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A Rant and some Games: A small contest of sorts

© Wayne Dawe

(Note: The Internet is a dynamic place and web sites can come and go quite quickly. This is one of my older and some of the links may not work anymore. If you find that this is the case I invite you to look at some of my more recent articles. My links section has my favorite links from past articles and is checked regularly for non working links. Wayne)

Ack! Where has the week gone, my editor is going to kill me because this article is behind deadline. What to write about...maybe I should just rant.

I was at the beach this weekend (notice my subtle continuation of the beach theme) and I saw something that I found a bit disturbing. One guy had brought his kids with him and them proceeded to use the shovel (big metal one, not little plastic one) to redirect a small stream that was draining into the lake to run along the beach. He dug out a trench along about 30 metres of beach and flooded an area 1 to 3 metres wide with the runoff from this river. The next day he came back and did it again. What ever happened to just going to the beach and enjoying the water, waves and sand? He wins my award for nature abuser of the week. Anybody else have a nomination for next week?

I feel much better now but I suspect that you, my gentle reader, are wondering what the heck your doing here if I'm just going to rant and rave this week. Sooooo onward and upward we go with my Web picks of the week. This week's picks were primarily culled from the newsgroup misc.kids.computers.

One extremely cool site is JavaSaw - the Java jigsaw. The pictures on the jigsaws are mostly abstract patterns but they are safe for kids. Different levels of difficulty make this game interesting for kids of all ages. Little Bits Multimedia Downloads page has some amusing edutaining games that you can download and try out. www.familygames.com has some news games that I think you'll enjoy, this is the same company that created the boffo hit game Santa's Secret Valley which is still worth a look if you haven't seen it yet. Familygames also has a program which mixes up fairy tales to help improve reading vocabulary, it may sound kind of dry but this game is much more fun in person. The final link of the week is SpaceKids, an amusing game. The demo can be downloaded from the Spacekids web site.

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