Welcome to BenWoods.com

You made it! Thanks for visiting.

It's post time for shopping season

Every year on the day after Thanksgiving, the media covers 13,205,129,675 stories about how it's the busiest shopping day of the year. A story in the paper says Biff Smith got to K-Mart at 2 a.m. so he could be first in line to buy the newest Pokemon stuff for his son. Then there's a TV shot of Emma Jean Santaclaus, who purchased $5,000 worth of Barbie accessories for her 27 children. Then on radio, an anonymous man outside any mall says, "Yeah, it's pretty crowded in there. I guess I picked the wrong day to get my watch fixed."

Here's the site for living in the past

A rarity on the Web is a site that can keep one entertained for longer than 20 minutes. The only chance most sites have at this is by spending 18 minutes loading some cool program that can do your laundry while you wait.

JFK learns how to build HTML tables

Those of you who have mastered the art of building a Web site have probably encountered the most important tool known to designers: the protractor.

Coming in second would have to be tables, the backbone to many pages you have visited in your lifetime, or at least within the last three weeks. Tables are the most primitive of the HTML tags because people like to have things in nice readable fashion, excluding tabloid magazines. Most people prefer tabloids that look similar to newspapers more than 40 years ago, which contained at least 343 headlines on each page.

The results are in: Bush, Gore lose to The Golf Channel

I have one simple request for Christmas -- that someone, ANYONE, will finally be named president. Yes, we have George W. and Al, but if they name Al W. George out of Minot, N.D., instead, that would be fine.

What caused this whole problem? The people of the United States, of course, always trying to stir up trouble, whether it's at the local moose lodge or bingo hall. Can't people fill in the correct circles? Can't people count votes right? Can't people use turning signals when changing lanes?

E-mails overrunning a business near you

Is this what the world is coming to? People sitting 6 inches away from each other will not talk to each other but instead, write short e-mails?

An example:

From: Someone

Sent: November, Wednesday 1, 2000 11:41 AM

To: Someone else

Subject: Outside

Did you see that?

From the Archive

Plagarism wasn't just invented yesterday

I thought about writing an article about plagarism, then I decided I would first see if I could copy it from someone else.

HA! That was supposed to be funny ... or maybe just sad.

There is a recent report from the BBC saying that the Internet has made copying sources easier. Furthermore, the professor quoted in the story says that the new generation of students see nothing wrong with copying material found online.

Computer programming is not just for geeks anymore

Instead of saying, "Look at this cool thing I found on the Internet!" what if you could say, "Look at this cool thing I made on the Internet!"

On top of that, you don't have to have an extensive history with programming languages, either.

Free phone for your computer?

A large portion of people, including me, have tossed away a home land line in favor of just using a cell phone. Of course, that can be problematic on occasion, especially if your cell phone service is bad.

There might a remedy available, even without going through on of your local telecom companies. Gizmo (not to be confused with the little guy on "Gremlins" touts itself as a free phone for your computer.

A place for those old business cards

Are you one of those people who have boxes of old business cards sitting around, hoping that someday they might be worth something on eBay? Of course not, that would be insane. Unfortunately, I'm not here to tell you today that they are worth something, because they aren't.

That is, unless you are Steve Patterson of Knoxville, Tenn., a certified cardeologist. He has almost reached the 100,000 plateau of business cards, and he's heading toward 1 million.

Bing Maps launches

Microsoft continues its march toward competing with Google by launching Bing Maps. I took it for a quick test run, and in general, it's pretty comparable to Google Maps. There's hardly a discernible difference between the two, honestly. You can change routes pretty easily, look for local businesses and email links to friends. Probably the strangest thing I noticed, however, is that the base URL turns into bing.com/maps, instead of remaining maps.bing.com.

Powered by Drupal