Favorite Web Sites

As you read my blogs and click on my hyperlinks, you will see that I tend to “go back to the well” when finding reference material or sites about what I am talking about. This is because I, like everyone I am sure, has a few favorite sites that I use for reference. Below is a non-inclusive list of web sites that I might use, just so you are forewarned about multiple trips to the same site from one blog:

Internet Movie Database (IMDB) – I use this one for movies, obviously, and also actors. It is a pretty comprehensive site and will at least give you names of actors and actresses in movies. If I see an actor that I like, I simply type in their name and I can see everything that they have been in. This comes in handy when purchasing movies for my Jason Lee and Brad Pitt movie collections, which I added to with the purchase of 12 Monkeys and Seven Years in Tibet yesterday for only six dollars each at Best Buy. It also helps me to discover what other movies the beautiful and talented Kat Dennings has been in after watching Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist last night. A must use site for people who like movies.

Wikipedia – Wikipedia is one of the best open source sites on the internet, as long as the entry you are looking at is well-written and informative. It also has a bunch of useless things written on it that are often rather comical. One such entry in the one for Valley Fair Mall, my hometown mall. Apparently, it has been cleaned up a bit since the first time I saw it, but it was formerly referred to as “Welfare Mall,” “in the ghetto of Salt Lake City,” “in the buttcrack of Salt Lake City,” and “Ghetto Fair Mall” in previous versions. This site is edited by people who feel like they know what they are talking about and each entry can have different versions as illustrated with the Valley Fair Mall example above.

I have also used Wikipedia to write entire papers for college, though not as my only source. I wrote a 16-page paper on Enron, and used Wikipedia as a primary source, though I ended using the actual references cited in the article as sources for the paper so to appear way more nuanced in academic research then I actually am. That is how awesome I truly am.

Google – Everybody love “the Google.” It is a one-stop shop for all things internet now. My homepage is actually a Google application called iGoogle. If you have a Google account, tou can set it up with all sorts of widgets, like free downloads from iTunes, Bonehead of the Day Award, Spanish Word of the Day, and other neat things. It has news feeds and stuff too, but who really needs that. In fact, one of my posts on this very blog was me “Googling myself” to see what came up. That was super fun! (not really, but I needed something for this blog)

Those are the three web sites that I use the most, though I have also linked to Amazon for music samples when doing Song of the Week. So if you see a lot of hyperlinks in one of my blogs, do not be discouraged if they all go to the same web site. I’m like a bad parent: I play favorites.