Ben’s Weblog

So, John McCain and a bunch of Presidential hopefuls have set up MySpace pages in order to connect with the oh-so-cool younger voters. It seems that one of McCain’s staffers decided to use a nice-looking template for his page. Said staffer made a little whoopsie though – they linked back to the template designer’s images. [...]

Sometimes, it’s ok to say “Yeah, we suck” – as evidenced by an apparently disgruntled employee following up to my post a couple months back about the poor customer service I got when attempting to get a warranty replacment of my Magellan GPS unit. New comment on your post #158 “Magellan GPS – Poor Customer [...]

I’ve been having a rather frustrating experience with Magellan GPS (Thales Navigation) as of late. Last Christmas, Marcie got me one of their SporTrak Color hand-held GPS units. I played around with it a little bit over the winter, took it on a couple of flights with me, etc, but I never really dug into [...]

Nice to see someone in the media business actually gets it as far as making media available for public consumption. Too bad they’re on the wrong side of the pond. My favorite bit is at the end of the article: In 2003, when the BBC switched off the encryption on its satellite feeds, allowing anyone [...]

If you run your own blog, you’ve probably had to deal with comment spam. Even here on my own lightly-visited site (500 MB/month typical transfers), I’m getting 5-10 per day. Seriously, who are these people fooling? You’re putting ads up for absolute crap on the sites of people who are least likely to visit your [...]

From the folks at US News: It was the lead item on the government’s daily threat matrix one day last April. Don Emilio Fulci described by an FBI tipster as a reclusive but evil millionaire, had formed a terrorist group that was planning chemical attacks against London and Washington, D.C. That day even FBI director [...]

Stumbled across an interesting article in the NY Times today on airfare rules, and how people are bending them in order to save money by doing things like using only half of a round-trip ticket. What gets me is the tortured logic the airlines use to justify some of their rules. Here’s a quote from [...]

Coming to you from Wired’s Furthermore… section: Rutgers University has turned its attention to a new area of health concern: The Simpsons. A team of researchers analyzed 63 episodes of the hit cartoon show for health-related messages and was alarmed by the study’s findings. “Fats, sweets and alcohol, particularly beer, doughnuts and salty/fatty snacks, accounted [...]

Nice to know my hometown has such a great national reputation.

Ok, this just struck me as funny…over on the right hand side of this page, you can see a section that says “Recent Google queries that led here” – I have a little hack which recognizes when you come to see me via Google, and tells what you searched for. Someone got here via searching [...]

This one’s straight out of the “only in New York City” and “government intelligence” departments. Read it here: Osama “Fin” Laden is a threat to national security (link from Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) Nice to see my tax dollars are well spent, as usual. Of course, frequent readers of my site probably know how much I “love” [...]