Ben's Journal

The time comes in every geo hackers life when he or she will need to do reverse geocoding - that is, convert latitude and longitude to a st...

A few photos from hanging out with Liam, and Friends. Even though the weather was cruddy, it was still fun cruising around the Baltimore I...

I've been using WebDAV rather than FTP to push files to my dev server. So far, I've been happy with Apache's mod_dav and I...

You'd think the intimates department would be the ideal place for a guy to hang out in the Mall. After all, there are posters of underw...

Country music loves break up songs. But what I find impressive is how the songs have evolved as the technology has too. Instead of just si...

A few days back my buddy Christian mentioned the site Free CSS Templates . I didn't think much of it, and basically forgot about it....

Pizza dough - check Measuring cups - check Salt & pepper - check & check Prescription drugs - check No wonder her pizza tas...

Today, I stumbled on Google's Charting API and it's too cool not to mention. It's URL based, so it's trivial to toss a ch...

Between cygwin and emacs , I've managed to turn my Windows box into a Unix box. Though of late, I've noticed that Cygwin commands...

Shira and I are engaging in our second Christmas Tradition - going to the movies. We're seeing Dan In Real Life. The Drafthouse made t...

It's been 13 years since Shira and I had our official first date. It was Christmas Eve, and the Chinese restaraurant was named Ho Ho. It...

Shira got the day off, and it was nice enough to really take advantage of it. We took a great walk in the Four Mile Run area in Arlington. I...

Yesterday, while in Rochester, Shira realized she had misplaced her wedding ring. Without the ring, I wasn't sure if we were still marr...

I just finished going through the Our Body: The Universe Within Exhibit at the Science Museum in Rochester. Our Body is the exhibit which c...

How fitting is it that we should arrive in Rochester to be met with big 'ol snow drifts. But we were a bit thrown off - the sun was shin...

I just learned about Wimzi , an AOL widget that embeds an anonymous AIM client on a web page The result is that anyone can come along an...

OK, perhaps I'm exaggerating a bit. But check out what the Google Calendar API Dev Guide has to say about programming with their API: ...

Try this experiment next time your at the supermarket: pay a little more and pick up a couple of persimmon fruits. The ones I just tried wer...

I love it when a site goes viral . How else is it possible that Shira and I would receive recommendations from two completely independent ...

Yesterday, Shira read off some scary statistic from a magazine (which of course, I can't find now) that said something to the effect of...

This PalPay message that ended up in my inbox, and not spam folder is an obvious fake. You can tell this in just a few seconds by using T...

Tonight I worked on a client's site that required me to use sFTP , instead of the more standard FTP protocol, to interact with it. I w...

We just found the very best way to see Washington's monuments is at night ... in the freezing rain. We stumbled across the fabled G...

Not sure how useful these tips will be, but here goes: Use IM as a super fast way to exchange information between your laptop and your S...

While I may pick on PHP every once and a while, I do have to say they got at least one thing right: The Docs . First, the comments in ...

The last few times I've been to the library, I've considered getting a book on photography. But every time I browse the shelves I...

The latest Bank of America ATMs are amazing. You feed in checks and cash, and it does the OCR thing to process it all. No envelopes or fil...

For the last couple years, Shira has put together a fun Jeopardy game for her office. And every year I watch her do this in PowerPoint and...

This amusement (not quite useful, but certainly cool!) was sent to me by Christian Cantrell . As this tip suggests you can: ¿ʇɐɥʇ sı lo...

I needed to run some adhoc queries against a MySQL database. I didn't have shell access, so running the mysql command was out, and I d...

Tonight I had to write a PHP page that would take the term parameter from a Google AdWords link and do something useful with it. The tric...

Tonight we got to attend a friend's Chanukah party, and boy, was it a treat! The latkes were absolutely perfect - just like Mom us...

David recommended this classic SNL skit to me this morning. Hilarious stuff.

I just learned about these incredibly handy keyboard shortcuts in IE: Address Bar shortcuts Select the Address Bar ALT+D Add ...

To help push me to use IE even more , I thought I'd do the unthinkable: set it to be my default browser. This was surprisingly diffi...

Let's say Google doesn't offer just the right icon you're looking for for your Google Maps app. What's a geek to do? ...

I may be way late to the party on this one, but I just had to share. Yesterday, I stumbled on: FlipperTV . The Democratic party has basic...

Actually, this a hurried shot of Shira "at work," not me. If you couldn't guess by my blurred photo, we've taken a micro v...

I think this is the first "snow storm" DC has had this year. There might be a whole 1/2" of snow on the ground. Though, I...

I can think of at least one serious ooops moments with all my i2x clients, where I realized that something I was showing them worked in F...

Like most Jews, I can explain some details about Chanukah - yet when I was asked yesterday when it happened and a few details about the st...

Happy first night of Chanukah Chanukkah Chanukka Channukah Hanukah Hannukah - ah, forget it. Happy first night of the Festival Of Li...

I got to thoroughly test our GPS today, as I visited two clients in DC. The nüvi did well, re-calculating the route as I took wrong turn af...

Jenna passed me this cool video about how some dude is building a Stonehenge type structure by schleping the rocks himself. Perhaps ...

Last Friday I was on hold with PayPal for a bit too long, and rather than listening to music, I got to hear them talk up their services. Al...

Really, nothing? There's no other apartment on the planet like this one? What, does it have no floor or something? Is a marketing pitch...

We took Shira's new GPS, a nüvi 360, out for a spin tonight. Our previous iQue M5 GPS died on us suddenly, so we needed a quick repla...

Call me crazy, but suppose I have the following explain SELECT <stuff> FROM <stuff> where name = 'foo'; -- Explai...

I feel so cool, as I head into DC for my first Web 2.0 meetup . It's 5:30pm, so trains are packed with people who have real jobs - unli...

I have a new favorite error message from Firefox. I attempted to use an object attribute named class and was greeted with this wisdom: ...

If you don't usually listen to country music, you should give Radio Country Club a listen . It seems to be a nice blend of more rock ...

Yesterday I was working on a Google Maps application and wanted to show a bunch of different types of markers on the map. Rather than creat...

I love Pandora Radio , but of late, it's been bringing my machine to its knees. I shut it down and was left with silence. I don't...

I have trouble getting the times right for meetings between myself and those on the west coast. This means that I'm a complete disaste...

Here's a lesson I just learned... If you ever accidentally put your peanut butter away in the fridge instead of the cupboard, and de...

Seriously, here's 13 steps to being classy: http://www.wikihow.com/Be-Classy Far as I can tell, it's good advice. I think every mi...

I needed to snap a few photos for an eBay auction Shira was running, and as always, didn't have the right equipment for a close-up setup...

My buddy John sent me documentation of weird CSS bug tonight by using a cool service: BrowserShots . Drop in a URL,and get 9 screenshots...

Wow, what a fantastic Thanksgiving event. Shira's cousins' hosted and totally outdid themselves with amazing company, food, drink ...

Shira and I were setting up some AdWords campaigns for i2x and thought it would be wise to buy the phrase Ideas2Executables . When we atte...

Happy t-day all! Shira and I are planning a break from tradition this year. We aren't planning to hold up at home eating hot dogs, but...

If you've never played around with styling HTML lists, you should take a few minutes and check out A List Apart's, Taming Lists ar...