Some Links You Might Want to Check Out

People Whom I Know

An Idle Mind: My friend Ashwin's website. His plan for it has shifted since he registered the domain name, but it's still cool. He has a gallery of his own drawings, as well as a forum in which he and I bemoan the fact that no one else posts to the forums.
Andy's Picasa Albums: These days, this is the closest thing Andy has to a website. It's a bunch of photographs he's taken. I like it a lot. If you're lucky, you might spot a photo of me!
Hanes Theatre was my high school theatre. Lots of good stuff goes on there, from plays to chorus concerts to jazz band performances...it's an all-purpose, all-awesome space. If you ever go there (the place, not the website) you will probably see me, at least in spirit.
Rhodes College: This is where I live and work. It is an excellent school, and you should talk to me about it if you are contemplating which college to go to.

Me, Anyone?

Stephen's Picasa Albums. This is probably the first place I'll put photos, because it's quick and easy to upload things fresh out of my camera from Picasa. I don't have to make thumbnail-size versions of pictures, I don't have to lay them out in a table with witty captions, I don't have to decide which page they should go on, I just click a button and they end up online. The best of these will make it to the on-site Photography section eventually, but it may take some time. Check Picasa often for the freshest photos.
Stephen Rintoul (Facebook). This is my Facebook profile. Evidently, Facebook removed the ability to link non-Facebook people directly to Facebook profiles, so you'll need a Facebook account to see any part of my profile. Furthermore, you'll need to be friends with me to see much more than my photograph.
Stephen's Livejournal: I don't really update this much anymore. It's something I'd like to do, but the time gets away from you and you end up going months at a time between updates. Feel free to keep checking, though, because I suppose at some point I will resume, if only sporadically.

Cool Software (mostly for free)

Inkscape: This is what I use to create vector graphics, such as my Cartoon Stephen image. It has something of a learning curve, but it's a powerful tool.
GIMP stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It's not quite as powerful as Adobe Photoshop, but it's a hundred million times cheaper and does everything I want to do with photos. This is what I use if I need to make detailed edits to photos (otherwise I use Picasa, below).
Picasa: this is what I use to sort, enhance, resize, and publish my photos. It's a handy tool for quick fixes, and for getting photos into a format for posting online, whether on Picasa's image hosting site or on this very website.
Google Earth: everybody's seen this, but it's still awesome. Like TerraServer, back in the day, but better and in color!
I'm typing this webpage on Crimson Editor right now. It's a tabbed text editor with special formatting for HTML (like tags are blue and bold, and comments are red and italicized).
Audacity: a free sound editor. I haven't done a lot with it, but it seems worth investigating if you're into audio.

Sites That I Bookmark, Because They're Awesome

XKCD: The first webcomic I'm hooked on.
Dinosaur Comics: A webcomic I've never been hooked on, but it sometimes makes meaningful observations of
LDraw.org: The website for the excellent Lego CAD standard and all sorts of cool CAD viewers and editors.
The Vibrated Cornstarch Experiment: Physics is fascinating. Watch the movie; it's fabulous.
ReacTable: An awesome musical instrument/synthesizer thing (a "collaborative electronic music instrument with a tabletop tangible multi-touch interface") that some people designed. Watch some of these movies, too. (I learned this at a Rhodes College Society of Physics Students meeting.)
Internet Archive Wayback Machine: This site has been keeping tabs on the World Wide Web since the World Wide Web's infancy. If you remember any really awesome internet sites that aren't up anymore, or if you just want to go back in time and look at old archives of a favorite page, this is where to do it. Be sure to check out early iterations of www.whitehouse.gov, because the beginning of the world wide web was embarassing for everyone.
The National Weather Service. If I'm ever in doubt about what the future has in store meteorologically, I check by here and all my questions are answered. I like the graphical forecast tables.
Everyone should check out the Wikipedia. Sure, you can't count on anything you read in there, but it's pretty much accurate. There are all sorts of cool articles there. If you ever have a whole afternoon to kill and a fast internet connection, I recommend starting with a random article and reading whichever links interest you. I read somewhere that there are many times more articles in the Wikipedia than there are in all of the Encyclopedia Brittanica. I use it for homework sometimes because it's almost certain to have information about whatever I seek, and the articles are mostly well-written. From there, I expand my research with other (reliable) sources to make sure there was nothing completely false in the Wikipedia article.
ControlBooth.com: A site for the techies, by the techies. Finally, an internet community that I can connect with. It's funny. Techies everywhere are the same, even though there is little contact between one group of techies and another. We are all angry, awesome people.
Thinkgeek: A site for (and by) nerds. It has every sort of exciting technological gadget ever made, along with a selection of funny t-shirts and other goodies. If you're ever in the position of buying a gift for me, this is a good starting place (wink).
WDG's HTML 4.0 Reference: I know everyone uses Dreamweaver these days, but sometimes it's good to also know what's going on underneath the surface in your HTML code. That's where the Web Design Group comes in. This guide is a spectacular web development tool, especially for people like me who are learning HTML as they go. Also check out the CSS Reference for help with your Style Sheets.
Webopedia: This contains detailed information about anything and everything computer-related that interests you. Wondering what ASP stands for? Curious about your network architecture? Webopedia can help you out.

Rubik's Cube Links

What else, what else? Oh yeah! Rubik Unbound, the online java cube! Rubik's used to have an official one that would solve it for you, but this is the next best thing. I've spent hours upon hours (when away from my tangible Rubik's cubes) solving online ones. Warning, however: this can be just as frustrating as the real one if you don't know how to solve one. For those of you don't:
Visit PuzzleSolver.com. All of my sources tell me that this is the best solution to the Rubik's cube available. I never learned it, because I use the method in the booklet that comes with the cube, and I don't want to confuse myself. However, I have incorporated a few of the ideas herein to my own method. But if you've never solved one before, this is the place to start. Just click on the Rubik's cube icon.

For When You're Kind of Bored...

For more amazing java stuff, try J*va On the Brain (pronounced Juh-star-va), a site of awesome java games that you can play in your browser and even download to play when you're offline. Very cool.
If you're into retro stuff, try visiting The Flat Earth Society. No one knows if this is a hoax, or if someone really believes that the Earth is flat. It is worth checking out, however, simply for shock value. It may get you thinking, especially for those of you who like to question everything.
While you're holding in questionable scientific beliefs, run over to the Official Website of Flying Spaghetti Monsterism. May His Noodly Appendage guide you toward the truth.
Use the following resource at your own risk. Urbandictionary.com is a completely user-supported dictionary complete with all sorts of hip, current terms. However, many of the defintions are not altogether appropriate for all occasions. Let's just say that it's not very well moderated.