Welcome to BenWoods.com

It's a good thing there are Internet weather sites. Yes, it's beneficial for travelers to know if it's going to be nice at their destination. It's great to know if a large snowfall is coming, so everyone but bartenders can be off work. You can even check out the weather where all your friends live.

I'm not usually one to steal ideas for a column, but this one was too good to pass up. Macworld had a story in its April edition about free stuff on the Internet. I wouldn't consider myself one of those people who go to different fairs with the sole intention of seeing how many magnets and pencils I can collect in a plastic Go Army bag, but if something's cool and free, I'll give it a try.

Do you frequently need help with your computer? Does your monitor and/or hard drive occasionally stop working? Are you currently pulling a blanket over your head as you sit in the closet? Then you have come to the right place.

If you've never had any technical difficulties with your computer, you fall into one of two categories:

1. You have never used a computer.

2. You used a computer once and realized it wasn't cooking a grilled cheese sandwich properly.

I'm not ashamed to say I like to cook. I rarely do cook, though, because I never seem to have enough time, or enough energy, or the dog ate my homework.

Some of the stuff I cook, I make up as I go. Other things I've borrowed from my mom, and the rest I pull out of my cookbook. I never thought of looking up recipes on the Web, because if I had time to do that, why wouldn't I just pull a recipe out of the cookbook?

The best way to pick your bracket is to not listen to anyone.

No sportscasters, no sports writers, no cowboys. You shouldn't listen to anyone. You have the brackets in front of you; why can't you make your own decisions?

Leading to the belief that even reptiles can spot amazing discount store sales, Fisher, a loggerhead turtle, has trekked over 4,000 miles in since July and should reach west Africa in the near future. There's no word just yet as to whether or not the sale will take place at a Wal-Mart or Kmart.

Fisher was released off the North Carolina coast and is being tracked by a satellite transmitter. The Marine Turtle Research Group is tracking him, and you can see the updates at Seaturtle.org.

So the other day, I remembered I needed to contact Michelle Branch.

This seemed like a simple goal at the onset, but there were various problems: How would I go about actually doing this? What did I need to tell her? Who is she anyway?

As a web developer, I have always heard stories pertaining to the lack of knowledge people have about computers in general. Maybe you have heard the one about the person who called tech support because her computer wouldn't come on ... during a power outage. Or maybe you are familiar with the story about the guy who used his CD tray as a cup holder.

A few glaring items came to mind as I finished reading Roszak's "The Cult of Information:"

Google, never to turn away from indexing searchable material, is working with leading world libraries to catalog a ridiculous number of books.

Harvard, Stanford and Michigan university libraries, the New York Public Library and the Oxford Bodleian Library are lending their books to be scanned into the Google Print project. Melvil Dewey, the inventor of the Dewey Decimal System, could not be reached for comment.