Scientists are normal people too.
Do we not have noses on our faces?

Here's a usefull pair for anyone with a mobile phone. O2 and fonetastic.

Both of these sites offer to send free text message to any uk mobile. O2 offer 100 per month and fonetastic offer 5 a day. Of course, both of them will sell you more ;)

Extras.
O2 will filter and forward (the first 100 odd characters of) emails to your phone. You can set it so that it will only accept them from certain people, or if they conatin certain words. However this service does tend to be shut down quite often.
Fonetastc will (in exhange for you haning out in there chat room (or just leaving it open in the background ;} )) give you ringtone, logos, composable ringtones and DIY logos.

Bad points.
Neither of these service is 100% reliable, or very fast (sometimes it will take quite a while for your text message to be delivered after you sent it). So don't use for urgent messages.
O2 frequently times out before you can log in.
Fonetastic is covered with flash, pop up, and on page adverts, that can get really slow down the page loading on a 56k modem.

{edit 12/6/03 | the chat room on fonetastic has been dead for some time}

Thursdays Webcomic (ahem, who said friday)
There's a saying,(at least I don't think I made it up,) "new media does old media, better than old media." This applies particularly well to comic strips. Those comc strips in the papers (such as Peanuts and Dilbert) were funny but could never have long storylines, as they couldn't assume the readers were getting all the strips. However with the arrival of the internet comic artists could put archives of old strips online so the readers could catch up on any missed plotlines. So as well as delivering a punchline a day they can have long running stroy lines.

One of the oldest (and best) webcomics around is Sluggy Freelance. It is one of the few that have been so succesfull that the author has quit his day job and lives off the money he makes from books and merchendice (must spell check this evening).
The current strip may not make a lot of sence so it's probably best to start at the begining and read a few strips each day, you'll soon catch up and be screaming for more.

As Pete says "Is it not nifty? Worship the comic."

(I may write up a description of sluggy and put it here this evening)

Ever find yourself thinking about Britney's 'sweater mittens'? If the answer is no, then be prepared to start, as Liquid Generation take you on strange journey uncovering "The Mystery of Britney's Breasts" (1.47 MB flash file)

When you've seen that, you may find yourself thinking about silicone, and wondering How much is inside? [Apologies for the weak connection ;)]
Well the owners of this site haven't investigated Britney yet but they have looked a; How much paper there is in "a Million Dollars", How much blood there is inside a human, How much porn there is in a print cartridge, and that's just for starters.

Another link comming later, but who can resist the chance to own a supercomputer?
(spotted at The Register)

If you can see this page either you're some kind of freaky Willow type witch or you're using a web browser, like Internet Explorer. I use Mozilla.

Some of the features that the latest version of Mozilla supports are Pop up add blocking, tabbed browsing (multiple pages in one window, each with its own tab), a series of 'managers' for cookies, downloads, images, etc. and even auto image resizing.

The story behind Mozilla afaik is that Netscape released most of their source code in an open source project where anyone could write modifications or attachments. They also pay a team of developers to work on this code. Every time Netscape Navigator is updated now, it is just adding certain features to an old Mozilla stable release.

Some of the features that a browser/newsgroup reader/email reader should have are still owned by Netscape, most noticeably the spell checker. Since Mozilla is developed for Netscape it won't have a spell checker attached. However the open source community have their own page, for their own add-ons. Mozdev. It contains many cool add-ons. Such as; linky and leech (download helpers), optimoz (a mouse gesture interpreter to speed up browsing), the spellchecker, and even some games.

Almost every day I visit the register.
"Offers news, views, opinions and reviews on what's latest in the IT industry. Based in the UK."

Not only does it have the latest news on the Internet, Microsoft's shenanigans, copy protection, and security,
it also has comedy. And all those links were from the last couple of days.

Also check out The world's most dangerous server rooms.

I'll start with the obvious ones and they'll get more and more obscure as time passes.
So what's my home page?
Well it used to be a webmail site, but I found there was a site I used even more. Google.
Not only is it a really great search engine, but it's a good spell checker too.

If you're bored try searching for your and you friends names on Google.

Hints and tips.
1) Use quotation marks around phrases.
e.g. Searching for Rosalind Mansfield returns 8370 results, whereas searching for "Rosalind Mansfield" returns 1.
2) Use - to remove unwanted results.
e.g. If for some bizarre reason you were interested in a Van Diesel movie searching for xxx movie -porn -sex, will return less spurious results.
3) Use + to include common words like of and the.
In order to speed up searches Google drops common words from searches by default, but you can put them back in. You no longer need to do this if the word is part of a phrase in quotes, or the only word searched for.
4) Use the cache links, if a page has changed since Google looked at it, or to highlight your search terms.

The reason Google is such a good search engine is the unique method it uses to rank pages. Unlike earlier search engines it doesn't take into account how often the search phrase is mentioned on a page, or how close to the start of the page it is. It takes each link from another page that points to your page as a vote for it.

Also in a bizarre coincidence, Google bought pyra labs (owners of blogger.com and blogspot.com) after I'd decided to do this site but before I'd set it up.