Welcome to BenWoods.com

As a writer, I am usually sitting on a few mildly interesting ideas for books, articles, etc. Last year, I wanted to create a children's book about the winter holidays, but I wanted to avoid writing about Christmas or any specific religious holiday.

In the past, we've seen an octopus blend in with rocks, run on the ocean floor and solve a maze. That's not all they can do. Apparently, some octopuses pick up coconut shells and hide in them, the first evidence of an invertebrate using tools.

Wow, I just realized how far behind I was in posting tidbits about good local writers. I met author Mohamed Mughal last year at a writers' conference, and we shared opinions and the like on our writings.

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.

Sitting in front of screen all day is not healthy. Well, if it were a screen door, that might not be too bad, but we're talking about a computer screen. In fact, just sitting all day isn't healthy, either. Let's face it: Do you think the colonies would have won the American Revolution by lounging and playing World of Warcraft all day?

I'm sitting in my cube right now, wearing shorts, a T-shirt and tennis shoes. On the other side of the sensibility coin, analyst firm Gartner is predicting that avatars will have business dress codes by 2013. How do people come up with this stuff?

If you ever had grandiose ideas about becoming a professional arm wrestler, and defeating numerous arm-wrestling machines in the process, you should probably put your dream on hold.

Since three players recently broke their arms playing Arm Spirit, Japanese game maker Atlas has decided to remove all 150 of its machines from arcades.

In case you missed it, the National Federation of the Blind recently won a reasonably large lawsuit against Target, claiming that Target.com did not meet minimal standards for people using screen access technology. While I normally side with the little guy over big corporations, there are a number of ridiculous things involved with this ruling, so I'll try to point out each one individually.

In the web world, an upgrade is usually a thing of joy and agony. On one hand, you want to have the latest and greatest, but on the other, there are usually so many hoops to jump through that it can oftentimes be better to wait until the last minute.

I guess in this case, I'm a little late to the game with Drupal 9, but I've finally upgraded this site - all the way to 9.1 with the Gutenberg editor. Now it is time to dance.

For the fourth straight weekend, I'll be making a book appearance, this time at home in Louisville, Ky. I'll be at Carmichael's (2720 Frankfort Avenue) 4-6 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 12. Make sure you don't go to the Bardstown Road one because I won't be there!

Please stop in and say hi to me or my local publicist, Elizabeth Woods, if you get a chance. Elizabeth is my grandma, one of the main proofreaders for 'The Developers' and an avid bingo player.