Paul's Bookmarks

Here I can write in the first person! I'm your Webmaster Paul Sank, the chief clerk of NTR. I have a massive, well-organized collection of bookmarks online. To adapt them all to this format would take way too long, so I'll give you just a selection of the ones I find most useful, interesting, or fun. All of the links below were tested in July 2010; two were found broken and were deleted.

Made By Me

• Paul's NTR Twitter Updates

  Here are the most recent tweets:

  
  

• Life-Net News & Radio
  This is my site, consisting of my newsletter and radio show covering poverty widely in a net of many voices. Thousands of hours of my volunteer labor have gone into this, but I started it when modem speeds were 14.4 Kbps (that's kilobits), so you'll find this to be one of the fastest loads anywhere. Very good for dialup, even the audio (play the streaming 16Kbps versions).

• Camden Youth Soccer Club
  Somebody else maintains it now, but I built the site from the beginning, and it still has plenty of my work in it.

• Love Lab
  Yeah, I know, I'm a cranky ol' SOB. Why do you think I felt the desire to learn all about unconditional love? This is a gigantic breakdown on the very definition, 1 Cor 13:4-7.

• Review Memory Verses
  Here are the Scriptures I've memorized since 2003. Quiz me anytime!

• Think On These Things: 25 Lexical Fields of Virtue
  I, like many folks I'm sure, am fascinated by all the many words that represent virtues, from love to patience to fortitude. Here's the attempt I made to catalog them.

• J Paul Sank's Glossary of Linguistics
  Sometimes I read a term and want to know what it means. So why not write 'em down a bit more formally and arrange them alphabetically for future reference?

Practical Stuff

• Time.gov
  Tap this link and you'll know exactly what time it is in the Eastern Time Zone. This is the official US time.

• Yahoo Mail
  I've used this service since 1998. I'm very loyal, despite its flaws. I prefer "Classic", not "Beta".

• NJ Transit
  I use this site mostly for downloading bus schedules. And I receive their email alerts.

Weather

• The Weather Channel Hourly Forecast
  When I'm looking less than a day ahead, this is my preferred service. This link is set for Camden. You, of course, may wish to change the location and bookmark that.

• National Weather Service Detailed 7-Day Forecast
  When I'm planning my week ahead, I go here. Again, it's for Camden, and you may wish to change the location.

Reference

• Dictionary of Affixes
  Much fun to browse, this source tells you the meanings of all sorts of prefixes and suffixes used in English words.

• WordNet
  Strictly speaking, this is not a dictionary. It's more like a thesaurus. But I keep going to it as a dictionary. You can download it, so it's on my own computer that I use it most often.

• Metacritic
  This is the first place I go when I consider spending money on a movie. Enter a movie title and get back a big list of what many critics wrote about it. Thus, you can make an informed decision, taking critical consensus into account.

• Universal Currency Converter
  I don't travel, but I do need to convert currencies sometimes for my newsletter. This is a handy, quick converter that has, so far at least, always had the conversion I needed.

Health

• The Doctor's Book of Home Remedies
  This site has saved me from a few medical bills.

• Sound Sleeping
  Like a wave machine, but it has a whole menu of sounds arranged like a mixing board. You can mix your own customized relaxation soundscape -- whether you prefer something realistic or not.

• When to Call Out Sick
  Please pay attention to information like this! I hate it when somebody comes into work contagious and exposes me to their disease.

• Your Personal Guide to Fasting and Prayer
  This is the best guide I know, yet, to a discipline I'm hoping to establish in my life.

• Pranayama Infocenter
  Who knew there was so much to know about breathing exercises?

Fun

• Paleo-Future
  What a blast, to look into what the future looked like through the eyes of people in the past! Can you say, "futuristic"?

• Apollo 11 Video Library
  I tracked down this site and enjoyed it a lot during the 40th anniversary of the mission.

• NASA Image of the Day
  Spectacular space pictures!

• Getjar
  When I got my first smartphone, I wanted to stuff it with free programs. Years later, I still have the same phone because I have so many programs in it that I don't want to part with. This is where I got most of the programs.

Spirituality

• Textweek
  If you go to a mainline denomination church, this source draws from the same source your pastor drew the week's Scripture readings from: one form or another of the Common Lectionary. Incredibly handy, here you find texts, commentaries, hymn choices, and much, much more, all keyed to what week it is. It's true "one-stop shopping" on the week's lections.

• Torah Readings
  I like to know what the Jewish readings are, too.

• Chapter-by-Chapter MP3 Recordings of the Hebrew Bible
  One of these days, maybe I'll understand more than a few words.

• Sankta Biblio
  The Bible in Esperanto, a language so simple, you can already make good guesses what much of it means.

• The Paris Psalter
  The Psalms in parallel Latin and Old English.

• Wordproject Audio Bible
  Hear the New Testament in a number of familiar tongues.

• Dead Sea Scrolls: Texts
  Finally I found out what the Scrolls actually say. So much is fragmentary, but I'm glad I don't have to miss the occasional gems.

• Early Church Fathers
  One of my favorite sources ever. I go to these writings almost daily, because in my opinion, fundamentalists take the whole Bible out of context. Who better to help us understand the Bible than the people who lived in those times? Who knows the language and diction better than they? I don't follow their interpretations slavishly, but I always want to take them into account in order to keep my thinking centered. Here is where the real fundamentals can be discerned.

• 120 Wise Sayings of the Desert Fathers
  Take a walk on the Orthodox side.

• Convent of Pater Noster
  These folks have a Lord's Prayer fetish, and how I love them for it, because I've never seen so many languages sampled in one place!

• Islamicity: The Holy Quran
  I look into the Quran fairly regularly, just to give it an honest chance to tell me whatever it has to say. This is a good study site.

• True Near-Death Experiences
  It should probably say "Selected" rather than "True". Nevertheless, this is an astounding assortment of near-death accounts.

• Church For All
  Of all the attempts made to replicate the church experience online, this, as simple as it looks, is the one I keep coming back to.

• Traditional Hymns, MIDIs, and Scores
  The best hymns collection I know. So vast, I'll never know half of them. As a former musician, I prefer old hymns to new worship songs; I find the harmonies more interesting and the words more literate.

• The Ecole Initiative
  This site isn't maintained anymore, it says, but who cares? It's still a handy source for a great pile of knowledge of Christian history and biography.

• WTMR
  The radio station that used to air my Life-Net Radio series. They got too strict about their format, but that's what makes them a good candidate for my Spirituality section!

Linguistics

• Heather Marie Kosur's Hub
  Lots of useful basics about language.

• Speculative Grammarian
  The journal of satirical linguistics. The more you know, the funnier it is, of course.

• X-SAMPA
  Optimized for by me for simple cell phone browsers, the X-SAMPA system for representing speech sounds, using nothing more than a plain ASCII keyboard (no fancy symbols).

• The International Phonetic Alphabet: Audio Illustrations
  Here's the place to find out what the sounds represented by the IPA each sound like. Just tap the symbol and hear the sound.

• The Vikings: Write Your Name in Runes
  A basic guide to one of the early Germanic alphabets.

• Omniglot: Writing Systems and Languages of the World
  A very impressive compendium of knowledge about world languages.

• Wulfila Project: Browse the Gothic Bible
  Great if you want to be a "true" Goth. Seriously, did you know there was a Gothic language? Have a look at it here.

• Biblical Hebrew E-Magazine
  A great way to wade into Hebrew without being the least bit overwhelmed.

• Free Online Dictionaries
  Not terribly comprehensive, but useful. Dictionaries all in one place for a number of languages from Afrikaans to Swedish.

  Neurocognitive Linguistics

• Language and Reality
  Because it's a preview, some of the pages are missing. But there's still plenty here of the essential writings of Sydney M Lamb.

• A Stratificational Approach to Making Macaroni and Cheese
  I think the guy who made this meant to make fun of my favorite form of linguistics. But I couldn't help but enjoy this!

• LangBrain
  The official website of neurocognitive linguistics.

Music

• Musinumworld Cell Friendly
  The music of Timothy Doyle, who programs computers to generate music. This site can't be beat for handy background music. The files are tiny, so they download very rapidly, and the pieces are long, so the sum of it is "more music per unit download time". Free. This particular page was made by Mr Doyle at my suggestion that I'd love to have a page that would work easily on my primitive cell phone browser. Years later, it's just as convenient.

• Tune Toys
  At this site, you can easily do your own experiments in computer-generated music.

• Classical Musical MIDI Page
  Many composers, all for free. The MIDI format means you spend less time downloading and more time listening.

• The Qatsi Trilogy
  The trilogy of movies by Godfrey Reggio and Philip Glass.