Five Web Sites I Love

By Kristi Brooks

For your reading pleasure, and to serve as proof that there is intelligent life out there on the Internet, Today's Engineer is profiling interesting and useful Web sites for your edification. What's in your bookmark list?

1. WalkJogRun

www.walkjogrun.net

Their blurb: Simply put, it’s a way to plan running routes by drawing them out on a map. It includes a distance/speed calculator and calorie burn estimator.

Why I love it: I’ve recently relocated and lost all my running routes. This site is easier to use than any other I’ve found so far and some local routes are saved. It will even show you the elevation changes in a given route; this is helpful when I’m planning a new route locally or for when I’m traveling. I haven’t explored all areas of this site yet, including the ability to create running groups.

2. Zits

www.arcamax.com/zits

Their blurb: Jerry Scott and Jim Borgman’s popular comic “Zits,” the story of a teen and his parents trying to coexist (with humorous results), debuted in 1997 and has been running strong ever since. Pulitzer Prize winner Borgman collaborated with Scott after working as a cartoonist with the Cincinnati Enquirer, while Scott continued work on his other popular comic, “Baby Blues.” The comic is now syndicated in over 1,300 newspapers nationwide, and has won the National Cartoonists Society’s top prize for Newspaper Comic Strip in both 1998 and 1999.

Why I love it: I have teens at home and find the humor so timely. Everybody needs a little humor in their lives. I can identify with the parents in the comic strip and I see the hope in my kids’ faces as they point out to me something in the comic strip that I apparently have been missing in their communication with me.

3. BitPim

www.bitpim.org

Their blurb: BitPim is a program that allows you to view and manipulate data on many CDMA phones from LG, Samsung, Sanyo and other manufacturers. This includes the PhoneBook, Calendar, WallPapers, RingTones (functionality varies by phone) and the Filesystem for most Qualcomm CDMA chipset based phones.

Why I love it: We have three cell phones in our house, with a fourth to be added soon. It’s easier to copy things between phones using bitpim. I can save text messages to my computer (that contain something like addresses of one of my kid’s newest friends) until I can save the information in an easier to find place. It’s free and pretty handy for us.

4. Logic Games

logicgamesonline.com

Their blurb: n/a

Why I love it: I love logic puzzles! I’ve bookmarked this so any time I need something to keep me entertained I can click my bookmark and lose myself for a few minutes.

5. Allrecipes

www.allrecipes.com

Their blurb: Allrecipes, the world’s largest social network of food and entertaining enthusiasts, receives more than 270 million annual visits from home cooks who share and download recipes, reviews, photos, personal profiles, and meal ideas. For more than 12 years, the Seattle-based site has served as a dynamic, indispensible resource for cooks seeking trusted recipes, entertaining ideas, everyday and holiday meal solutions, practical cooking tips, and food advice. Allrecipes provides more than 40,000 recipes inspiring between 8 and 12 million monthly unique visitors and a membership base of more than 2.8 million strong.

Why I love it: I get in a rut with cooking and always find good ideas here. There are tutorials for those who want to learn new skills like how to debone a chicken. What I like most about this website is that it is heavily used, which means the recipes get a lot of reviews. This translates into saved time for me because it truly is tried and true.

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