A few hours of surfing and you end up with a huge history file, and lots of useful links, and even more useless ones.

Some of them end up in your 1000+ bookmarks, whereas others are just lost when you accidentaly close a browser tab you shouldn't have closed -- and consequently forgotten.

This is where this blog posting comes into play -- it gets them saved -- and since I took time to write it down, I might actually remember to check it out later on, and perhaps others will find something interesting from reading this posting.

But first I shall go back a week in time and make a recap of last weeks ISIB (interesting sites I browsed).

I started up at Maddox web page and read his review of the latest James Bond movie. This review had a link to the true story that the James Bond movie was based upon, the Bolivian Cochabama Water Revolt, which occured around the year 2000. (More information about this at PBS).

The PBS Site listed the company Bechtel as one of the culprits, which in turn led me to the article from Wikipedia about this company.  On Wikipedia you can read about other incidents this company have been involved in, such as the Ok Tedi Mine  in Papua New Guinea, as well as a lot more from the 80s,90s and 2000+ where there is even more 'dirt'.

After reading up on that, I somehow ended up reading about the Business Plot (to overthrow the US Government in the 1930s. Then I found a lot of information about Smedley Butler (The USMC General who testified about the plot to the US Senate in 1934). Turns out Mr. Butler wrote a book called 'War is a racket' which seemed like a intersting read, resulting in me now awaiting a book delivery at the doorstep.

And now back to todays early browsing, which may not have had the same inpact as the above, but still interesting and might prove usefull or fun.

Microsoft Research has always been a good web site to visit from time to time. Ever since their "Speech Agent" which appeared sometime in the late 90s (from my recollection) to their release of the full source code for Microsoft Allegiance, still regarded as one of the best RTS/Space games out there.  (unfortunately released near the same time as Starlancer, also from Microsoft and suffering from very few players ) I have always made it a habbit to 'check in' on a yearly basis to the Research web site, to find out whats up.

Well, todays checking resulted in some new discoveries.

- Microsoft Songsmith : This is a niftly applicaton that apparently creates music to your singing. You hook up a microphone to your computer, record it, and the application will make music which you can adjust for feel, such as Upbeat, Slow, etc.

- World Wide Telescope : This seems like a google earth for space, only meant to create presentations/journeys into space. Made up from thousands of land and space based telescope images of the worlds above.

- Image Composite Editor : This application lets you stitch images together to create a panorama image. (Even available as a 64bit app!)

- Autocollage : simple application to make a collage of your pictures from a folder, such as your holliday images or whatever.

Personal note: I use the word 'interesting' too much.