Welcome to BenWoods.com

You made it! Thanks for visiting.

What are fireworks salespeople up to now anyway?

(This column was originally published in the Crawfordsville Journal Review on July 9, 1999)

Nomads have wandered through cities during the last two weeks, sold their goods and departed for lands of milk and honey.

They don't leave a trail, but their wares do - usually ashes, perhaps a foul-smelling odor but always a glowing experience.

Fireworks salespeople have rigorous lives. I recently caught up with one such seller, Smokin' Joe Romancandle. What follows is his normal day:

The Developers available at all Louisville Borders locations

The Developers can now be found at each Borders location in Louisville. Here are the addresses for the stores:

3024 Bardstown Road, Louisville, KY 40205

2520 S. Hurstbourne Gem Lane, Louisville, KY 40220

4600 Shelbyville Rd, Louisville, KY 40207

400 S. 4th Street, 4th Street Live!, Louisville, KY 40202

Trying not to dunk cookie usage

Out of all the mysterious things on your computer and/or the Internet, cookies seem to be near the top of the list. From SearchCIO.com, a cookie is defined as a file on a Web user's hard drive (it's kept in one of the subdirectories under the browser file directory) that is used by Web sites to record data about the user.

The Developers featured in MI newspaper article

Since the full article is no longer available online, I figured it would be easiest to just post right here.

Ex-Owensboro resident pens humorous Internet novel

By James Mayse | Messenger-Inquirer | 06/11/05

Although Ben Woods has been writing a computer column for years, he didn't spend much of his early years writing fiction. Before moving to Owensboro to join the Messenger-Inquirer and, later, Red Pixel Studios, Woods' last short story was written when he was in high school.

Long time, no blog

Blogging has become fairly gigantic in the United States, ranking somewhere in between "Saved by the Bell" (now just a cult following) and "Friends" (a much, much larger cult following) in popularity. With the tools available, virtually anyone can start up a blog and post whatever he or she has to say.

From the Archive

Time stands still when waiting for Star Wars

I finally discovered something I could not easily find on the Internet: tickets for the newest Star Wars movie.

Sure, it is still a few days before "Attack of the Clones" opens in the United States, but I should already have tickets in my hand. I'm not claiming to be the biggest Star Wars fan in history. I've never dressed up as Darth Vader in public or dated a girl named Yoda. True, she was from Dagobah. But I do have a lot of Star Wars memorabilia hanging on my walls at home, and all of my action figures are stashed away in places I can get to easily.

Maybe overpopulation isn't an issue after all

Every day, scientists are discovering more of space, which, I suppose, is still the Final Frontier. That is, unless you count the salad bar at truck stops, since that is another weird phenomenon as well.

There is an ongoing treasure hunt for sustainable-life planets. That's not surprising, considering the world's population is more than 6.6 billion (and growing, if you want to view). Where are all of the people going to go? There's just not enough space between the croutons and bacon bits.

Book review: "Creative Firing" by Chester Burger

In the current state of the U.S. economy, it's pretty difficult to avoid being laid off, fired or, for whatever reason, not having a job for a certain period of time. True, sometimes the employee is entirely to blame for his/her predicament, but more often than that, a company is trying to consolidate, move offices or, in general, save money against the bottom line. Many times, those doing the actual firing and layoffs have to make decisions they would prefer to ignore, yet they have no choice.

People are crazy, but that's nothing new

Finally, after what seems like 54 years, I've had time to compile the results of the crazy survey. I'm sure you are probably thinking, "What crazy survey?" Rest assured, there was one, and a few people even participated. There were over 100, so I may end up using the first 100 answers if I ever start my own Family Feud game show.

Partying online since 1999

I recently added six months' worth of columns from my first job out of college, at the Crawfordsville (Ind.) Journal Review. The articles appeared both in print and online, and while some of them are obviously outdated, it's interesting to remember what was going on 10 years ago. Wow, I've been writing web articles for a decade! I don't think there are too many others who can say that. Google recently celebrated its 10th birthday, and the oldest index the company has available is from 2001.

Powered by Drupal