The Cutting Edge: COMPUTING / TECHNOLOGY / INNOVATION : L.A.’s the Place All Over the Place
In cyberspace, place is supposed to be irrelevant. But in real life, place matters plenty. We actually live in Southern California, after all. So this week we’ll abjure the Australian outback and other far-flung corners of cyberspace to explore on-line resources having to do with life right here at home. And we won’t mention the you-know-who trial once.
Almost everyone who subscribes to an on-line service has access to Internet news groups, so these will be our first stop. And what could be more parochial than the news groups beginning with la? In la.forsale, for instance, I located a second-hand stair-stepper, and in la.general I learned of local places for big men to get clothes nicer than the chocolate brown polyester leisure suits stereotypically identified with big men’s stores.
If you’re interested in restaurants--and who in Southern California isn’t?--stop in at la.eats for discussions of the local cuisine. There’s also la.personals, where postings are almost exclusively by men.
Don’t overlook the ca. news groups, either. In ca.politics, for instance, you’ll soon be able to follow an Internet conference on the Los Angeles riots being conducted by Cal State Long Beach. You can also subscribe to the conference (and contribute to it) by e-mail. For more information, check out the announcement in la.general.
Other ca. groups include ca.earthquake, ca.water, ca.environment, ca.driving, ca.wanted and ca.general. Depending on how you access the Internet, you may be able to get a list of la. and ca. groups by using a wild-card search. For example, from the command line, I use tin -q “la.*” to get a list of groups focusing on Los Angeles. And don’t forget alt.california.
The major on-line services also offer material of local interest. Prodigy partisans who really want Southern California resources should consider TimesLink, the Los Angeles Times’ partnership with Prodigy (and nobody’s making me say that, I swear). They even carry my columns. CompuServe users can check out the California Forum, where material of Southland interest includes discussion, a Hollywood Bowl schedule and many .gifs of Southern California sites.
America Online has a hierarchy of localized news groups beginning with aol.neighborhood that are available only, as far as I can tell, from AOL. The good news is that they include a host of Southern California-specific groups, such as aol.neighborhood.ca.los_angeles.politics and aol.neighborhood.ca.pasadena.marketplace. The bad news is that there is nothing much in these groups.
As for the World Wide Web, there are so many Southland resources that it’s hard to know where to begin. One plausible place is https://lafn.org/, the home page of the LA FreeNet and a gateway to many things Southern Californian. Or try https://www.csun.edu/community/community.html at Cal State Northridge, a handy gateway to matters of community interest. Los Angeles itself has an official home page at https://www.ci.la.ca.us/, including municipal budget highlights, a history of the city Fire Department and more.
Cultural Los Angeles is well represented on the Web. Art lovers will surely want to visit the County Art Museum at https://www.lacma.org/. LACMAweb, as it calls itself, offers works from its collection, schedules and so forth. The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County is at https://cwis.usc.edu/lacmnh/default.html. There’s all kinds of neat stuff here, including “virtual exhibits.”
You can take an interesting tour of Chicano murals in Los Angeles at https://latino.sscnet.ucla.edu/murals/. Or check out https://www.gulker.com/gulker/portfolio.html, Chris Gulker’s Web exhibit of his own impressive Los Angeles photographs. For a list of Los Angeles-area Internet access providers, stop by https://www.primenet.com/~lclee/laoc.html. For Los Angeles weather, visit the terrific page at https://www.tasc.com/icast/weather/lax/wxlax.html. It looks great, loads fast, and delivers what it promises. For traffic, try https://www.scubed.com:8001/caltrans/la/la_transnet.html. If your connection is fast enough, you can get a clickable map; just click the road you want. For more profound discussions of driving in the Southland, visit the news group la.driving.
If architecture and urban planning are your interests, you can see a Web incarnation of Reyner Banham’s 1971 classic “Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies” at https://www.cf.ac.uk/uwcc/archi/jonesmd/la/. Astonishingly, these pages were prepared by a young Briton who schlepped all over town by bus.
The educationally minded have a number of choices. A compendium of Southern California educational institutions is at https://www.cccd.edu/edu.html.
At schoolmarmish https://lausd.k12.ca.us/, you’re warned right at the outset not to try any funny business: “Use of LAUSD-net is a privilege granted to those who follow the Los Angeles Unified School District’s Acceptable Use Policy. Refresh your memory. Read the policy again.”
You can visit the two big local college campuses at https://www.ucla.edu/ and https://www.usc.edu/. Loyola Marymount is at https://www.lmu.edu/.
Earthquakes got you worried? For an impressively large map of local quakes during the last 72 hours, visit https://quake.wr.usgs.gov/QUAKES/CURRENT/los_angeles.html. It’s based on data from the USGS-Caltech Southern California Seismic Network.
AIDS Project LA has an informative set-up at https://www.ddv.com/Oscarnet/Charity/APLA/APLA.html. And for a list of California Web servers, visit https://www-ca.llnl.gov/california/servers.html.
Just because we can browse the World Wide Web doesn’t mean we should forget local computer bulletin board systems. For a list of more than 1,000 of them in Southern California, log onto Mike’s SoCal Corner BBS in Long Beach at (310) 422-7942. Unfortunately, the list doesn’t include much in the way of description, but it is big and it is free.
And finally, Buzz Magazine is on the World Wide Web at https://www.buzzmag.com/buzz/. I checked out their list of the 100 coolest people around, but the site must still be under construction, because no cyberspace columnists were mentioned. There’s a place for submitting nominations, though, and as soon as I get this little macro written, my computer’s going to be awfully busy.
Daniel Akst, a Los Angeles writer, is a former assistant business editor for technology at The Times. He welcomes messages at akstd@news.latimes.com but regrets that he cannot reply to every one.
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E-Mail Route to the Net
For those whose main access to the on-line world remains electronic mail, there is a new edition of Bob Rankin’s marvelous “Accessing the Internet by E-Mail” hot off the presses, or the hard drive or whatever. For a free copy, send e-mail to listserv@ubvm.cc.buffalo.edu. The body of the note should say only GET INTERNET BY-EMAIL NETTRAIN F=MAIL. And don’t include that final period, your normal e-mail signature or anything else. Remember, you’re not talking to Rankin, you’re talking to a computer.
