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Jeff Bigler's Home Page

Gratuitous Quotes

This is my home page. Think of it as reading bumper stickers on the information turnpike. I'm going to put my septic tank on the Web so I can eliminate the middleman.

About Me

More biographical information about me and my resumé are available for those who want them. I live in Nahant, Mass. (about a 25-minute drive from Boston).

Lots of people seem to enjoy my hypothesis about "tact filters" and my wife's and my Christmas light rating scale.

PGP users can get my public key from the MIT AI Lab's PGP public key server.

Hobbies and Interests

• music
  • New England Philharmonic
  • Symphony by the Sea
  • MIT Gilbert & Sullivan Players
  • Two-instrument transcriptions of J.S. Bach's Little Fugue in g minor
  • viola jokes
  • other instrument jokes
• morris dancing
  • Red Herring Morris
  • MOTley Morris
  • Recently Traditional Fictional Morris
  • Morris Sides on the Web
• caving
  • MIT Caving Club
  • Boston Grotto
  • National Speleological Society
• home brewing
• roof & tunnel hacking
  • IHTFP Hack Gallery
• Computers
  • MIT Student Information Processing Board
  • Webmasters' Guild
  • The Dvorak keyboard
• paganism
• role-playing
  • MIT Assassins' Guild
  • fantasy roleplaying games
• Bicycling
  • League of American Bicyclists
  • The Cyberider Cycling WWW Site
• HAM radio
  • Form 610 (Adobe PDF format)
• trains
• Alpine skiing
• numismatics
• locksmithing
• community service
  • Alpha Phi Omega National Service Fraternity
• tinkering with machines

Silly Stuff

Give me a randomly selected link.

Geek Code

-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.12
GE/S/MU d-(+) s-:+ a C+ UBLUAVHIS+ P+ L+ E++ W++ !N !o !K w !O M V- PS+ PE(+)
!Y PGP+ t !5 !X R+ !tv b+ DI++++ !D G e++(+++) h--- r+++ y++++  
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------

Refer to the Geek Code Decoder Page if you want to decode someone's Geek Code (version 3.12 only).

Fun and Possibly Worthwhile Links

Food

• Restaurants
  • Late Night Food
  • William Chuang's Menus for Boston/Cambridge Area Restaurants
  • ResTERRAnt
  • IncuBeta food page
  • OSF Restaurant Guide
• The Recipes Folder!
• The Beer Page

Humor

• Viola Jokes
• Non-Viola Instrument Jokes
• Internet Comics I read more or less regularly
  • Sluggy Freelance
  • User Friendly
  • Bruno Baldwin
  • Bruno the Bandit
  • Bobbins
  • Goats
  • Helen, Sweetheart of the Internet
  • Mason Darrow, nonprofit lawyer
  • Waiting for Bob
  • Red Meat
  • Doctor Fun
  • Hound's Home
  • Falling Dream
  • Ozone Patrol (on hiatus)
  • Café Angst (ended)
  • The Comic Strip (United Media comics on the WWW)
• Jo's Completely Factual and Not At All Juvenile Guide for Americans Visiting Britain. An amusing commentary on British slang.
• "Guess the Disease" game
• My humor directory (my dumping ground for funny email I receive)
• Random hi-tech company home page. This is an AI program that generates a random company homepage from an archive of buzzwords and images.
• The Bastard Menu
• ASCII Smileys
• Er-Jokes
• The T.W.I.N.K.I.E.S. Project
• Fun with Grapes - A Case Study
• Strawberry Pop-Tart Blow-Torches
• Mark Frank's Humor Page
• Comic Strips served to MIT through ClariNet. (Sorry...these are licensed to MIT only.)
• George Goble's home page, which documents his exploits in lighting a charcoal grill with liquid oxygen
• The Random Page (sites running randomizers on the WWW)

MIT

• MIT Floor Plans
• IHTFP Online Hack Archive

Music and Dance

• The Internet Viola Society
• Digital Tradition Folk Song Full Text Search
• sheet music archive
• Morris and Sword Sides on the Web
• The Mammoth Music Meta-List
• Bow Makers and Bowed Stringed Instrument Makers
• List of Musical Mailing Lists
• New England Folk Concert Calendar
• Ceolas, the home of celtic music on the internet.

Paganism, Magic(k), Mythology, etc.

• Tarot
• The MIT Pagan Students' Group
• Pagan Digest archives (a mailing list based at Carnegie-Mellen University)
• Bibliography of Pagan Books

Recreation

• Yale Speleology Server Home Page
• MIT Caving Club Homepage

Maps and Geography Info

• US Census Bureau Tiger Mapping Service
• Xerox PARC Map Viewer
• MapQuest
• MapBlast
• MIT Digital Orthophoto Browser (aerial photos of the greater Boston area)
• Mass MAPS (Make maps from Massachusetts GIS survey data. Uses Java and JavaScript.)
• Distance Service calculates distance between any two cities.
• Ordnance Survey - Gazetteer of Place Names. This is a search engine that will give the county and map location of any town in England.
• Geography Server by telnet

Weather & Atmospheric Information

• NOAA Geostationary Satellite Photos
  • GOES 8 photos (Eastern US)
    • Water Vapor Image
    • Visible Image
    • IR Image
  • GOES 9 photo (Western US)
    • Water Vapor Image
    • Visible Image
    • IR Image
• National Weather Service
  • Eastern Region
    • Boston Office
      • Boston Forecast
      • Southern New England forecast
• Boston Forecast from The Weather Underground
• Current Weather Maps/Movies
• Weather
• Long Range Weather Predictions from the Old Farmer's Almanac
• Tide predictions for Boston, courtesy of the NOAA Center for Operational Oceanographic Products and Services (CO-OPS).
• Hydrologic Data for Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and the rest of the US

Telephone & Address Lookup

• Area codes
  • area code lookup
  • Bellcore North American Numbering Plan (NANP)
  • Bell Atlantic area code pages
• U.S. Postal
  • ZIP codes by city
  • ZIP+4 Codes
  • Approved Street Suffixes
  • Approved Secondary Unit Designators

Media

• The Internet Movie Database
• Total News
• The High-Tech Reader
• NewsLink
• Online Newspapers list, courtesy of Editor & Publisher magazine. This is the most comprehensive listing I've ever seen of online newspapers, and it's extremely browsable.
• Radio Stations on the Web, courtesy of WMBR, MIT's radio station. This is the most extensive list of radio stations on the web that I've found.
• Other lists of radio stations on the Web
• Fliegel's Web Media Guide. Extensive lists of links to the web sites for several newspapers, magazines, TV & radio stations, as well as lists of internet providers and advertising web sites.
• Canadian Publications Online
• The Electronic Newsstand

Internet Myths, Hoaxes, Urban Legends, Etc.

• Hoaxes, Myths & Urban Legends
  • Department of Energy Computer Incident Advisory Capability
  • Computer Virus Myths page
  • IBM's Hype Alert web site
  • Symantec Anti Virus Research Center Hoax Page
  • Network Associates Virus Hoax Listing
  • Dr. Solomons Hoax Page
  • The Urban Legends Web Site
  • snopes.com Urban Legends Reference Pages
  • Mining Company Urban Legends Page
  • Datafellows Hoax Warnings
• Info on evaluating internet sources
  • Evaluating Internet Research Sources
  • Evaluation of Information Sources
  • Bibliography on Evaluating Internet Resources

WWW & The Internet

• Lists of Internet Providers
  • "The List"
  • Providers of Commercial Internet Access (POCIA)
  • NECI Service Providers
  • Yahoo - Business and Economy: Corporations: Internet Access Providers: Indices
• web-safe colors
• WWW Search Engines
  • Ask Jeeves! is a WWW search engine to which you type a question in plain English. Jeeves translates your question into a search query and comes up with its own answers, as well as pointers to answers from WebCrawler, Yahoo!, InfoSeek, Excite, and AltaVista
  • AltaVista, Digital's famous search engine.
  • Infoseek
  • Open Text Web Index
  • What's New for Commercial Sites Index
  • What's New With NCSA Mosaic
  • Yahoo
• WWW Space Providers
• Email-to-FAX Gateway
• Best of the Web '94 Award Recipients

Reference

• Astronomy
  • Sky Online, an astronomy site
  • Comets Currently Visible (most of which require a telescope)
• The International Guild of Knot Tyers
• A View from the Back of the Envelope is one of the best sites I've seen for developing an intuitive feel for science.
• The Old Farmer's Almanac
• Dictionaries and Encyclopædiæ
  • Merriam-Webster Dictionary
  • ARTFL Project: French-English Dictionary
  • Roget's Thesaurus (via gopher)
  • Webster's Dictionary (1913)
  • Encyclopædia Britannica
    Note: by the terms of MIT's license agreement with Encyclopaedia Britannica, access to these materials is limited to Authorized Users of the MIT community only.
• WebElements is a thorough site with a tremendous amount of information about each element. The site is maintained by Mark Winter at the University of Sheffield, England. If transatlantic bandwidth is slow, you can access a subset of this information at the Boston College Chemistry department's WebElements mirror site.
• College and University Home Pages
• American College and University Home Pages
• Irish and Celtic thingies
• The On-line Books Page
• Roget's Thesaurus
• The American English Dictionary
• CCSO Server - Oxford English Dictionary
• United Nations Gopher Menu
• Fight Against Coercive Tactics Network (F.A.C.T. Net)
• Boston Online
• The first 50,000 decimal places of pi
• The Date of Easter
• U.S. Naval Observatory Astronomical Applications Department Frequently Asked Questions, including Phenomena of the Sun and Moon, Time, Calendars and Historical Events, etc.

Transportation

• The MBTA
• SmarTraveler
  • SmarTraveler Boston
• Massport
  • Logan Airport
  • Tobin Bridge
• Fast Lane transponder program
• E-Z Pass transponder program
• Mass Pike
• American Automobile Association
• The Big Dig (Boston's Central Artery/Tunnel project)
• Boston's Cancelled Highways: highways that were planned in the 1950s and 1960s but never built.
• The New England Transportation Site
• Airlines
  • American
  • Air France
  • Continental
  • Delta
  • Northwest
  • TWA
  • United
  • USAirways
• Flight Tracker, by trip.com

Rescue

• Eltham State Emergency Service, Victoria, Australia

U.S. Government

Executive Branch

• White House
• Department of Agriculture
• Department of Commerce
  • US Census Bureau
• Department of Defense
• Department of Education
• Department of Energy
• General Services Administration
  • GSA Federal Supply Service
• Department of Health and Human Services
• Department of Housing and Urban Development
• Department of Interior
  • U.S. Geological Survey
• Department of Justice
• Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS)
• Federal Bureau of Investigation
• Department of Labor
• Department of State
• Department of Transportation
• Department of Treasury
• Department of Veterans Affairs
• Central Intelligence Agency
• The CIA homepage for kids
• National Security Agency

Judicial Branch

• Federal Judicial Center
• United States Federal Judiciary

Legislative Branch

• Government Printing Office
• House of Representatives
• The Senate
• LEGI-SLATE Gopher Service

Inter-Agency Organizations

• FinanceNet
• Government Information Xchange
• National Performance Review
• Partnerships Against Violence

Other Indexes and Lists of Servers

• Fedworld Information Network (NTIS)
• Index to Government Agency WWW Servers
• WWW Servers (Federal Government)

Other Government Links

• National Aeronautics and Space Agency
  • NASA - JSC Digital Image Collection
• National Science Foundation
• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
• Federal Communications Commission
• U.S. Postal Service
• U.S. Patent and Trademark Office
• National Institute of Standards and Technology
  • Boulder, CO Laboratory
  • Time and Frequency Division

Finding Me

If you want to know whether I'm logged in, zlocate me. If I am logged in, you can use the zwrite gateway to send me an instant message via Zephyr, MIT's instant messaging system.

You can also send me email via the Web.

NOTE: this page is available both via the SIPB WWW server:

http://www.mit.edu/~jcb/

and via MIT's official web server:

http://web.mit.edu/jcb/www/

This page is maintained by Jeff Bigler. It has been requested times since the counter was last reset. (No, I don't know when that was.)

This page best viewed with any browser.

Last modified: Fri Dec 26 23:14:29 2008