Informed Decisions

If you really want to take advantage of the internet, you need to have the following things bookmarked. These are sites that provide unbiased information about things that affect you daily, where a wrong decision can cost you time or money. I won't claim that all these links are the end-all reference in their category, but if you know of some that are better, please share. I won't list all the obvious resources, like news, weather, maps, and shopping, but rather the ones you might not know about.

• rottentomatoes.com -- Never waste two hours of your life watching a cruddy movie again. This site collects and combines ALL reviews of every movie released in the past decade or so, to create a single score from 0-100. You're not making a decision based on one reviewer's opinion, but on the average opinion of all professional reviewers. You can make allowances for your "cutoff point" (I usually will not go to the theater to see anything below 75%), but if a movie gets below 30% on the TomatoMeter, you can be pretty sure it's a stinker. The main thing I like about this site is that I'm not being guided by one person's opinion, but by the aggregate opinion of lots of people who have each seen and reviewed lots of movies.
• imdb.com -- Once you've seen a movie, or while you're watching it, if you're wondering where you've seen that actor before or what sort of trivia is floating around about the movie, this site is your best reference. Besides being able to browse the cast list, click on an actor's name and find out where I've seen them before, I particularly like the "trivia" and "goofs" links.
  
• en.wikipedia.org -- This is a community-maintained online encyclopedia that has information about anything you can imagine, much more so than any printed encyclopedia. Because anyone can edit it, you should treat its information with a small grain of salt. But I have found it to be just as reliable as any other online data source.
  
• accuweather.com -- Weather forecasts on TV or in the newspaper simply cannot be accurate to your location, because they are published for a much wider audience (everyone in the area). However, if you bookmark a good local or regional weather radar site, you can get up-to-the-minute animated radar maps that actually show the clouds moving through your area, color-coded to how likely they are to dump rain on you. Once you locate your place on one of these maps, you can estimate to within 5 minutes when rain will arrive and when it will move on. There is no way you'll ever get this level of accuracy from TV or the paper, because they can't broadcast info for every spot in the area, 24 hours a day.
• groups.google.com -- Anyone who hasn't lived under a rock for the past eight years already knows that you can find anything on the web with Google. What you might not know is that you can tap into the collected wisdom of years of online information exchanges between individuals. For example, go to this site and type in the model number of something you own, plus the word "problems", and you'll see all the times that anyone has asked or answered questions about problems with that item. These information exchanges are called "usenet newsgroups", or just "news groups". You can create a free account through Google to post messages here, but I mostly use them to find answers to questions other people have already asked.