 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
By Jim Trageser
If your idea of fun is wacking a little white globe with a long stick (and, admittedly, mine is), then add this page to your bookmarks. Martin Olivera's site has info on local courses, on the PGA's two annual stops in San Diego, on local equipment manufacturers, and great links to other golfing sites.
The opening page is sharp – a simple but well-designed menu featuring animated golf flags lets you get anywhere on the site. The Mercedes Championship page has the results of January's PGA event at La Costa; the Buick Invitational (formerly the San Diego Open) page of February's tourney at Torrey Pines.
The highlight is the list of every public course in San Diego County, as well as some in Temecula and Baja – green fees, course length and par (with slope and rating info as well), location, how to make reservations, and whether you have to use a cart (which is common, but still asinine). Each course's page also links to a Yahoo map showing you where it is (except for the courses in Baja).
In addition, there are similar lists of San Diego's, executive, private and military courses. There is also a listing of San Diego's top 26 most difficult courses, which is kind of interesting if not totally subjective.
This site would be perfect if only Martin had user-designed courses for the Jack Nicklaus Signature Edition golf game from Accolade. See, unlike a real course, I could beat him at that ...
Whoa – better be ready to do some set-up before visiting here. This virtual reality site needs a VRML plugin, and the Live 3D plugin for Netscape is a hard drive space hog. I had 35 megs free and it still wouldn't install – so I put it on another machine, and got it to run. You'll also need frames and Java on your browser as well.
Given that there are some massive files here, I wouldn't suggest visiting unless you have at least a 28.8kbps modem, with a connect speed of more than 24kbps.
There are quite a few different virtual reality files to view here, including a rotating Earth and a how-to section on building virtual reality files. And there's a VRML globe with hot links to various countries and continents – but I couldn't get it to run without bombing out my whole computer.