown and is part of what John calls the Brown Mafia.

strangers

Stan Kelly-Bootle: The Devil's Advocate column used to be a good-enough reason to read Unix Review. I stuck a link to Stan's webpage because we both used the same ISP back in those PPP/SLIP days of yore.
Jen Leibhart: I really cannot remember why I first linked to her page, but Jen's site is now all about Richard Brautigan, and that's good enough for me.

language

Akkadian Online: DUB.E = tuppi bitim, 'home clay tablet' in Akkadian This Dutch site has TeX fonts for Akkadian cuneiform and an Akkadian-Dutch dictionary.
British National Corpus: Over a hundred million words of British English.
Constructed Languages: A little sub-discipline of lingusitics studies artificial (or constructed) languages.
Elvis in Latin: Ah, Suomi! Dr Ammondt puts out CDs of popular songs covered in Latin versions. When not singing, he's posing for heroic cheesecake on the beaches of Finland.
Ethnologue: A great online database of languages of the world. Nothing great comes without a hidden agenda, n'est-ce pas? This site is hosted by the Summer Institute of Linguistics which is an offshoot of the Wycliffe Bible Translators.
European Minority Languages: There's more to Europe than French and German. How about Walon or Breton?
Gaelic: Word of the day in Gaelic. Great fun!
I Love Languages: Tons of links about languages.
Khoesaan: Famous for its clicks.
Klingon Language Institute: tlhIngan Hol vIjatlh. A great site! Their refereed journal, HolQeD is a must for any serious Klingon linguist.
The Linguist List: The best of the linguistics electronic lists. Searchable archives, jobs, and much, much more.
The Linguistic Society of America: Just short of its 80th anniversary. Its journal, Language, is still a pretty good read.

film

Film Threat Magainze: Hollywood's little voice: all the poop that's fit to plop.
Internet Movie Database: Even though it was borged by Amazon, it's still the best database on all things cinematic. I've been using it since before the web. Ah, those little ASCII files designed to asnwer all those raging late night questions.

books

The Internet Bookshop: Best online bookstore in the UK that I've used.
Postmodern Culture: One of the first electronic journals I ran across. Some great articles.

weirdness

Aliens on Earth: Area 51 avant l'Independence Day. With the demise of X Files, here's a place to indulge your alien hearts and minds.
Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal: Keeping tabs on the fringe kooks. Lots of fun, but sometimes takes itself too seriously.
The Fortean Times: Caveat lector! This is some old-time, serious hoakum.
Ideal TV: And I thought it was sunspots. This guy "zaps" politicians on TV. Not sure if he's serious, but fun reading.
Penis Pasta: It's been around the web a time or two, and it was censored, but, hey, those Swedes sure make a mean dish to soak up the tomato sauce.
The Skeptics Society: Along with CSICOP [vide supra] a great place to go and research claims that has-been movie starlets are channeling ancient Atlantean computer consultants.
Ubi Springfield?: Matt Groening is from Springfield, Ill, but the Simpsons live in Springfield ...