General things

• Some design notes about these pages.

• Some interesting things about Minnesota and Minneapolis.

• Everything you ever could possibly want to know about me: the Rachel ANAQ (Almost Never Asked Questions).

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• The official (whatever that means) Prisoner appreciation society, Six of One, dedicated to Patrick McGoohan's surreal 60's exploration of personal freedom and societal weirdness.

• A collection of Japanese advertising slogans in English -- weird weird weird.

• A page full of generally bizarre Japanese English; it also includes snippets of weird English from elsewhere. Now, if only most Americans could learn to speak Japanese as well as Japanese people speak English...

• An interesting -- and completely useless, but very fun -- page from Paul Haas, where you can, among other things, check up on his internet-equipped refrigerator. This site was featured in Time magazine, but please don't hold that against it -- it's still pretty good.

• A fan page dedicated to the Goon Show, which provided much of the inspiration for Monty Python, and was Peter Sellers' original posting.

• A page with a very nice Flash animation of Tom Lehrer's famous Element Song.

• One of the better Monty Python sites around, MontyPython.net, has a pretty good store of Pythonian resources, including lots of scripts (for those of you who want to know how to spell the names of all those Australian Table Wines).

• The Fawltysite is dedicated to John Cleese sidesplitting series.

• The Satellite News, site of the Mystery Science Theater 3000 fan club. (MST3K being one of the best science fiction comedy series to come out of the Minneapolis area. Also one of the only.)

• Who can resist Homestar Runner?

• The Warehouse 23 Basement. There are some seriously strange objects in there...

• A really cool website that lists the top freeware computer programs out there: Pricelessware.org.

• I haven't played with Legos in a long time, but I'm still fascinated by what some people in the Lego Users Group have accomplished.

• It's amazing what people can do with Legos. Even without the physical Legos, some people do pretty well. Coby's 3D Lego renderings will show you what I mean. (I'm tempted to move this link to my SF page, specifically the section on starships, but somehow it doesn't seem right.)

• When I look for jobs, one of the first places I go to is the Chronicle of Higher Education's jobs pages.

• Another good place to look is Higher Ed Jobs.

• Yet another good place to look for jobs is H-Net.

• A good meta-search site for jobs is called FlipDog. They list a lot of good jobs, but I saw some fake jobs from an Onion-type site listed, so clearly they don't check things.

• Finally, a great place to check for jobs and all sorts of other stuff is craigslist.

• Cool! An open-source encyclopedia: Wikipedia. Some of the entries leave a bit to be desired, but if you disagree, you can just change them.

• Here's another cool thing: the Chicago Manual of Style's FAQ. I try to follow their style recommendations on this site, and in general, though I'm far from perfect in this regard.

• Another good free source of information is the CIA World Factbook. Of course, they didn't even know where that Chinese embassy was (or they did and lied about it), so their stuff is a bit suspect.

• I also have frequent need of satellite images of the Earth (mostly for making maps, but also for pure aesthetics). One of my favorite sites for satellite imagery of the Earth is the MODIS Rapid Response System's gallery. There are tons of amazing real-color images of the Earth there, most with resolutions down to 1 pixel per 250 meters!

• A website where you can see a map of the Earth as it appears from space at this moment -- with night and everything -- only no clouds.

• The SETI@home site, where you can download a cool screensaver which will allow your computer (and thus you) to help in the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI).