* (approximate ASCII representation of a spider)

Life is like a spider. It is furry and has eight legs.

Welcome to my homepage! I'm going to skip the intro -- you'll figure me out from what you see here. Or not.

A note about the icons on these pages: the small ones in black frames are done by me; I retain all rights on them. If you want to use them, please contact me first. All others are ones I've snarfed off the net; I'm trying to replace them with my own.

Places I visit frequently

My links page.
Google and their excellent map software. People have hacked useful things with the map software, including a pedometer.
Altavista, specifically their Advanced Search page.
Yahoo's maps.
The Detroit News, the largest newspaper in Michigan, puts a daily edition on the Web. Why is this here? I grew up in Michigan.
The Boston Globe, because I used to live near Boston. Their actual website is boston.com.
I now live near Washington, DC, so: The Washington Post print edition (free registration required), available at washingtonpost.com website (some parts require registration).
Probably the best news agency in the United States: The Christian Science Monitor. And no, I'm not a Christian Scientist.

Pages I maintain

Beer Ratings

alphabetic list

My cooking and recipes page.
What More Could IT Need?, a parody of the Letterman sketches from the TV show "The Electric Company".
I am cheese. Are you?
IHTFP is a favorite acronym at MIT. Here are just a few of the translations. As a warning, several of them could be considered obscene, including the standard "I hate this fucking place".
Purity tests of numerous varieties.
Business cards I've accumulated from various places (mostly craft shows).

Hobbies

If you know of a page covering any of these areas that I don't already have, let me know about it.

I brew beer. Surprise, surprise, I also drink beer. However, I don't drink normal American slug-killer - Budmilloors and the like. There's too much good stuff out there to waste my time on that.
- I have my own page of beer ratings that I maintain. I also have an alphabetic list of the beers I've rated.
- Cats Meow is a huge archive of net-accessible beer recipes for virtually any style you might care to brew. It's available through The Brewery, a large information base for home brewers.
- The Real Beer Page has a wealth of beer information and links. It leans toward commercial brewing.
- The Cellar has a useful Forum which includes a brewing calculator.
- The Beer Mapping Project (ab)uses Google maps to show locations of brewpubs, breweries, beer bars, and beer stores in various US cities, as well as regional brewpub and brewery maps.
I've been interested in computers and the law. I've been studying law as a hobby for a while, and recently graduated from law school at Suffolk University in Boston. I'm now trying to get a job at a firm like Powers Phillips. Since I've started school, people have been sending me lawyer jokes. Gee, I wonder why...
- I read about the Security Systems Standards and Certification Act in a Wired News article. I wrote a letter to both Massachusetts Senators opposing the bill.
- I recently used the House Write Your Representative service to write a letter to my Congressional representative, Edward Markey, in response to Rep. Howard Coble's statements on a radio talk show. Rep. Coble's comments included an implication that the internment of Japanese-Americans by the US government in World War II was for the safety of those who were imprisoned! The article (local copy) was published, among other places, on boston.com's national wire feed.
- Useful information about your elected officials can be had at Project Vote Smart.
- Law Guru has an enormous online law library. US Federal and state, international....
- Two good, free law research sites are law.com and lawlinks.com.
- Emory University School of Law has an on-line reference desk covering numerous subjects.
- The Electronic Frontier Foundation is an organization that works to protect on-line rights.
I enjoy cooking -- I find it a good way to relax. I have found one pure cooking reference, The Cook's Thesaurus, and a lot of recipe sites.
- The Cook's Thesaurus is a cooking encyclopedia that covers thousands of ingredients and kitchen tools. Entries include pictures, descriptions, synonyms, pronunciations, and suggested substitutions.
- Baking 911, which has lots of information, tips, and tricks about baking, as well as recipes.
- cheese.com is a good online reference for a wide variety of cheeses.
- My own cooking and recipes page. Right now, it has tips on weighing, and two dessert recipes.
- Allrecipes has a vast collection of recipes, allows you to search by ingredient (woo!) and has a recipe scaling tool.
- Recipes galore at the English Server. Lots of vegetarian recipes, lots of carnivore recipies. The carnivore recipe headings are entertaining.
- Godiva Chocolatier has a homepage. With chocolate recipes. Yum....
- More chocolate information and recipes at Richard Donnelly Chocolates
- William Chuang has a list of recipes.
- Cooking equivalents and conversions at the Cambridge School of Culinary Arts.
I'm also generally interested in food. Aren't we all?
- William Chuang maintains numerous Boston restaurant menus, if you want an idea of what you can eat near MIT.
- Interesting things that have been done to grapes.
- And Pop Tarts.
- And Twinkies.
- Digital, before it got eaten by Compaq (which in turn got eaten by HP), had a lot of fun playing with food at WRL. What came of it was a document titled Characterization of Organic Illumination Systems. The things people will do to pickles....
History and heraldry are two other hobbies of mine, but I've not found anywhere near as much stuff (well, nothing, really) on the Web about either. If anyone knows of links about either, let me know.

Pages and pages of stuff

Neat home pages: Other people's home pages that are cool or otherwise fun.
Useful references: Handy things to have available.
Random nifty links: Links off into the depths of the Web.
High level documents: Pages that have pointers to lots of places. These are good places to start exploring.
Work-related links: You'd think that a cool technology like this would give me more time to play with it before I actually found something useful to do on it....

mjbauer (at) mit (dot) edu