Jimmy's Favorite Sites

By Jimmy Hammond

Here are a few sites I have discovered to be helpful, informative or interesting. These sites relate to Annapolis, to business or are just worth dropping in for a casual visit. Let’s go surfing and take a look.

I can’t render a professional opinion about the state of the 2006-07 real estate market in Anne Arundel County, but all the information you need to form your own opinion can be found using the data available at www.homedatabase.com. This comprehensive and flexible database created for the MRIS realtors lists all properties in Maryland, Pennsylvania and Virginia, West Virginia and the District of Columbia. The internet site provides the user with a complete display of properties, with photos, descriptions, amenities, virtual tours, and direct links to agent’s and broker’s Web sites, password free. Each real estate listing is accompanied by comprehensive community information, including area demographics and crime data, school information, weather data, online mapping, and comparable sales data and median home values. This service is free to anyone with access to the internet. Just type in the state, the zip code, type of property, price and property features you are looking for, and the software does the rest. This is a great way to shop from home, pre-select properties to visit or compare properties in the county, your community or the states. It looks like a lot to choose from, bummer dude!

There was a great deal of chatter and finger-pointing this past summer concerning the new costs for residential electricity consumption in Maryland under the new deregulation plan imposed on us by the 1999 Maryland State legislature. The new law did make it possible to buy electricity from electricity producers other than Baltimore Gas & Electric, BGE. The process entails searching, analyzing, and switching starts by visiting www.shopforelectricity.com or www.goodenergy.com . These sites are structured to help you compute savings, based on your historical monthly kilowatt-hour (kWh) consumption and the rates from other power generators. If you switch from BGE remember that you may continue to receive a separate charge for distribution, since the distribution part of your electric service was not open to competition.

I was searching several topics on the internet and continually found myself at http://en.wikipedia.org . The site was very informative and nicely structured. I didn’t realize that Wikimedia Foundation Inc. is a non-profit organization with the goal of providing free knowledge to every person in the world. They meet their goal through the maintenance, development, and distribution of free content, now at over one and a half million articles online. Wikimedia provides computing and network resources to create and distribute many reference works including http://en.Wikipedia.org, http://en.Wiktionary.org, http://en.Wikiquote.org, http://en.Wikibooks.org, http://en.Wikinews.org, http://en.Wikisource.org and http://commons.wikimedia.org. Although the site has been victimized by vandalism, properly registered visitors can add, remove, and otherwise edit and change much of the content. This ease of interaction and operation makes a “wiki” an effective tool for collaborative authoring. The term wiki can also refer to the collaborative software itself that facilitates the operation of such a web site, or to certain specific wiki sites, including the computer science site (an original wiki), WikiWikiWeb, and on-line encyclopedias such as Wikipedia. The Wikimedia organization relies on public donations to run its wiki-based projects. Check out “Global Warming” in their search area and you’ll see why they deserve your support.

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