Universal Donor's Reference Page

I'm collecting below a crapload of useful links for kindred peeps with an obsessive need to look shit up. It's also great for people who like to see things clumped into lists. I love lists. I love references, especially actual reference books. Maybe at the bottom of the page I'll make a list of all the books on my reference book shelf at home! Oh ma gah what an unmitigated geek! See, I'm writing this introduction under the possibly ludicrous assumption that somebody other than me might read it and/or use it. Ever. But see I know that 95% of its hits will just be me. It's all for me. And still, here I am, hammering away at the keyboard like an idiot, tappita-tappita, postponing the actual creation of the page, which is gonna require a lot of HTML and pasting of URLs and checking everything to make sure it works (QA) and various other acronym-related projects (ARPs).
     Even if you come to this page and you don't get turned on by reference links or lists, this page could be interesting for other reasons. Like, um.... Well. I'll put a picture of some tits on the bottom. People like tits. (see fig 1.) Also, this page could be fascinating for any grad students who are writing a thesis about me, as it affords a rare glimpse into my deeper, hidden, personal side. As they sort of say, I'm "letting my geek flag fly." Ugh. What an awful thing to sort of say. My point is only that the blog is a place where I express my opinions, but rarely my feelings. Creating this page is like letting you, the grad student, rifle through my desk drawers – which I'm sure you'll agree that you can learn a lot more interesting stuff by ransacking a subject's desk than you can in three hours of formal interview.
     Anyway, I like reference, and if you do too, you shouldn't be ashamed and you are welcome here, you geeked-out hunk of losermeat. Hey, Someday maybe you too will paid to come up with pages and pages of trivia questions for a pub quiz, and then you can laugh at all the people who laughed at you for loving reference books!

NOTE: this page is still in its infancy and makes no claims of completeness or even utility. PLEASE send me comments, suggestions, and especially more links to great references (jeremybroomfield@gmail.com)

The Wikipedia — an online encyclopedia written by users
Encarta — a traditional encyclopedia site
World Atlas.com — A great online atlas with an unbelieveable number of different maps
CIA World Factbook — sort of a combo encyclopedia/atlas
Google Maps — The Best domestic map and directions site. A million times better than MapQuest or Yahoo Maps.

All Music Guide — A hugely comprehensive music site with reviews and essays
IMDB — Internet Movie Database
Last weekend's movie grosses — from IMDB
All Movie Guide — just like its brother above, a hugely comprehensive movie site with reviews and essays
TV Tome — an IMDB-style reference for television shows

Take a short 68-Q Myers-Briggs personality test — then use the Wiki entry on MBTI to analyze your results in depth
!!! Talk to a Human Customer Svc Rep — The IVR Cheat Sheet lists the magic button sequence that gets you a human at 100+ common customer service numbers
Snopes — the Urban Legend reference. Use it to determine if email forwards are hoaxes (hint: they always are).
Dead or Alive? — Up to the minute info about who's dead or not.
IP Locator — type in someone's IP address, it tells you where they are within 20 feet
area code listing, by number — Got a mystery number? This page tells you the location of every area code.
ANACs for every area code — ...and while you're at it, here's a silly phreaking reference for nostalgic geekwads (in NYC, try dialing 958 to see this tech in action).
Current Air Traffic Map — An image of all the flights currently in the air over the U.S. (also below under travel)
Pub Quiz Help — a widely varied reference for trivia buffs. I'm not sure it would actually help you win a pub quiz, but it might help you create one.
Ballparks.com — A bizarre, huge ref to hundreds of stadiums for many sports. The left-hand site navigation is weirdly small and difficult, but worth the effort
ChordFind — generates guitar chord diagrams on demand. See also keyboard and bass chords.

dictionary.com — also has a thesaurus
Online Etymology Dictionary — Get your word origins here
The Phrontistery — A metareference page (like this one!) all about words & language. For big word nerds.
Urban Dictionary — A user-created online slang dictionary
Babel Fish Translation — You've probably seen this. Translates text from lots of languages to lots of others, with varying, but often amusing, results.
ClichéSite.com — find the correct cliché, its source, and – thankfully – a substitute
Figures of Speech — from Wikipedia, a list of schemes and tropes with examples.
Logical Fallacies — Memorize this list! Even if you can't actually use it in real life to shut down blowhards, it's important to know this stuff.
Toasts of the world — learn to say "Cheers" in Basque, Esperanto, or Suomi, you souse.
Alphabets! (all pages wiki): Phonetic • Greek • Hebrew • Arabic • Japanese • ASL • Morse code • radio code • ASCII

Drugs.com Pill Identifier — describe that mystery pill you found in your mom's purse to find out if it'll get you high.
NYC DOH's Restaurant Inspection Information — check your favorite diner's latest health inspection score (not for the squeamish)
The Tuna Calculator — Tells you much tuna is safe to eat per week per pound of manflesh
Toxins in Cosmetics — Search for your favorite products to see which poisons you're rubbing into your flesh, hair, or teeth!
FoodNews.org — A guide to pesticides in produce (offers a printable wallet card for portable horror)

Weather.com
The actual Time — the official U.S. Time
The MTA's Subway Advisory Page — Check and see if the G line is under construction again
Windows keyboard shortcuts — the mouse can be so inefficient. Save time with keycuts. "Key cuts." I made that up just now!

Orbitz • Expedia • Travelocity • Priceline •
FlightView's flight tracker — Check the status of any domestic flight
Nationwide Airport Delays — a map of the major U.S. hub airports, color-coded by length of delay, if any.
Current Air Traffic Map — An image of all the flights currently in the air over the U.S.
Worldwide Ship Tracker — Just like the above link, except for sailors -- it shows where all the big ships are right now.
NYC DOT's Alternate Side Parking Calendar
JetBlue's TV Guide — Tells you what's on the seatback TV so you don't have to channel-surf in midair.

Acronym finder — You know what SCUBA stands for. But do you know what LASER Stands for?
The "Core Rules" of Netiquette — Not the best list ever, but a good intro.
FileExt — give it a PC file extension, it'll tell you what application created it. Yawn.
The Utah Baby Namer — a minimally useful but pretty amusing site about Mormon first names.
Jamaica [sic] Proverbs — Folksy island wisdom along the lines of: "Cow read dem law in dem belly." Uh-huh.
Steve's Infinite Jest Utilities Page — Chapter thumbnail list, footnote locations. Cute and useful

Book lists:
     Time's Best 100 Novels since 1923
     Modern Library's 100 Best Novels
     Friendswood Library 150 Novels — concatenates 4 different book lists
Movie lists:
     FilmSite.org — Great mega-meta-movie list site
     EW's top 100
     IMDB User's top 250
Miscellaneous lists made by acronyms:
     IGN's Top 100 Video Games Ever
     AME's Top 40 Magazine Covers since 1965
     Time's Top 100 People of the 20th Century
     MOH's top 100 April Fool's pranks ever
     AR's Top 100 American Speeches
     CC's 100 Greatest Standup Comedians
Other Meta-Top Lists:
     City-Data.com — Metalist of statistics lists about US cities (pop., age, income, area, elev., etc. )

The following links are particularly useful for people who are creating a website, either for the first time or the twentieth.

HTML Popup — onscreen HTML reference
special characters codes — I use it all the time

CSS Specifications — the big momma reference
property index — the nitty grit

Visibone big pretty color chart
Visibone kiloChart big
Websafe Hexidecimals Popup
Color Lab — for comparing a set of colors for design

Visibone
Webmonkey
Lynda — I haven't actually tested this, but somebody mentioned it positively.
A Brief Introduction to Unix Permissions — CHMOD 755! Yeah baby!
ISO 8859 — Everything you wanted to know about this character encoding standard! Heh. I love this page and its chart.
bodytag — not a reference at all, but I didn't knwo where else to put this. It makes a link out of URL for a media file, like embedded ones, so you can "save target as..."