Welcome to BenWoods.com

If you're like me, you could use a big bowl of ice cream about now, and you are tired of hearing dot-com this and dot-com that. Soon, you won'tn be hearing this crap anymore. Instead, it might be dot-crap.

The International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has decided to expand the current list of top-level domains -- http://www.thestandard.com/article/display/0,1151,16268,00.html?nl=int

Maybe I'm in a small minority, but I'm still confused how so many people are duped every so often by an e-mail virus. Let's take this step by step:

A guy walks into his workspace at 7:30 a.m., preparing for another exciting day of whatever. He opens his inbox to find 50 e-mails -- 45 promising him to lose weight, financial freedom or cheap Viagra four from actual friends, probably chain letters and one other with a subject header of "Open repeatedly, this is not a virus," which of course is from virusdemon@viruscentral.com.

You cannot escape the Internet. OK, you're right, you can. You can move to Uruguay. But for all the trouble, you might as well find a computer and get busy.

A lot of people have been talking about designing a "homepage," which has nothing to do with your living quarters. Simply put, a homepage is the portal to the most important information on a particular Web site.

Computers can be your friends. No, they won't take you to lunch or buy you a drink. But they can do more than collect dust. Assuming you are human (and if not, don't let that stop you from reading), you probably fit into one of four categories:

1. You still use a typewriter, you're still building a bomb shelter, and your best friend in grade school was Robert "Robbie" E. Lee.

Editor's Note: This was Ben's final column while writing for the Crawfordsville (Ind.) Journal Review.

This will be the last column I write for the Journal Review. I may start them again sometime in the future. I would like to. But for now, this will have to do.

If any of you have column ideas, please still tell them to me and send them. I will keep a list, and somewhere down the road, maybe they will let me do this again.

As people make advances every day in technology, we also lose stuff that we don't need to know anymore. When was the last time you rewound a videotape? If you can think of anything you don't need to know anymore, check to see if it's on this list of Obsolete Skills.

I don't agree with all of them (you still need to know how to compute sales tax if you are a business owner!), but it's a pretty good list nonetheless.

Here are two recent releases to check out the next time you're in the need of a new book.

"Love Betrayed" is a nonfiction novel by author Karen Hinton. It's a book for traumatized wives who find themselves reinventing their lives after dedicating decades to their husbands.

If you're AT&T, and you want to convince the American public that you can be responsible for handling the bulk of broadbrand traffic, cutting out parts of live music might not be your best idea.

But that's exactly what happened during the recent Pearl Jam's "Blue Room" Live Lollapalooza Webcast. The event monitor muted anti-George Bush lyrics, which left fans no option but to listen to a censored version of the concert.

If you found this page via Facebook, then congratulations! Stop by Brazos Bookstore between 3-4 pm Sunday, April 1, make a qualifying purchase (like, buy a book, not just a bookmark) and receive a free autographed copy of Corporate Ties! Pretty simple, right?

Some of you probably troll message boards from time to time, noticing how users will get hopping mad because a random person called them, or their favorite team, a bad name. If you continue reading the thread, you will probably notice other users taking both sides, and if you visit the same message board a few months later, there will surely be a similar thread with different people involved.