Ben's Journal

This morning, Shira baked her first key-lime pie. It was absolutely delicious, and I think the perfect way to get thoughts of a sweet year a...

I needed a facility for finding related words. Luckily, I was able to find the Big Huge Thesaurus API . As web services go, it's pr...

Lately, I've really been enjoying XM Channel 136 (technically, Public Radio Exchange ). The stories that are run there are often quite...

Yesterday, I was surfing the web on my Windows Vista laptop when I noticed a window that appeared to be a virus scanner doing a scan. How c...

This imaginary Course List sure made for some fun reading. It's split up into Courses for Women taught by Men , and Courses for Men t...

I've often wondered, but never taken the time to research the question: does a child need to be in a car seat while riding in a bus? Wh...

I know they were calling for a "Monster Storm" and people often buy out bread and milk. But why isn't there a single bag of po...

I consider myself to be a fairly experienced traveler. I also consider myself fairly organized. Yet, regardless of these two facts, no matt...

Yesterday I rented up Sara Palin's new book America by Heart from the library. I just couldn't help myself. I've promised myse...

While reading Three Cups of Tea , I proudly noted to myself that not only had I heard of Mortenson's home town of Bozeman Montana, but ...

Go read this . Or, the Washington Post write up over here . Wow, just wow. Next time someone tells me that the Internet and social media...

Pick something you want to accomplish but that's tough to do. Say, lose weight or start a business. Now, what if instead of attackin...

One of main reasons I purchased a Netbook was for travel. I loved the idea of having a laptop with me for fixing issues or blogging, yet ...

No surprise, people believe totally false things in the world of politics. Like, say: Though the CBO concluded that the health reform l...

Our week long adventure in Belize is complete. We had an absolute blast. You can read about it here , or just jump right to the photos ove...

Day 7 - our last day finally arrived. Our hotel bill reflected our little one's presence: $25BZ for a broken vase, and $50BZ for a...

3 Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Relin is a Dayenu type of book. Had the story just been about Greg's valiant, but failed...

Whooo! Our little guy slept the night!! Since we got here, he hasn't been feeling anywhere near 100%. During the previous nights of th...

Our next door neighbor brought over their HP Mini Laptop which was having some serious boot issues. You'd turn it on, and rather than b...

We started off Day 5 of our trip with a visit to the Belize Botanical Gardens - a starred attraction in the Fodors guidebook. We had two ch...

Most of today was spent getting from Northern Belize to Western Belize - about 10 miles or so small shacks, or homes that looked they ...

You might as well go ahead and install 7-zip now, you're going to need it. Why? Well, not because you want to use the fancy shmancy...

Today we tackled what we actually came to Lamanai to see: the Lamanai Mayan Ruins. We took a short boat ride to the park containing the...

The main event for Day 2 was a medicine walk. Essentially, our guide was going to take us through the jungle and point out various p...

I really like pastebin.com . They allow you to easily publish information (usually, code) so that others can access it via unique URL. Th...

Our flights to Belize were fairly uneventful. So was Customs in Belize and the rental car desk. In fact, if anything, the whole arriv...

Now I know how Hillary Clinton must feel. If only we wanted it more . OK, maybe not. Last night, a friend of ours invited us to join h...

From today's press conference : The single most important jobs program we can put in place is a growing economy. The single most i...

A client of mine had a novel idea that involved generating printable note cards from data in database (yes, I'm being intentionally va...

The WikiLeaks debacle got ya down? I've got the fix. reader or watch what Fareed Zakaria has to say on the matter: I think John...

Mmmmm...Soy Milk! This batch ought to last us a few weeks, at least. (Note: these are 64oz containers, not your usual 32oz ones.) Such...

Last Friday I mentioned the Retro Camera app and how it looked like it would be a fun one. Today, I had a client in DC to visit, and on ...

Let's say you've got a website you're pouring your heart into. And then let's say someone comes along and copies nearly eve...

Happy 2nd day of Chankuah ya'll! Today, 3 people independently recommended this video to me. Apparently, it's this year's ru...

A while back, I came across this collection of unusual Google Earth finds . It's an impressive list and worth taking a few minutes to g...

Even on my Windows boxes, I spend a good part of my day at a bash prompt. And I do so, most of the time, taking it totally for granted. It...

Did Google just rewrite the rules about web fonts? The above text isn't an image - it's an example of the Google Webfonts in...

Shira gave me another reason to love the Arlington Library today: their eCollection's Premium Sites . By using your library card, yo...

With a new deck and especially easy access to our kitchen from it, it made sense to finally upgrade our 12 year old grill. With my Brothe...

So, yeah, I have to admit it - I like our new TV . But, you know what was almost as good a feeling as turning on that slim and bright wonde...

And what is Retro-camera-itis? It's when you look at a site like Photojojo's Tumblr and love the retro looking images, and then ma...

A few months back I had a brilliant idea: I noticed that we really don't watch much TV and when we do, we often just do so on hulu via...