Ben's Bits

In an effort to make the articles on this site slightly easier for people to find and for me to be able to easily give the site URL to people verbally I have moved the blog portion of my site to it's own URL, bensbits.com. Thanks to the magic of mod_rewrite all of the old URLs should redirect to the new site. I don't guarantee this will be the case forever though so if you are linking to any pages on the blog please find the page again and update your URL.

This move was somewhat spurred by the coverage I'll be doing from CES this year which will include blog postings as well as some A/V material which will be available through a separate site that will be launching soon. Another reason for the move is that the ben.franske.com site has finally received a makeover that has been more than three years in the works and was started over from scratch several times (what can I say, I'm busy). That site now contains some introductory material about myself as well as some information on the many other projects and things I have going on.

Perhaps he's not the first to experiment with it but Steve Spangler has a great deal of information about the now popular (at least with the YouTube and Google Video crowd) sport of creating geysers out of soda pop and mentos on his website. From science teachers looking for an eye-catching and engaging demo for the first day of school to crazy teenagers looking to make "cool stuff" happen in the backyard this experiment is bound to be a crowd pleaser.

I can't help but assume this amusing page is a humorous jest and ploy to sell novelty toys. It looks like someone had a little too much fun with a soldering iron and superglue and decided to dedicate a webpage to it. Interesting considering the rest of the site looks fairly legit. Of course the patent they claim applies to these devices has nothing to do with the devices themselves.

So what am I talking about? You'll have to go see for yourself!

Tonight I upgraded from an outdated CVS version of b2evolution to the latest 1.8 beta. I also had to remove a lot of old spam comments that got away from me and, in the interests of time, dumped all comments made on the site since April. If you posted a (non-spam) comment and it was lost in the purge I apologize. The antispam features are much improved in version 1.8 so we'll see how it holds up in this high traffic environment. If you have any problems or complaints please let me know.

I know that site updates have been few and far between but my life has been quite crazy for, well, a long time now; but especially this summer. I think I can promise a special series of articles in August so stay tuned for those. I also hope to get back to the semi-frequent updates, commentary and news postings you're familiar with.

In other realms I am still working on a complete redesign of the http://ben.franske.com web site, now over two years in the works (some backlog, eh?) I think that the redesign will go live towards the end of August or beginning of September. Of course if you're one of the many people or groups who are waiting for a custom software project it means one less thing in front of you in line. Of course there is that book to write which I've starting plotting out and could consume quite a bit of time...

You may have noticed the lack of updates the last few days. There are a number of reasons for this but it mainly boils down to a hectic schedule the last few days. I will try to get things rolling again on a daily basis in a few weeks but I would like to write a few slightly longer pieces as well so no guarantees! On a slightly related and interesting note I am serving district court jury duty for the next two weeks which promises to be quite an interesting experience and one suitable for at least one blog entry once I've completed my tenure. All I'll say for now is that it's quite the interesting process.