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Career: Even the Geeks don’t know all the answers - Geek Interview

http://www.geekinterview.com

Geeks have it hard, they usually have technical interviews where they are expected to know everything. Well, even the smartest ones sometimes get stumped. It doesn’t mean they don’t know it, they just got caught off guard. Well, GeekInterview is ready to rescue the geeks and get them the job they deserve. GeekInterview provides job interview questions and answers to those difficult technical questions. Visitors and registered users can post questions and answers to perplexing, brain busting, and downright embarrassing interview questions. It covers many different technical areas, here’s a sample of some (this is a short list since they cover way to many areas):

• Web/Internet Development
• J2EE
• Data Warehousing
• Management
• Networking
• Databases
• CRM

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Travel: Lonely Planet

http://www.lonelyplanet.com

Lonely Planet provides published travel guides and its companion website also serves as a useful online guide for travel.  Its similar to Fodors Guide for travel. Lonely Planet has its own flavor and take on travel destinations.  It highlights cultural nuances, celebrations, and events that you might not get from other travel sites.  For example, just looking at the site today, I didn’t know you could surf at Yemen and there is a musical festival called Sarawak in Malaysia.  You don’t necessarily have to buy their travel guides to get decent travel information, their site contains a wealth of information on your destination of choice.  It provides background information on the weather, best times to visit, health & safety, culture, getting around, and etc.  It contains images of the destination and blue lists which are user driven forums which provide insider travel information.

The planet might be lonely but with the wealth of cultural and travel experiences profiled in Lonely Planet, its certainly not a lonely place for human beings.

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Shopping: Bargain Aggregator - Boddit

http://www.boddit.com

Boddit is an aggregator for bargains, it pulls from multiple bargain sites.  Some of the popular ones that it pulls from are FatWallet, DealNews, DealCatcher, TechBargin, SlickDeals, and many more.  You can view the deals by the most recent, hottest, freebies, one day, or custom the deal you want.  They also have multiple categories so that you can filter by audio, camera, clothing, computers, consumer, home, coupons, and by store.  I’m not quite sure why its named Boddit but it definitely will do it in terms of finding bargains.

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Travel: Around the World in 80 days? - Virtual Tourist

http://www.virtualtourist.com

Virtual Tourist gives you reviews from other registered users on travel destinations. Its a popular website which is similar in its purpose as TripAdvisor. TripAdvisor has a better looking site than Virtual Tourist but nevertheless it may have more reviews especially in topics as things to do. Virtual Tourist has reviews on restaurants, things to do, nightlife, shopping transportation, photos, and tips for various travel destinations. According to the site, they cover 2.2 million destinations as far of as Timbuktu. They also have a forum for travel deals which I can’t really say much about since I haven’t used the information there but the editors at Virtual Tourist do pick the best ones so that you don’t have to wade through hundreds of forum postings. Its largely powered by the registered user community which is very active and passionate about traveling.

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Trends: Don’t worry it won’t cause cavities - Daily Candy

http://www.dailycandy.com

I wasn’t sure where to categorize this since it spans multiple categories but this is a good place to spot trends and discover new things. They blog on the latest finds in fashion, cooking, beauty, deals, services, arts & culture, and fun.  It cover several major cities like Boston, DC, Miami, San Francisco, London, and etc.  You can sign up for their email digests that could be tailored to your city.
From eco-friendly handbags made from recycled Chinese newspapers to low fat Holey Donuts, this is the site to find unique and hidden treasures.

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Celebrity Gossip: Egotastic

http://www.egotastic.com

Egotastic is a popular celebrity gossip and news weblog with the latest and greatest coverage of our female celebrities. It differentiates itself from other celebrity blogs by focusing more on female celebrities in their skimpy bikinis, cleavage baring outfits, and in fashion faux pas situations. Some of the fashion faux pas situations involve forgetting to wear undergarments, clothing “accidentally” slipping off, and other embarrassing mishaps. There’s a lot of celebrities covered and they are pretty much all female. Its a popular site that’s been running for 2 years with a 175 million visits so far.

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Celebrity Gossip: Celebitchy

http://www.celebitchy.com

Its a celebrity gossip site with a headline view layout. I like the clean layout which gives you a short caption and a big picture. You can quickly scan for what you are interested in and select the one you want to read without having to slog through a bunch of postings. They are also pretty prolific with their postings on celebrity news so there’s plenty to keep you entertained.

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Travel: Travel Social Networking - 43places

http://www.43places.com

I’m glad I stumbled on this site, its a social networking travel site where you share your travel experiences or your experiences living in a certain place. This is a keeper especially for people bitten by the travel bug or locked up in a cubicle with no where to go and no windows. When I did a search for Seychelles, there were 355 people who want to go there…count me in..356. So what did I see when I got to a page about Seychelles?

• There are tagging descriptions to let me know it has beaches and its a honeymoon spot
• There were beautiful photographs posted about this island
• People who share their experiences and knowledge about Seychelles (Be sure to check out the giant love nuts as mentioned by one of the comments)
• Questions about Seychelles such as finding accommodations, things to do, etc
• Where it shows up on the lists of the best lists, there’s quite a few for Seychelles

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Political: Conservative and Fox Newsworthy - HotAir

http://hotair.com

Michelle Malkin is a conservative political commentator of Fox News fame who started this blog to report on news and share videos with a conservative slant. Its a popular site along with an even more popular person behind it. She’s outspoken, controversial, and a hot rod for criticism like Ann Coutler. The site is organized with headlines of the latest news pulled from various new sources at the top and the rest of the page has selected news video linked from youtube. I debated whether to put this into the news or political category. I decided to put this in the political category after reading the about page and seeing that it emphasized it is a conservative video log.

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Celebrity Gossip: Doing what Socialites do best - Socialitelife

http://socialitelife.com

A Socialite’s Life is a weblog full of whispers and rumors about the going ons in the celebrity circles. The weblog is much more than a celebrity gossip rag, here are some of the samplings on what they report on:

• Trend Thrift - L.A. boutiques and fashion trends
• ASL Party Patrol - Parties and events in L.A., some member(s) of the Socialitie’s Life staff attends music events and parties and reports on it.
• Movie Head - A videolog which reviews the movies playing in the theaters
• Observations Of An Obsessive Compulsive TV Aficionado - A review of some of the TV shows seen by a staff member of A Socialite’s Life. There are some pretty funny cartoon captions that poke fun of those shows.
• Music in the Morning - Profiles popular and indie music and has links to the music videos.

With all the topics this site covers, this is one busy socialite.

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Personal Finance: Looking for what other people are buying? - Motley Fool Caps

http://caps.fool.com

Motley Fool CAPS is a site for social stock picking.  I don’t even know if there’s a phrase called social stock picking but it sounds good enough.  At least its not social nose picking.  From what I read in their FAQ section, the site works by having registered users called players who pick stocks and make a guess on how well it will do.  The players might be some monkeys throwing darts on the stock section of the newspaper, I’ve heard they fare as well as humans.  Once the players make their guesses, CAPS calculates how well they did in their guesses.  The players get a rating and the stocks do too.  As a player gets more credibility by making more and more accurate guesses, they have more weight on the rating of the stocks.  So the benefit for the rest of us fools is we get to find out which stocks have the highest ratings as well as the peeking at the top player’s selections.  The site also holds contests where you can win some money.

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Celebrity Gossip: Aggregator for Celebrity News - Celebrity Gossip

http://www.celebritygossip.com

Celebrity Gossip is another celebrity news and gossip site. It is an aggregator that pulls celebrity news from various celebrity blogs and sites. According to their banner, the site is updated every 5 minutes. Here are some features on the site:

• If you click on their celebrity tab, it pretty much covers every celebrity from A-Z.
• Each day there’s a list of the celebrities who celebrate their birthday on that date
• There’s a section which only lists the photos of the celebrities
• Lists of the most talked about celebrities and viewed photos

This site is owned by First Beat Media and its worth a look.

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Cooking: Experimental Chefs - Crash Test Kitchen

http://www.crashtestkitchen.com

Crash Test Kitchen is a catchy video log about cooking, the cooking is done by two adventuresome regular folks named Waz and Lenny. Waz and Lenny are not professional chefs, they attempt to cook based on recipes they find. Its similar to the cooking show shown on PBS, called “America’s Test Kitchen”. They capture their cooking with a video camera and post it on the site. They do not hide their failures when their attempt fails.  Yeah, I hate seeing those chefs whip out some perfectly done gourmet dish in half an hour and talk about how easy it was to make it.  As for posting their videos on the web, personally I wouldn’t want the whole world to see me struggle to make mac and cheese. I’m proud to say I haven’t killed anyone with my cooking but the trick is to not cook at all.

Going back to the blog, its a personable blog where they sometimes recount their previous experience with the dish of interest. My only complaints with the blog are:

• They don’t post often enough since each of their posts is fun to read and watch. (We want more!)
• They should consider categorizing the recipes since I had to click on each month to figure out which recipes they had cooked.

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Cooking: Simply Recipes

http://www.elise.com/recipes

This is a great site to browse for new recipes and it contains yummy and belly rumbling pictures of dishes that have been tested by Elise or her parents. It has recipes in every category (appetizers, lunch, brunch, dinner, and so forth), type of meat, vegetarian, and etc. If you are interested in ethnic recipes, this site does not have a lot so you will need to look elsewhere. I found this site today by accident when I was looking at SiteMeter and came across a reference to it. Its a another good recipe reference my partner and I will be using along with allrecipes.com. The site author is Elise who started the weblog as a personal family site to maintain a collection of recipes. The site grew in popularity with about a million visitors per month and won several awards. The recipe collection are either from Elise’s family recipes or collected through external sources over the last 30 years. When I’m eating my canned spaghetti and meatballs, I can look at the pictures of food and pretend I’m eating the braised beef short ribs which by the way requires two days of preparation and cooking.

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Tech: Looking for Tech Software Advice? - DownloadSquad

http://www.downloadsquad.com

Download Squad is a weblog which provides news and commentary on the software and web products which are interesting and useful. I have to admit, sometimes its overwhelming with the number and variety of life and work productivity tools out there. Who knew there is a site named Homeslyce which provides online tools to build a perfect dorm with your roomate? You can create a shopping list for your dorm, make a decision on what to buy with your roomate online, and split the tab. Well, you find out about these cool little knick knacks from Download Squad. There’s a group of contributors to the site and there are some real gems that are very useful. This site profiled BlackDust, a Google proxy search engine which allows you to remain anonymous when you do your searches.

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Tech: Gizmodo

http://gizmodo.com

Gizmodo is a weblog about electronics and gadgets owned by Gawker media. There are a group of writers which find the latest and greatest electronics and post them on the weblog. Some of the finds are through their readers or organizations who submit product information. Ultimately, the staff at Gizmodo decide if the product is worth a review on their weblog. They also take submissions even if the product is not yet released and an employee secretly sent the information to Gizmodo. So, you may find out about a product which has not been publicized or well known. In their FAQ page, their focus is on consumer electronics so don’t expect to find much about software. There’s a category named Dealzmodo which lists the best deals in electronics.

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Entertainment: Movie Spoiler

http://www.themoviespoiler.com

If you are looking for a spoiler to a movie, this is your site. The site contains spoilers for pretty much all the movies currently playing in the theaters. It has an archive of movie spoilers for movies released up to a few years back. The spoilers are usually detailed so if you saw a movie and were confused by parts of it, the spoiler usually helps resolve the confusion. The spoilers can be sent in by anyone. The owner of the site will select and post the best spoiler. My only compliant about the site is the ads are a bit overwhelming but this is the best site to get your spoilers.

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