Whatever you need to know is on Web

By Sam Meddis
USA Today

Entertaining

• Andante is dedicated to lovers of classical music — an online source for wide-ranging info and commentary on musical works, composers and performing artists.

In case you don't find what you want there, a handy directory links you to 12,000 classical music Web sites.

• The Impressionists is a virtual exhibit of the lives and works of the movement's great masters. Check out the paintings featured at this Biography.com site, and then you can actually try your hand at duplicating a variety of masterpieces.

• Find out why Saya, the female protagonist of "Blood: The Last Vampire," makes Buffy, in the words of Wired News, look like a rank amateur. (Consider yourself warned.)

Educational

• NASA's Galileo spacecraft adds Jupiter's moon Callisto to its gallery of breathtaking images. Described as a spiky landscape of bright ice and dark dust.

• Travel back to the days before e-mail with a visit to the Bath Postal Museum, which presents backgrounders and artifacts dating back to the Egypt's earliest days of snail mail. A virtual hoot.

Community

• Here's a site that advises you to do something constructive with your road rage — join an online community to collectively vent about "good drivers, bad drivers and weirdoes." Includes a jokes section to help relieve the commuting fury.

Financial

• Fortune serves up its list of the world's largest corporations — a study that finds that a quarter of the companies on the list made less money in 2000 than in 1999.

Lifestyle

• Anyone who harbors doubts about the world-transforming power of the World Wide Web obviously hasn't paid a visit to the Beer Advocate. A virtual portal that, ahem, says it all.

Oddities

• The Department of Advertising of the University of Texas at Austin serves up more than a mouthful of famous commercial battle cries. Though the site admits: "A few of them aren't all that famous, but they're ... interesting." And indeed, they are.

Techie

• Tired of those Web browser windows that seem to pop up from nowhere? This free Pop-Up Stopper software promises to help you control them. A virtual godsend.

Useful resources

• Wondering whether to upgrade or buy a new computer? Want to make sure your PC is properly protected? Find answers to those questions and more from the consumer-minded folksat Consumer Reports Online.

Sam Meddis reviews new and notable Web sites daily at usatoday.com/tech.htm.