Easter and Passover sites

Easter. Find Easter fun for kids — including stories, crafts,
recipes and games — at Billy
Bear and Easter Fun
1999. An entertaining activity while kids of varying ages are off
from school is the annual Big
Internet Easter Egg Hunt, which officially commences Thursday, April
1, this year. Click on the multicolored Easter egg to go from one
interesting site to another. All are guaranteed kid-safe. The Bunny
Trail leads to sites created by school groups. The Rabbit Trail is for
bigger kids and the Wild Hare Trail is for “really old kids, worn-out
Webmasters and commercial sites.” Surfing the sites on the egg hunt is
quite enjoyable — and educational — for parents or teachers as well as
youngsters.

Good sites that focus on the religious aspects of Easter are The Easter Page,
Eternal Easter
from Latimer Memorial United Methodist Church in Belton, S.C., and Easter in Cyberspace — A
Christian Perspective. The most amusing source of additional Easter
links is Peggie Bohanon’s ‘Twas the Night
Before Easter parody. Grant McDonald offers Easter humor with Top 10 Excuses Given by
the Guards at the Empty Tomb.

Passover. Rabbi Ari Mark Carter of Hillel Foundation at
Stanford U. explains
the religious significance of the holiday, including forbidden and
permitted foods, and offers a guide to Passover seder. Suite 101’s A Suite Passover has
numerous articles that range from a Passover glossary and holiday
recipes to ideas on how Christians can understand Passover better.
Jewish Family & Life’s HappyPassover.com
offers the most varied suggestions, information and activities on
observing Passover with the family.

Spring Forward. Not only does most of the U.S. switch over to
daylight saving time on Sunday, April 4, so do Europe and Russia. But
Australia “falls back” on the same date, and the British Isles went to
“summer time” yesterday. You learn all this at World Clock, which will
tell you what time it currently is in any city from Addis Ababa to
Zurich. This site is heaven-sent for anyone whose phone call has ever
awakened someone in another part of the world. When you’ve got to know
the exact time (plus or minus 1 second!) to reset all your
clocks, the National Institute of Standards & Technology’s Atomic Clock has
it. If you don’t have Java, try Atomic
Clock Time. Did you ever wonder how the date for Easter is
calculated each year? Ronald Mallen of the Astronomical Society of South
Australia explains and helps you determine the date on which Easter
occurred in any year from 1700 on.

Pop! Pop! Are you one of the folks who finds stress relief by
squeezing Bubble Wrap until it gives a satisfying pop? Here’s the online
equivalent, Virtual Bubble
Wrap. Pop to your heart’s content because you never run out of
unpopped bubbles. At The World’s Best
Bubblewrap Homepage, you can discover B-Wrap etiquette and
diagnostics as well as take part on a poll: Are bigger bubbles better
than small ones?

Need Cash? Your plane is delayed, and you’re stuck in
Atlanta’s huge Hartsfield International Airport much longer than you
expected to be. Unfortunately, your supply of cash is almost spent.
Where’s an ATM to get some more? If you’ve got your laptop along, log
onto Visa’s airport
ATM locator. It tells you how many ATMs are located at all of the
major airports around the world (Buenos Aires has two, Montreal one, and
Tokyo four) as well as providing a small map to many of their locations.
To be prepared, before you head out of town, check the ATM
locator for any city you might visit.

She Sells Seashells by the Seashore. Or maybe you’d prefer:
The sixth sick sheik’s sixth sheep’s sick. Or even: three free throws.
Find other great tongue twisters at the Tongue
Twister Database.

Bill’s New Browser. The browser wars heat up with the release
of Internet Explorer 5.0. Read an indepth review of
its features from PC Magazine, which allows you to click through to
the free download of the new version should you want to. PC Mag’s
verdict: Upgrade if you’re already using IE; wait for Netscape
Communicator 5.0 otherwise.

How Dense Are You? Check out the fun at Densa quiz (a takeoff on
Mensa) where you’ve got to be on your toes to come up with the correct
answers.

Mea Culpa. In last week’s column devoted to winners of Webby
Awards, a few readers had difficulty with one of the sites. Monday
morning, I had a nice e-mail from Ed Farabaugh, who said, “My first
encounter with Jodi.org left me unable to retrieve (from my Win95
taskbar) Netscape Communicator’s original window, which left me without
a ‘Back’ button or a ‘Go’ command. My only recourse was to close all of
the (new) Netscape windows in the taskbar, and to restart Netscape. For
me this was of little consequence (no big deal). While it was a good
‘practical joke,’ it left me with thoughts of the many ‘newbies’ who
might be unable to determine the best course of action, the most drastic
of which is to ‘turn off the computer’ during a write to the hard drive.
I am sure you know this could have some very negative consequences.” I
was glad to get Ed’s message because I hadn’t had the same experience
when I checked out the site. Using Internet Explorer, I got back out by
clicking on the X in the right-hand corners of the pop-up windows and
then going to file, open, to get to another site. So I didn’t realize
that the site might be a problem for some people. If you were one of
them, I apologize. (We removed the link to avoid confusion, but when I
checked the site this week, the “joke” is different.)