Where Did I See That…?: www.findarticles.com - Search over 300 publications to find articles on the topics that interest you.

Free Is a Good Price: www.nzlist.org/user/freeisp - This site tracks the latest developments in free Internet service in the U.S., and offers reviews, advice, and links to ISPs and lots of other freebies.

Ditto!: www.completelyfreesoftware.com/index_all.html - Everything listed on this site is completely free, completely functional, do not time out, and are for DOS and Windows.

True Virtual Networking: www.uk.research.att.com/vnc - Access another computer from any computer on the Internet and from a wide variety of machine architectures. It’s also free under the GNU license, and works like a charm.

For You, It’s Free: www.payneconsulting.com/freestuff.htm - Lots of free Microsoft Office tools, including an expense form template, VBA code cleaner, footnote assistant, and much more.

Clean Your Docs: www.payneconsulting.com/MetaDataAssistant - A free tool to clean the metadata from your Word documents—things like your name, file paths, and other possibly confidential information. Lets you specify what information to remove, and includes many customizing options.

Office File Viewers and Converters: officeupdate.microsoft.com/Articles/viewerscvt.htm - Microsoft’s tools to convert Office documents among various formats, and to view in their native format.

More Free Things: www.freewareandstuff.com - Tons of links to free software, freebie sites, webmaster resources, etc.

Distance Learning Demystified: www.degree.net - This site, owned by Ten Speed Press (publishers of What Color Is Your Parachute?), offers information and news about various options for getting a degree in a non-traditional fashion. There are guides, books, and links to schools.

Improve Your Writing: www.write101.com - A free online writing course and several tutorials help you improve your writing skills.

How’s the Weather Up There?: antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/0011/earthlights_dmsp_big.jpg - This is a fantastic image of the earth at night (see small sample below), taken from the space station. Pan up and down, left and right, and see where the population centers are by the concentration of lights.

Writing for the Web: www.emilyv.com - A great site for freelance writers, run by an actual freelance writer. Lots of excellent advice, along with links to many indispensable resources.

Track Satellites and Space Stations: www.heavens-above.com - This site lets you pick your location from a huge database, or input the longitude and latitude yourself, then calculates a star chart for you for any visible (with the naked eye) satellite for your location. The database includes Sacramento and some neighborhoods and neighboring communities.

Where No Man Has Gone Before…: www.galacticsurf.com - A spectacular space and science portal, with links, ratings, and brief descriptions of sites devoted to space missions, cosmology, particle physics, space exploration, astronomy software, photo galleries, sites of the month, etc.

Plastic News: www.plastic.com - A new type of news site, Plastic calls itself "a live collaboration between the Web's smartest readers and the Web's smartest editors, a place to suggest and discuss the most worthwhile news, opinions, rumors, humor, and anecdotes online."

Dark Side of the Moon: www.lpi.usra.edu/research/lunar_orbiter - The photographic atlas of the Moon, consisting of photos taken from the lunar orbiter. Hundreds of high-resolution digital photos.

Birds of San Francisco: www.wildparrots.com - The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill documents a flock of wild parrots that live in San Francisco. Stories, sighting reports, sounds, photos.

The Triumph of Life: www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/triumphoflife - The companion Web site to the Nature television series about evolution. You’ll need the Flash plug-in and the free RealPlayer for some of the videos and interactive portions.

Camping with the Sioux: www.nmnh.si.edu/naa/fletcher/fletcher.htm - Alice Fletcher’s 1881 field work diary of her daring six-week venture with the Plains Indians.

Degree Confluence Project: confluence.org - An attempt to visit every place in the world where longitude and latitude lines intersect at exact integers, and to photograph the spot. Over 11,000 remain to be found, and volunteers are requested. The goal is "an organized sampling of the world."

Tom Anderson spends entirely too much time surfing the Web and has only this column to show for it. Send him your suggestions for Web sites to visit.