Welcome to BenWoods.com

For those of you who have been following my literary agent list, you know that I've contacted a boatload of agents. Although some of given "Corporate Ties" favorable responses, I have not obtained an agent.

Well, it's now time to move ahead without one.

OK, technically speaking, I am a human being. But my friend, co-worker and "Corporate Ties" cover designer, Sean O'Connor, has constructed a robot in my likeness.

When entire countries decide that your browser is a security risk, that's probably not good news for your company. That's the case with Microsoft and Internet Explorer, as French and German governments are recommending their people to use safer alternatives to IE.

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.

During the past couple of days, I've been taking mini-breaks to read Basketbawful, a blog about the worst of the worst in the NBA. If you know me, you're probably wondering why I would be reading this, considering that I follow college basketball exclusively, not the NBA, the NBA development league, European leagues, Upward basketball, etc. If you don't know me, I'm not sure how you ended up on this site, but feel free to look around and DON'T TOUCH ANYTHING.

Do you have a great idea for a new invention? Do you have the perfect business plan to make millions? Do you have the means to bring peace to the world and bring a fortune to yourself?

Open source will no longer mean open season for little standardization when it comes to the Linux operating system.

On Sept. 14, The Free Standards Group announced the availability of Linux Standard Base (LSB) 2.0, an essential component for the long-term market success of Linux. The best part about it is that many major players who have Linux-based solutions, including IBM, Intel, Dell, and Hewlett-Packard, are endorsing LSB.

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.

In the beginning, the Internet gods created hypertext markup language. This language, known to you and me as HTML, was pretty much the sole programming possibility in the earliest development stages of the World Wide Web.

Surely by now, you've started to realize that many of those ads you see on the Internet for free stuff might just be bogus.

Of course, there might be some truth to the "free" part, but that could involve talking to a sales rep for 53 hours, wrestling an alligator or taking part in a survey about going to the bathroom in foreign countries.