(If you would like to explore the Middle East, investigate the possibilities of making that exploration with my friend Dr. Phillip Stanley at San Francisco State University.)

To hear from students with ties to other countries, take a look at either or both of the magazines produced by Patrick Leong's students, The Many Faces of Diablo Valley College and Las Nuevas Voces '98, with stories by our students who bring a wonderful cultural variety to the college

Perhaps you'd like to see what the DVC Faculty Senate has been up to, with the ever-scintillating minutes of its many meetings and its-even-more-scintillating Forum.

What sorts of information can you find on the WWW about community colleges? Jim Locke's homepage at the College of Marin is a good place to start.

You keep running into McKinneys on the World Wide Web, you say. Of course you do. McKinneys are flexible, adaptive, and willing to try new technology. One son, Daene, teaches at the University of Texas (specializing in groundwater, certainly a growth industry) when he's not in Kazakhstan or Uzbekastan working on, you guessed it, a water project. Another, Devin, is in Italy, working on a variety of activities, some of them web-related, others tango-related. Another, Erin, runs Grace Street Caterers, declared one of the Bay Area's ten best last year by the SF Chronicle. (For prices and information: email gracest@pacbell.net). You might even get a free sample tuna tartare ice cream cone.) A fourth son, Colin, is involved in computer support (computers needing all the help they can get) in St. Paul, Minn.

But enough of the mundane (although those ice cream cones are certainly not earthbound); why not visit homepages, some spectacular, dedicated to authors, ranging from Jane Austen to William Faulkner.
 
If you're new to the Internet, you might like to look at a primer (growing more outdated by the year) which will give you enough information to hold you until you start buying Internet books. At the very least, find out about Netiquette, Internet behaviorial do's and don'ts. And if you're new to email, I've posted a guide.

On the other hand, you may be a fun-loving sort who just wants to read some terrific short stories. Maybe you like dogs; then you could be interested in some dog stories and poetry.  Okay, no dog poetry for you; you're a people poetry person. If you'd like something longer, and you're fond of comic Freudian monomythic adventures, you might want to take a look at Deedle Dumpling, a novella.

Acting on the advice of virtually nobody, I've pasted up a picture of myself for you to admire. The cute one is my grandson, Teague, several years ago.

Well, it's been terrific visiting with you, but some of you are shuffling your feet, muttering something about "links." Certainly, no respectable web page can survive without offering to send people somewhere even more interesting. Here are some sites I've stumbled across:

Magazines, newspapers, and CNN

CNET's newspage

The New York Times

Time

Computer Mediated Composition Magazine

The San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner

The British Electronic Telegraph

The Atlantic Monthly

Salon

Slate, Microsoft's political magazine. Bill Gates is now giving it to us, after seeing circulation drop by 90 per cent when he tried to charge $19.95 a year. As one Internet maven pointed out, "People will only pay for pornography or stock market reports on the Internet."

Arts and Letters Daily , a constantly changing guide to, as its title suggests, arts and letters on the web, ranging from book reviews to polemics about writers, thinkers, and other eccentrics, with a long list of links to literary criticism, news services, news magazines, and columnists

Kairos (a journal for teachers of writing in webbed environments)

The Christian Science Monitor

American Journalism Review (The AJR maintains an extensive list of online newspapers, magazines, and television networks.)

The Matt Drudge Report (Drudge provides links to AP, UPI-Reuters, and direct links to the nation's leading political columnists.)

CNN

PBS

Guides to the Internet

Liszt, the comprehensive list of e-mail discussion groups

Metacrawler, which searches all the other search engines, weeds out duplicate responses and produces a report

Fast

Search

 

Alta Vista: Search  the Web  Usenet  and Display the Results  in Standard Form  in Compact Form  in Detailed Form 

Go Network (Infoseek)

Excite

Magellan

Search engines that search other search engines:

Savvy Search searches nineteen other search engines, including Yahoo, Lycos, and niche indexes like the Internet Movie Database, the Virtual Software Library, and DejaNews.

WhoWhere? searches for email addresses.)

Spy Hop (beta version) searches online newspapers

Research-It

(An incredibly handy one-stop universal research tool: dictionaries (including rhyming and pronouncing, thesaurus, translator, French conjugator, acronymns, biographical dictionaries, Bartlett's Quotations, maps (USA - including USA city street maps - and world), telephone books, a currency convertor, stock quotes, zip codes (including package tracking for Fed Ex), and Liszt (mentioned earlier), the place to find out about email discussion groups.

RefDesk

Links to search engines, doctors (if class has given you a headache or other unexplained pain), newspapers/newsmagazines, zip codes, sports, shopping, and just about everything else on the web.

Stuff for writers (and teachers of writing)

A collection of homepages about writers, ranging from Jane Austen to Mark Twain (feel free to send me other links)

Daedalus

The Writery, University of Missouri

The Alliance for Computers and Writing

Food

The Electronic Gourmet Guide

Terrific vegetarian recipes

Cairn Terriers

Cairn Terrier Homepage

The Library of Congress

The Library of Congress Homepage

C-Span Schedule, Documents

C-Span (The schedule for C-Span's coverage of Congress, as well as this remarkable channel's schedule when all those talking heads have gone somewhere else, including panels, dinners, testimonials, and a wild variety of other events, including the reenactments of the Lincoln-Debates and the trial of Hamlet for the murder of Polonius.)