Departmental and local stuff
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MIT's main web site,
a page for MIT postdocs,
and an exhasting, if not exhaustive listing of
campus resources.
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Barton
(MIT Library Catalog),
VERA
(Virtual Electronic Resources Access),
and the MIT Library's
Physics & Astrophysics subject guide.
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The MIT Kavli Institute for
Astrophysics and Space Research
and its Chandra X-ray Center,
plus a convenient listing of CXC-MIT Local Resources;
the Department of Physics,
and it's Astrophysics Division.
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Calendars:
local calendars for
NE80,
MKI and
the physics department;
international astronomical meetings
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Talks and colloquia:
CSR colloquia (Tues @4pm);
CSR Friday lunch series (noon);
MIT physics colloquia (Thurs @4:15pm);
CfA colloquia (Thurs @3:30);
the CfA weekly calendar,
and other local colloquia.
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Astronomical references
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Journal articles
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Professional resources
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Popular astronomy & neat stuff
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The reference shelf
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My favorite online search engine:
Google.
(Scirus is supposed to be
science-oriented, but I still prefer
Google,
even over
Google Scholar).
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MIT's Virtual Reference Collection,
the Internet Public Library
and iTools
have just about everything!
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eBooks:
MIT Library's e-collection
(incl. Safari Tech Books
[which has the O'Reilly series] and
Books 24x7) &
JHU's eResources.
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Dictionaries:
Webster's Collegiate dictionary and thesaurus.
For more thorough coverage, there's the
Unabridged edition of Webster's,
or for the mother of all dictionaries, the
Oxford English
Dictionary
[MIT remote access to
OED and
Oxford Reference].
Note: Google provides word
definitions with the search syntax "define:word".
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Encyclopedias:
Wikipedia,
Digital Universe,
the Encyclopedia Britanica
[MIT
remote access],
or the
World Book Encyclopedia.
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Maps & atlases:
Google Maps,
MapQuest,
MultiMap,
Maps On Us, &
Maporama,
for interactive maps, driving directions, etc.
(don't forget traffic reports).
Or, National Geographic's
java-enabled
"map machine".
About.com offers a collection of more
conventional maps,
and the
U.S. Library of Congress
has been digitizing some of their
historical maps.
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Travel info:
currency converter
|| language translation
|| the CIA's
World Factbook
|| Country reports from
the U.S. State Dept.,
CountryWatch, and
Canadian,
U.K. &
Australian travel advice
|| Bob's Internet Travel Tips
|| MIT Travel office
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Entertainment:
Fandango, which provides movie
times and info, and lets you buy tickets for Lowes theaters online.
And for those nights when you really don't want to go out,
TitanTV
provides customizable TV listings.
Zap2It offers both TV
listings and movie info, and there's the
find-a-video
site...
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More entertainment:
The All Music Guide,
the Trouser Press
Record Guide,
and the Internet Movie Database.
Addictive.
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Random other references:
urban legends & hoaxes
|| phone directories (incl.
reverse lookup)
|| Zip+4 finder
|| U.S. reps & senators
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Computer stuff
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Some astronomical software packages I find useful:
LHEAsoft,
CIAO,
SciSoft,
and
StarLink.
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Some online guides and FAQs, for using
Xemacs,
LaTeX,
sm (SuperMongo),
Xfig
(a JHU local file),
Tcl (programming
and command
guides),
cfitsio,
elm, and
procmail
(for filtering spam).
Some others that are more specifically for astronomers are
IRAF,
Xselect,
Xspec,
and
DS9.
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HTML: To learn the basics of creating a web page from scratch, check out
NCSA's Beginner's Guide to HTML.
Once you've gotten the basics down, you'll find that the only thing you
need is a good reference, such as this list of
all standard characters
(for a broader - but not universally supported - set of
characters, see the
HTML 4.0
Character Entity Reference)
or this alphabetical listing of
every html tag
up through HTML version 3.2, provided by the
Web Design Group.
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Cascading style sheets (CSS) will let you get a little fancier.
The folks at W3C offer this
very basic intro to CSS as well as
this more detailed page.
The Web Design Group offers
another great starting point,
which includes
this useful list of CSS1 properties.
Brian Wilson (no, not
that
Brian Wilson) provides a more exhaustive
list of CSS1 and newer CSS2 properties.
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I read the news today, oh boy.
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Newspapers:
The New York Times
(1851-2002;
1980-)
|| Village Voice
|| Boston Globe
|| Boston Herald
|| Washington Post
|| Baltimore Sun
|| Baltimore's City Paper
|| USA Today
|| San Jose Mercury News.
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(Mostly news) Magazines:
The Onion ("America's Finest News Source". If you don't know the onion,
you have no taste!)
|| Utne Reader
|| Slate
|| Salon.com
|| Wired
|| Time Warner's
Pathfinder, which includes Time, Fortune, People, etc.
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Other Magazines:
National Geographic
|| Smithsonian
|| Scientific American
|| Rolling Stone
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Other online news sources:
Reuters
|| Associated Press
|| CNN Interactive
|| IWon.com
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Weather reports:
Ten day forecasts for the Cambridge area from
the Weather Channel and Intellicast.com.
Alternately, the Weather Underground provides forecasts for
Boston & Cambridge,
Newcastle, UK, and
Bawlmer, hon. If you've got Mac OS X, check out this
nifty piece of freeware.
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The national pastime
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ESPN SportsZone's
baseball page,
Baseball America
(focus on minor leagues) and
Baseball Reference
(historical perspective).
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MLB scoreboards:
MLB ||
ESPN;
Standings:
MLB ||
ESPN;
Broadcasts:
MLB Media Center ||
Gameday Audio.
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While we're on the subject, here's
a compendium of baseball links
and more
baseball links.
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Mac stuff
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Macintosh news and rumor-mongers:
slashdot
|| The Mac Observer
|| MacOS Rumors
|| MacRumors.com
|| ThinkSecret
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Tips & troubleshooting:
The fora at
Mac OS X Hints and Apple's
OS X Pro Tips
are loaded with useful tidbits.
OS X FAQ offers several
tips of the day.
Accelerate Your Mac
has lots of tips,
MacInTouch includes
lots of user reports,
and
MacFixIt goes into greater
depth on selected issues.
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DIY repairs:
Apple provides details for what they consider
customer installable parts.
For other Mac laptop or Mini procedures, see the
useful guides from
iFixIt.
DIY repairs will not void your warantee,
but any harm you do in the process may not be covered.
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Magazines:
MacWorld
|| TidBITS
|| ZD Net (the one-time home of
MacWeek)
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Resources:
Apple's
support and
developer pages,
the very useful Things Macintosh pages,
the Mac resource page,
and more links.
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O'Reilly eBooks (!), courtesy of
Safari Tech Books
(sorry,
MIT access only):
Mac OS X in a Nutshell
|| Mac OS X: The Missing Manual (2nd ed.)
|| Mac OS X Panther for Unix Geeks
|| Mac OS X Hacks
|| Mac OS X Panther Hacks
|| Running Mac OS X Panther
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Shareware and freeware:
Version Tracker,
AOL's
ftp archvies,
and a page of
other mirrors.
Of these other mirrors, I recommend the html versions at
MIT
and
apple.
Another place to try is
c|net.
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A little history...
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Alma matters
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Yale University's
homepage, plus the page for
alumni.
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Yale's astro department,
plus billions and billions of
squid...
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JHUniverse,
the electronic front door of the Johns Hopkins University, plus an
online course catalogue.
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The Henry A. Rowland Department of Physics and Astronomy.
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The online catalogue for the
MSE library, and
the STScI library.
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Graduate Representative Organization
homepage, and their handy
Guide to Living in Baltimore,
the
first electronic version
of which was put online by yours truely. There's also the
National Assoc. of Graduate & Professional Students.
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