Everything the net can bring

By Judy Lowe

Pay tribute to mom, play more than 1,000 puzzles, create your own
recipe site and find an old Army buddy — you can do it all on the Net
this week.

Hi, Mom! Sunday is Mother’s Day. You’re not the sort of person who
would send an e-card to Mom, are you? This is one holiday where that
won’t cut it. But if your mother likes music, you might send — in
addition to the traditional card — musical greeting card from
MP3.com. Or, if Mom has a good sense of humor, invite her to dinner with
gourmet postcards from Mailameal.
These look so good, they’ll make you hungry and they’re available in
formats from soup to nuts, and even vegetarian. (But I’d recommend
against the low-cal ones; that probably wouldn’t win you any brownie
points.) Or put your mother in funny but fake headlines.

All moms, all the time. Some all-purpose Mother’s Day sites:

GI Joe and Jane. Want to find a long-lost military
friend? G.I. Buddies.com has
message boards and a search function according to the branch of service
— Army, Air Force, Navy, Marine or Coast Guard. You can also create
your own personal space at the site to upload information or a picture
of yourself to let all your old friends know what’s happening with you.

Your own recipe site. The creator of Mimi’s Cyberkitchen has developed
a spot for you to store all your recipes, with your page assigned its
own Web address. It’s called The Recipe
Circus
and it’s free.

High School Help. We may be winding down to the end of the
school year, but with those final papers and exams looming, it never
hurts to have one more good academic site bookmarked. High School Hub links to
research and reference sites, as well as search engines and Web
directories. It also provides excellent featured sites according to
academic subject (biology, English, social studies, language, math,
science and many more). In addition, you’ll find a daily SAT question,
The New York Times news quiz, today in U.S. history and sometimes the
unexpected (a driving quiz).

It’s puzzling. If you like math-oriented puzzles, Free Puzzles is for you. More than a
thousand math, geometry, logic and weight puzzles await you, classified
by difficulty level.

Regrets only. Barry Cadish is writing a book, or rather he’s
asking Netizens to provide the material for the book by answering the
question: What is your biggest regret in life? Or what would you do over
in life if you could? People have logged onto RegretsOnly.com to say they’re sorry
they didn’t go to college, didn’t take good advice when it was offered,
hadn’t married their childhood sweetheart, and on and on.

Hard-to-find search info. Gary Price of George Washington
University has put together a specialty search engine that connects you
to an amazing amount of otherwise obscure and difficult-to-locate data.
Direct Search
links to biographies, bibliographies, legal, science, humanities,
statistics, NPR archives and so much more that you can spend quite a
while poking around this site. It also has a speech and transcript
center with the latest from Campaign 2000 or even historic speeches.

Can’t you take a hint? If you’re looking for a gentle,
anonymous way to tell someone in your office that she or she needs to
bathe more often or has another annoying habit, Give-a-Hint lets you send him or her
a comical cartoon e-postcard tailored to the situation. Although it’s
not clear at first, all of the site’s animated cartoons can be sent
free.

Hear Roth read. Although you have to register to use The New York Times on the Web, you can
now hear Philip Roth read
16 minutes of the first chapter
of his new novel, “The Human Stain”
at the site’s Sunday Book
Review
.

Behind the scenes. Think of it as uncensored TV. If you have a
satellite dish, you know what we mean — what stations and networks
refer to as “backhaul feeds,” transmissions from one place to another.
And often you see the on-air “talent” in some revealing off-air moments.
A number of these have been collected at Wild Feed TV. Watch Tom Brokaw gossip
about Dan Rather, for instance. But you’ll need a Real Player to watch
the videos.

Judy Lowe

Judy Lowe is an award-winning writer whose two favorite activities are surfing through cyberspace and growing flowers. Her latest gardening book is "Ortho's All About Pruning." She can be reached by email. Read more of Judy Lowe's articles here.