Ken Clark - Webtour 99 - 5th March 1996
Do you want to come home to a blazing fire? Well, buy a holiday home in Wales! If you want to live there then learn the language. Impress your friends and neighbours with words from the Welsh language. A new on-line course introduces the basics of the language and currently runs to seven lessons with more planned for the future. A searching lexicon and spell checker are also provided for users with browsers that support forms. The only question is why is it in a subdirectory called fun?
http://www.cs.brown.edu/fun/welsh/Welsh.html
Talking of Wales the Welsh Tourist Board now have an official website. It provides all sorts of information of interest to people coming to, or thinking about coming to Wales from basic information to how to organise a holiday to Wales.
http://www.tourism.wales.gov.uk/
Worried about smut on the net? Then eXonizer, a tongue-in-cheek response to the passage of the Communications Decency Act in the US, proves to illustrate the fears of many Internet users. From eXoniser you can type in any URL and the service will access the page, check it for obscenities and return you the "cleansed" version. Click on the censored tags to find out why the words have been removed and also send e-mail to politicians involved if you feel so inclined.
http://www.global-image.com/eXonizer/
The most famous rodent since Rattus Norvegicus is now on the Web. Walt Disney has unveiled Disney Online, a comprehensive Web site that covers much more than just Mickey Mouse. Disney, as one of the world's largest media companies, has divisions covering television, music, travel and much more and they are all on-line. Children, of all ages can also find interactive games, puzzles, stories, downloadable files and more here.
http://www.disney.com/
Talking of Mickey Mouse, European Passenger Services, the British partner in Eurostar, the cross-Channel rail service of Belgian, French, and British national railways, has a newly revised home page. You can find out information about the service, timetables, fares and special offers, though probably not about cancellations and unit failures. Several different language versions are available for speakers of English, French, German, Dutch, and Japanese!
http://www.eurostar.com/eurostar/
If problems configuring Windows 95 to access your Internet account drive you to drink then a pioneering new Internet service designed by Manchester based communications specialist Walsh Simmons could be the light at the end of the tunnel. The company has created the first ever virtual off-licence on the Internet for Wine Cellar, the high street specialist wine store.
The new three dimensional Wine Cellar on-line store will allow customers to navigate their way through a high street off-licence, which has been recreated using photographic images seamlessly put together to appear as "real-time" 3D video footage. Customers can browse through the shop's extensive range of wines, beers and spirits, and find detailed visual and written information on over 750 different product lines, including on screen images of an individual bottle, or pack, and its label.
http://www.winecellar.co.uk.
Maybe your problems just make your blood boil. Well you are in good company. The National Blood Service has launched the first ever Blood Donation Information pages on the World Wide Web. The pages are designed to both inform and capture the interest of would be blood donors, giving information on the history of the Service (now in it's 50th year), the donation process and the uses that are made of blood donations.
Also included is an easy to use enrolment page, which, at the click of a button is E-Mailed direct to the Bristol Centre for registration on to the computerised donor information system.
The National Blood Service is responsible for collecting 10,000 units of blood a day. Blood and Blood Products play an important role in the treatment of many illnesses and without this vital ingredient many operations would not be able to go ahead. Living in cyberspace is fine but if you live in the real world as well enrol today, the next bus might well have your name on it!
http://uk-commerce.com/bloodservice/
If the fashion business is down your catwalk then the new edition of the UK's hottest on-line fashion magazine takes readers on an expedition through Manga, Japanese cartoon art, and boasts Michiko Koshino as the featured designer. Provocatively titled f.uk, there's also a guide for larger ladies, a look at what designers are hiding in their own wardrobes, a dip into a flotation centre, a chance to look into the future of fashion with Intelligent fabrics, and as they say, much more.
http://www.widemedia.com/fashionuk/
If, sitting at your PC you feel superior, important or significant its time to get some serious perspective. This NASA site enables you to ponder endlessly on the vastness of space and pick up some good backdrops at the same time! A different picture of somewhere in the cosmos is available here every day. It's a really interesting place to come back to regularly, not just for the stunning and fascinating images, but also to read the explanations of the image written by professional astronomers.
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html
If you can stand the pun in the URL (open.gov.uk !!) the UK's contribution to the G7 group of nation's Global Inventory Project provides a searchable index to superhighway projects currently underway in the UK and other G7 nations. The database is available to those carrying out projects to enter their details and to check if others are pursuing similar goals and thus cut down on parallel development. Well if it keep down taxes (some hope) it gets my vote.
http://www.open.gov.uk/govoline/niphome.htm
Bored, Listless, No one to write to, no e-mail. Well get your e-mail address registered on Bigfoot, the global directory of e-mail addresses. With over three million entries currently on the system you should find some pen-pals, or is that web pals? Bigfoot claims it has the most e-mail addresses available in one place and who could argue with that?
http://bigfoot.com