October 2000 || Volume 01, Issue 03

Off My Back Everyone Please!

Listen up everyone: here's the generic answer to everyone who wrote indignant emails to me because I missed out on their favorite Mac website: listen buddy, listen sister, I gave ya a very clear warning that I wasn't trying to give a complete list of Mac sites. I told ya that these were just going to be the sites that I find useful, mostly out of habit. But if you only want a list of your own personal favorites, just make your own set o' bookmarks and stay out of my hair. Please.

Well, this month I've been revisiting some sites I haven't been to for a while, and maybe I'll change my mind and (more importantly) my bookmarks. First, I can condense my list quite a bit. SiteLink is a site that puts together most of the daily Mac news and special offers from lots of other places. There are headlines from MacCentral, software updates from Version Tracker, special prices from DealMac, and about the longest list of Mac-centric links I've seen anywhere. Note to some of my correspondents: look at this list, and consider all its links my personal recommendation to you. When you've got it memorized, you have my personal permission to send me more complaints about missing sites.

www.sitelink.net

Another good site is MacNN, slogan: ReadMe First. Good slogan, good idea. MacNN has up-to-the minute Mac headline articles, many of which are different from what you'll see on MacCentral, for example. On the whole, the articles are less oriented towards financial and business stuff, and more towards items that Mac users are interested in. Y'know, freeware stuff, and the like. I like it: it reminds me of the Mac old days. And on several days when I checked, a good number of the items on the main page were about topics I couldn't find elsewhere that day. Lots of good forums as well, reviews of products rarely reviewed elsewhere, and plenty of other links too.

www.macnn.com

More News and Talk Radio Stations

Several readers expressed surprise that I hadn't mentioned any Canadian radio stations in last month's article. Well, I'm a Canadian myself (ex-Brit), now living on a tiny Caribbean island, so the topic is a current one for me. I want to stay in touch with things back home, and the National Broadcaster CBC on the Internet is one way I do it [Editor's Note: Why can't those Canadians just give in and get US news like everyone else? :)]. CBC runs stations in every part of Canada that carry local or regional programming before 9 a.m. and from noon to 2 p.m. The rest of the time, it's national programming, and it operates to a very high standard indeed. Internet sites are pretty extensive as well. Maybe the best page to begin is this one:

cbc.ca/audio.html

For people biased against public radio, there are private stations as well that are well worth listening to.

In Vancouver, two very lively stations compete hotly with each other. Especially hot are their morning and afternoon shows when people are driving into town and back out again into the suburbs: 6-9 and 4-6 Pacific. You can listen to both over the Internet, although you'll do better with (excuse me please, I'd rather not say it either) Windows Media Player. The first is a relative newcomer, using Windows Media Player only:

www.news1130.com

Then there's the longtime classic, CKNW. It has the unspeakably prejudiced (but sadly popular) Rafe Mair as the morning host. Listen any time after 11 am to avoid him.

www.cknw.com

Mair's counterpart in Canada's capital, Ottawa, is the even more objectionable Lowell Green. Avoid this station between 9 and 12 Eastern, but at other times it's not too bad if you don't mind a very high hype:content ratio.

www.cfra.com

A better news station is from Montreal:

www.cjad.com

And finally another longtime classic station, and one which makes a convincing attempt at full and unbiased coverage of local, national, and international news:

www.cfrb.com

So that's it for this month, and that's it for the time being for radio stations -- unless readers have some good suggestions for me to check out. Otherwise, watch out in November for some mostly-non-US newspaper websites.

Dennis Field - dennis@macosjournal.com
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