BNJMN

It’s been nearly two and a half years since I’ve posted anything to a blog. That’s a long time, isn’t it? I got an email from my wonderful webspace company, reminding me that I will be billed in a few weeks if I’m planning to keep my webspace and url and all those fun digital products and services. It’s not a ton of money to keep a website, but it’s a lot of money if I’m just wasting it. I would rather have $5 in my pocket than throw $5 down a storm pipe. Storm pipe? Is that a real thing? What I love about websites is their permanence. Well, if I decline to pay the good OneAndOne folks, then my site will be, to say the least, un-permanent. But websites and blogs are like stone tablets compared to the disposable records we share through Snapchat and messaging platforms. Even Twitter and Facebook, you get instant shares, instant likes, but I couldn’t tell you what I tweeted a month ago. I could look it up to an extent, but there isn’t always that context, that base. Thoughts and mes...

Much has happened in the past month. I've been to two concerts, tried Geocaching, got an iPhone, cleaned my website, and got into following the municipal election. Concerts: Jason Mraz and Stars. Both were fantastic in their own way. I met Mr. A-Z (do people call him that? Shoulda asked), and fell in love with a few of his new songs, most notable What Mama Say. First concert at Scotiabank Place, to! Stars had fantastic lighting and a great crowd, and are really good live. Very impressed. iPhone: iPhone4. Is there more to say? It's perhaps the best device I've ever owned. Website: It was attacked somehow recently, and unwanted script ended up on every page. So I cleaned it out old school, and now there shouldn't be any malware warnings when people visit. Check it out: BenjaminWood.Net ! My blog, as part of the site, had also been flagged, so I hadn't updated it just because of that headache. Maybe I'll write more often now. Geocaching: One of the results of havi...

My blog has moved! There were lots of fancy terms involved, including migration, canonical, cname, and propagated, but it was all very simple to do (thanks largely to Google's Blogger team). now instead of being at benjaminwood.net/blog, they will be at blog.benjaminwod.net. HUGE difference, am I right? School is beginning to wind down, after some huge, but successfully completed assignments. Only one presentation to go, plus exams. Speaking of presentations, I gave one about product placement yesterday, and have made it available at on my site ( www.benjaminwood.net/presentation ) because it's so cool. I basically took an iPad picture and made it interactive, included video, and made little apps to go from one slide to the next. And I guess while I'm gushing about site-related business, I made a few minor updates, including a new picture that I use for my site's main navigation. I can't wait to have more time to add more content to my site. And play videogames. Ph...

In between all the pain of recovering, drastically rearranged sleep schedule, and trying to stay comfortable, I have been able to update my website ( www.benjaminwood.net ). I had the idea over a year ago, what took so long was finding a reasonable design for the portfolio, as well as filling that portfolio. It's become very tricky to make a personal website these days. Thanks to all the features of Youtube, Myspace, Twitter, and Facebook - and to a lesser extent delicious, reddit, linkedin, and dozens of other sites - there isn't a whole lot to do yourself. I guess, the ultimate would be to combine all these social networks into a coherent, useful site. But I'm sure such a feature already exists. Part of this design was to change around this blog so that it fits better with the site as a whole. I did what I could, but I'm afraid any more changed would cause the template to explode! So, I'll see what I can end up adding to the site. I imagine, however, that 99% of a...

I attended one class this week - the first class of the semester, as it turned out. And it was a busy one. It's almost overwhelming how much work there will be to do before April rolls around. But once it does, the question becomes, what to do then? Fortunately, I have well over a hundred days to figure that one out. I did make a logo, though I had surgery on Tuesday. Talk about a strange experience... One minute you're playing with the heart rate monitor in the operating room, trying to lower your heart-rate, the next a man walks in and plays with the IV unit... and the next you're struggling to make out one of any of the several clocks that adorn the recovery room. And your throat is beyond dry. And it hurts to move. Then when you make it home, it's as if very little has even happened. "the pain's not too bad," you say, "it's been worse before!" And then you wake up the next day. Pain killers have been a good friend ever since. But not one ...

Yesterday, I was just abuzz with energy, so I began work on my website, for the first time in about two years. And surprisingly, I'm almost done! Hopefully I'll get enough work done on it this weekend so that it can go up. The image is just a snippit of what'll be shown on the site. And the Sens aren't in the playoffs anymore! I was looking forward to working on those dead nights where the entire city is collectively focused on televisions big and small not in the store. Oh well, what's that great Ottawan saying? "There's always next year"?