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. [...]

Came across an interesting article about airline carryon limits. To me, the fundamental problem is that you can’t trust the airlines to safely handle checked baggage, and they won’t guarantee the safety of your items in checked baggage (at least, without ridiculous charges). Airline baggage handlers seem to have sticky fingers, which is absolutely intolerable. [...]

Courtesy of the BBC, the rules of advertising. Some choice entries: 12. Children will not eat fruit or vegetables. Ever. 19. Professional people have strangely trivial preoccupations, e.g. a female barrister who is morbidly obsessed with finding a healthy snack bar. 23. Women never merely hop in and out of the shower, instead preferring to [...]

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 [...]

Courtesy of the NY Times, an article on employers and blogging. There’s a lot of gray area around what you can say about your employer in a public forum. Personally, I tend to err on the side of caution. Talking about cubicle layouts and maybe the occasional Dilbert-esque moments are about all I’m going to [...]

Came across a great article on identity theft over at c|net. Here’s a snippet: Financial institutions need to be liable for fraudulent transactions. They need to be liable for sending erroneous information to credit bureaus based on fraudulent transactions. They can’t say that the user must keep his password secure or his machine virus-free. They [...]

Wired had an interesting article on the future of toilet design today. All I can say is that it’s about time. I hate low-flow toilets. I probably have to break out the plunger at our house at least twice a week. We’ve got bathroom remodeling in our future, so one of these better-designed toilets will [...]

A rather humorous bit I came across in the last edition of Tuesday Morning Quarterback, the NFL’s column that talks football and occcasionally diverges, as seen here: Last week, the column noted Taco Bell’s “grilled carne asada steak” means “grilled roasted meat steak.” Eric Lund of Anaheim, Calif., home of the Los Angeles Angels of [...]

Nice to have someone over at ESPN cheerleading for the Illini today. It was nice to walk past the section of the office that has a lot of Michigan State alumni this morning and just smile. Course, Dickie V still can’t give us all props: However, I feel that the Illini will not run the [...]

Just an interesting article on the development and the guts of the best-selling MP3 player in the world.

Found a great article by Sen. John McCain about this. Definitely worth a read.

The age old question – is it soda or is it pop? Finally, an answer. I’m originally from soda country (Madison County, IL), am currently (for 2 more days) living in soda country (Lewis County, NY), and then moving into pop countrry (Cook County, IL). Fortunately, the Chicago area has enough transplants that it’s not [...]

Every now and then, I watch Law & Order reruns on TNT while I’m eating dinner. A columnist in the Sun-Times excerpted some of Lenny’s (one of the cops) great crime-scene 1-liners as he’s leaving for yeat another of the L&O spinoffs (I predict the series will in some way shape or fashion be on [...]

After watching that cheesy “10.5″ mini-series on NBC this weekend, I came across this website dedicated to the physics of movies: Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics Movie physics are of course not to be confused with the cartoon rules of physics I’ve blogged about previously. Movies that get “good physics” reviews? Road to Perdition, Seven Years [...]

When I was a kid, I’d play video games at a friend’s, since my parents wouldn’t get me a Nintendo. When we’d play for hours, our thumbs would get sore, a condition we called “Mario-itis” (yep, I was a geek back then, too). Turns out that maybe Mom and Dad should’ve gotten me one: Video [...]

…doing research around Guinness. Researchers have shown that the bubbles actually can fall down the sides of the glass without violating laws of physics. Using a super-slow-motion video camera — able to record 750 frames a second — Stanford University scientists with a penchant for some cold Guinness have confirmed that beer bubbles do fall. [...]

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

Oddly disturbing: Ohio salad arrives with piece of thumb As someone who works around food all the time, and deals a lot with ensuring food processes are safe, it’s just a bit disturbing that this sort of thing could happen.

…if everything in the world got good all of a sudden? Would Google News look like this?

I came across this rather funny article about California’s perception of the rest of the U.S. Of course, other places in the US have the same problem. When I went to college at UIUC, I think a few people in my dorm freshman year didn’t realize there’s a lot of Illinois which is south of [...]