10 Links I Visit To Delay Doing Actual Work

Everyone's got their favorite places to hang out on the web (when they should really be working hard on projects), and I've got a few such links for you to peruse at your leisure:

1. I'm a huge trivia geek - I play a weekly pub quiz in St. Charles every Tuesday night, I run through about 5 crossword puzzles every week, and my wife and kids have had it up to here with how much I quiz them on things that nobody really should know offhand. So when I need a quick trivia fix, I check out the Jeopardy Archive. It's simply THE resource for finding the clues seen on Jeopardy throughout the years. As of this writing, this site's accumulated over 200,000 clues from the TV show!

2. Being a fan of word games of all types, one of my quirky affections is for anagrams, where you take a word or phrase, flip around the letters, and get something that fits. Take the letters in "Clint Eastwood" and rearrange them to get "Old West Action", or switch "dormitory" to "dirty room"... OK, so it's pretty nerdy. But at least the Internet Anagram Server can speed up the process. I've got an 8-year old redheaded son named Cooper, and I can switch "Cooper Denault" into "Cool Red Peanut".

3. At one point in my life, I wanted to be the head statistician for the Chicago Cubs. I did actually work with the televised productions of various Cubs, White Sox and Bulls games for a brief while, manning the "Fox Box" - that's the scorebox you'd see on your TV screen during the game. My schedule's changed a bit since then, but I can still keep up with all of the various baseball arcana and numbers over at the best baseball reference site on the web. If you're a diehard fan of baseball, this site's a must for your bookmarks.

4. I graduated from Southern Illinois University in 1996, and at that time we had a pretty good basketball team. And from 2002-2007, the Salukis went to the NCAA tourney 6 times in a row. They've fallen back a bit since that great run, but I still visit SalukiTalk.net quite a bit, as it's the premier forum for Saluki fans of all sports.

5. Most guys my age grew up playing video games on the Atari, Commodore 64, Nintendo, etc... and it's nice that I've got two kids, so I can keep buying video games. For them, of course. Here's a great game rankings site that'll make sure you get only the best for your little ones.

6. So, what's your favorite movie? Really, if you had to make a list, what would you come up with? At flickchart, the more movies you rank, the better and more rounded your personal list will get. Flickchart simply gives you two movies, asks you to pick the one you like better, and you just keep repeating that same process. It keeps a personal list for you and will also update the ones you haven't seen yet into another nice list.

7. As a videographer, I have to track down certain songs or soundtracks from time to time, and I've come across a nice video to audio converter. Say you come across a YouTube video where you'd really like to take the audio from it and convert it into an MP3 file. At this site, you can do that. Many other formats are available for converting here.

8. Even though I'm older than the typical college student, I still like keeping up with all of the newer music, movies, etc. One blog that I read that helps me stay informed of current pop culture is USA Today's Pop Candy, written by Whitney Matheson. She describes her blog as, "...cult movies, comic books, indie rock, sci-fi, '80s greats, sweet links, general weirdness -- this is all the stuff of Pop Candy. I write about what I love in pop culture, and I try to get to it before everyone else dives in, chews it up and spits it out." I'm able to stay aware of a LOT of pop culture thanks to Whitney's site.

9. I mentioned earlier that I play pub quiz every week in St. Charles - McNally's Pub, to be precise. Over the years, I've gained the nickname of Death while playing there, because every week I name our team after a recently passed dead celebrity. Some winners have included "Michael Jackson Did Look A Little Pale", "Hangin' With Saddam", and a personal favorite of the golfing crowd, "Byron Nelson At Six Under". But now it's come to the point where I need to come up with something every single week, so when I'm stumped I head on over to Stiffs.com for some truly puntastic titles.

10. When the weather gets rough, and you're looking to find just the right radar map online, click over to the Weather Underground folks. No, not THAT Weather Underground political deal... this one's all weather, and it's got a great "WunderMap", where you can enter your exact location and it'll show you what's coming your way.