Despite my technophilia, until this year we still did not own any flat-panel televisions. Using some clever logic (combined with a Christmas bonus), I talked Amanda into getting one for our bedroom. It worked out pretty well… getting the existing TV / stand out of the doorway, and saving our shins from countless bruises. Being a well-informed consumer, I was concious of some of the pitfalls to avoid when buying something like this, but I was amazed at how much I was influenced, or at least tempted by crazy marketing strategies, even after the purchase!

Continue reading Marketing is Insane →

The Scrambled Mind of Benjamin Flessner is an intentionally non-flashy website that is essentially a giant ‘About Me’ page.  I made its first incarnation shortly after creating DigiMuzik.com in the late 90’s.  I like the very simplistic nature of raw HTML, and since I consider myself more of a web ‘programmer’ than a web ‘designer,’ I never added much for styling. There’s very little CSS in use, and the random sprinklings of JavaScript are more for fun than function. In fact, I installed MultipleIE in an XP VM and was impressed to see that most of my site renders just fine back in IE3.0 (though the Javascript doesn’t work until a couple versions later).

I certainly don’t expect it to be an immensely popular site… in fact, Google seems to have refused to index it properly, and I’m trying to figure out why. In any case, I do it mainly for my own enjoyment, but if you’re trying to figure out anything about me, you could do worse…   If you feel like digging or sharing or whatever the kids are calling it these days, feel free. I’ll probably tweet any significant updates to the few followers (8 as of this writing!) who might or might not care.

In any case… each letter stands for a page with some information about me or something that interests me.  Though they sometimes change, they’ve been stable enough over the last year or two that I can write about them with confidence.

S – Songs I like –  It used to be Lyrics under L, but I was concerned about copyright violations and decided to play it safe.

C – Computers and other gadgets I own

R – Ramblings – Sort of like Twitter, only spread out over a few years

A – Archives – Where old letters go to die when I replace them

M – Me – A brief bio of yours truly

B – Book Reviews – a collection of books I’ve read over the years and my thoughts/reactions to them (It used to be Bus Stuff, but that got a bit static… though my bus pages are still pretty easy to find.)

L – Lists – This has gotten pretty random as well, but it includes Benwords and my own, small version of the 555-LIST.

E – Entertainment – Mostly favorite comics and game site links, but I’ve been expanding it a bit lately

D – Decisions – My most recent fun adventure! I’ve made unique pages for over 100 words that start with D. Your job is to guess them and enjoy the results (and try to find all of them, though, of course, there’s a trick to it!). It even keeps score, if you allow cookies in your browser (and who doesn’t, these days?).

That’s it! Well, there are a couple of hidden Easter eggs, including a guest book (which, actually, isn’t too hidden if you read the changelog), but it’s full of content, and I actually update it every once in awhile (more often that I wrote blog posts, to tell the truth).