These are other people's pages.
| Newsy Stuff |
The Gate, the online site for
the San Francisco Chronicle. |
The Miami Herald is one of the best
online papers I've encountered, especially some of their columnists.
|
| The Oakland Tribune is a really lame newspaper. Appropriately enough, it also has a really lame website. |
The Daily Californian is the campus newspaper for UC Berkeley. |
| The San Jose Mercury News is probably the best overall newspaper in the Bay Area. |
The Contra Costa Times covers the farther reaches of the East Bay, out where it gets hot. |
| The Washington Post is the best source for political news in the U.S. |
And the newspaper of record, of course, is The New York Times. |
| Commentary |
|---|
Editorial cartoons
- Here is one of my favorite editorial cartoonists, Tom Toles.
- Ted Rall is a weird cartoonist, but I often appreciate his perspective/invective.
- This Modern World is a cool comic by Tom Tomorrow, featuring Sparky, a penguin with attitude. He also has a good blog on his site.
|
Columns and sites
|
| Blogs
|
Radio
|
| Sports |
|---|
- ESPN.com, where
I only use the free stuff. They have really impressive Java applets
for tracking baseball games!
- The Sporting News,
which I used to read religiously when I was younger. It went downhill
for a while, but seems to be making a comeback.
 My Cal Bears
 Aussie Cricket
|
 The San Francisco Giants were the first sports team I discovered, and I'm still a devoted fan. I love Pacific Bell Park!
|
| Weather |
|---|
| Paul's Bay Area Weather Page |
Planet Earth (It's a large GIF file, but worth a look!) |
| Traffic |
|---|
| Bay Area Traffic Unfortunately, this is a very useful site. It also links to all the Bay Area transit agencies, including BART. |
SF Bay Traffic is pretty cool, with a nice real-time map, but a bit hard to see on one screen.
KCBS's map is less detailed, but pretty useful for an overview. |
| The Spare the Air page lets us know when it's best to stay off the road. |
Transit Info is a very handy interface to all the Bay Area public transit systems.
Next MUNI lets you know when the next San Francisco MUNI bus or train will be by. Very cool!.
|
| Shopping |
|---|
| Amazon.com is the Internet's general store. They are truly amazing (and often in a good way). I am completely impressed with their customer service. I've only needed it twice, but both times they did The Right Thing without me having to ask. Oh yeah, good selection, good prices. |
Price Grabber is a pretty good comparison shopping site. I'm becoming less enchanted with DealTime, which used to be my favorite, and MySimon. |
| eBay is the global flea market, but somehow it seems to be one of the more viable business models around. On the other hand, their site design is quite awful. |
Half.com is now eBay's cousin. I guess it's the global warehouse store or something. |
| Bookpool is by far the cheapest source for technical books. Great selection, excellent availability. |
For alternatives to Amazon, check out No Amazon, an anti-Amazon site with lots of links to independent booksellers and chains. |
Alibris is a cool place to seach for used, rare, and out-of-print books.
Abebooks is another search spot for used books. |
Book Closeouts has very low prices on remaindered books. You won't find current bestsellers, but they often have little treasures if you're willing to look. |
| Deep Discount has the best prices I've found for DVDs. They sell lots of other stuff now, too. |
Two portals I can use to support my daughter's school: eScrip and Schoolpop |
| Out and About |
|---|
| eVite is quite handy, although a bit blunt, and rather a pain to use for large gatherings. I still haven't figured out why there was a Pampers ad on a birthday party invite I got once, though. |
OpenTable is a very handy service for making dinner reservations. It doesn't try to do too much, which is nice. |
| Theater
| Movies |
| MapQuest is useful for finding places
and getting directions on how to get to them. |
Google Maps does the same thing, only better, and has aerial photos better than the ones MapQuest used to have. |
It's the Dilbert
Zone... I'm a member of Dogbert's New Ruling Class!
The nerd in me loves User Friendly. If you're not a computer type, particularly a Linux-head, you might not appreciate it.
The Windows 95 Annoyance
page, a terrific resource for those of us who have to use That Product
EFFweb, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is a great organization, set up to ensure that the rights we enjoy offline also extend online.
The Monterey Bay Aquarium is one
of my favorite places in the world.