Ben's Journal

I'm tapping out this blog entry from the lobby of the hotel we're staying at in Canberra, Australia. We've finally arrived at t...

I'm writing this blog post from Gold Coast, Australia. I've moved halfway around the world since I last had a chance to sit down, ...

So, we did something a bit unusual this trip - we rented a car. Shira was ready to tackle this whole driving on the left thing. She's ...

I spent the day entertaining myself in Hereford , a little town in the middle of nowhere, about 3 hours from London. Just beyond our hot...

Yesterday we had a fun day wandering around London. In the afternoon, I wanted to get some work done, so I looked around for a quiet place...

I was quite surprised that the casino here in London offers free WiFi. That strikes me as both insecure and a distraction. But hey, what d...

While I spent most of the day working, I couldn't resist at least taking a jog through London. Luckily, there's so much history to...

Wow, international travel is amazing. 7 hours ago we were on a sleety airport in Washington, DC and now I'm in Heathrow airport in Engla...

So, there's a photo of my latest photography accessory: two backup batteries for my digital camera. I can't tell you how many times...

I've got some travels coming up, where it would be handy to have web content on my G1 that didn't require me to be connected to a ...

When I was like 12 years old I had braces and this metal bar installed behind my bottom teeth. Well, a few years ago I had the bar removed ...

I really like Paul Begala's advice to Governor Mark Sanford of South Carolina. Apparently, the Governor admittedly apposes the stimulu...

You've got to wonder - why the interest in Forth . Well, I'm currently trying to learn the language beyond the basics (and reading...

I've now had a T-mobile G1 for just a few days, so I'm ready to share my initial thoughts on the device. It will be interesting to ...

I think the speech Obama gave at the Lincoln Banquet a few days ago was one of his better ones recently. Like his speech on race or patri...

I wanted a hard copy of the classic Thinking Forth by Leo Brodie. I also wanted it in a hurry. The good news is that it's availabe un...

We got Pizza, Beer, good friends and the TV tuned to the Daytona 500. One small problem - the race was called on account of rain. D'oh, ...

One of the coolest features of the iPhone has to be the voice mail handling. Instead of calling in for your voice mail messages, they are d...

Playing a bit of pool and watching Shira show off her moves. She's way better than me - but that's not saying much. Good times.

I wanted to upgrade one of my servers to PHP 5.2.x. But, the standard upgrade command of sudo yum upgrade php wasn't working. Apparen...

I brought up the topic of Autism and Vaccination a while back. My brother just passed me this article on the topic: Confidential medi...

Here are a few photos from our latest West Virginia Trip . Nothing too impressive here in terms of photography, but I can't resist shar...

Here it is, my newest toy, uh I mean business tool: a T-mobile G1. So far, there's not much I can say about it. It feels small compared ...

Last night I was poking around for Forth programming resources and found the following interesting: OLPC's Forth Lessons . This is...

So, I'm minding my own business, hacking away at some PHP code on my Windows Laptop, when all of a sudden my web app starts reporting t...

Tonight, the app I was working on was crying out for a small feature which Ajax would work perfect for. So, I busted out jQuery and wrote ...

It's hard to believe that just about a year ago, I had the opportunity to join Shira on a short trip to West Virginia . Well, I'm ...

Giant by us now allows you to walk into the store, grab a hand scanner, scan and bag your groceries while shopping, and then pay in the fron...

Shira and I hit my bro David's house warming party. What a good time! Lots of great food, and Dave's roomates and friends were lots ...

A few years ago, this tower randomly went. It didn't take long to figure out that perched atop it was a camera that could swivel around ...

While playing around with Twitter and Google Spreadsheets I came across this fun presentation: 12 Educational Uses For Twitter . The pr...

The audio tapes from the Flight 1549 emergency landing have been released. Wow, they are an absolute must listen: Embedded video from ...

I've mentioned before how addictively easy to use the Twitter API is . Once you learn about it, you can't help but start embedding ...

There's this trend flying around Facebook where you author 25 random tidbits about yourself and then tag others to do the same: Rul...

I don't think the photo does my desk at this moment justice - I've got quite a collection of glasses here. I really need to figur...

So, my attempt to fix Shira's networking issue on her Dell didn't solve the issue. I was out of options, so I called my buddies at...

I agree with Nicholas Patten : This is an amazing animation . Apparently, the animation mirrors the legend of how the Chinese zodiac cam...

Last night I was pleased to have my Dell Laptop returned to me. Dell promised me they would fix it in about 10 days, and sure enough, tha...

Whenever I open up the Real media player on my Windows XP laptop I'm greeted with the following message: And it's not like t...

While looking around for a fresh color scheme to a nav bar menu, I stumbled upon these new color related goodies... www.coloring.com - ...

There was an interesting interaction on the latest This Week with George Stephanopoulos , where you had Sen. Jim DeMint, Eric Schmidt and ...

This shot was taken as the Cardinals were inches away from a touchdown (to tie the game) and instead handed the Steelers a 99yrd touchdown. ...

I'm standing here at the Theodore Roosevlt Island parking lot waiting for David and his running buddy to show up, and I'm quite impr...

I just finished with my dental appointment. Good news is, I was given a clean bill of health. No filling, crowns or dentures needed. Whew. ...

I continue to be impressed with Damn Small Linux . Consider, how I've turned an ancient laptop (without a hard drive) into a jukebox ...

I just realized that my Google Apps e-mail now has access to GMail Labs . For example, I can now add a send and archive button or enab...

I really enjoyed my Sister-in-Law's take on the Octuplet story . But that not too surprising, if there's anyone who's well ve...

The president and congress is busy hashing out the stimulus package . And while they do this, you can actually follow along . Weighing in a...

One of the neat features in WordPress is that an end user can so easily attach meta data to a post. For example, I might want to make so...

I finally got around to tweaking the the find-grep command in emacs to remove one of it's biggest annoyances (to me). Mainly, that it ...

I just had a terrifically fun visit with the parents and Grandpa , and had the same realization I always have when folks visit: there's...