BenSpark Family Adventures

... and Andy and Rondi of course. Stephen is Andy and Rondi’s Golden Doodle. A Golden Doodle is a cross between a Golden Retriever and a Poodle. Stephen is a very cute puppy, he is 10 weeks old and is very smart. He already understand the command to sit. Andy and Rondi are smart folks too because they are working really hard to train Stephen to do a number of things, one thing they are training him to do is ring a bell when he needs to go outside. So each time they take Stephen outside now, they kick little bell by the door and this is to let Stephen associate the sound to going out so then eventually he can alert Andy and Rondi that he needs to go outside. We had a great meal of chicken on the grill, Thanks for braving the elements Andy, corn on the cob, always a treat with dinner, and a fresh salad with blue cheese crumbles and walnuts. Then for dessert we had brownies a la mode with walnuts and hot fudge. After dinner we played a couple of board games, first up was Scene It . Allis...

Hi everyone. Allison had an idea. We are interested in what our friends think they look like as south park characters. So please send us your South Park Character and I will put it up on the site. It will be a new feature, I’ll add it to the sidebar. Here’s what you need to do. 1. Go to the South Park Character Generator . (If you get an error try the link again, it does work.) 2. Create your Character 3. When you are done push the Print Screen button on your keyboard. 4. Open Paint 5. Under Edit choose Paste

I have posted about Christopher Williams before. He is a singer songwriter that Allison and I love to go and see. He is also the inspiration behind Photo-A-Day. We were very fortunate to see him in Norton about 6 months ago and get a chance to talk to him. At that time he mentioned that he was going to begin opening for Jars of Clay. Well at Live 8 this past weekend he played with the band during their set in Philly. You can see the other artists too at AOL. Live 8 videos. How did we hear about this? Well, Allison is signed up for the CDub newsletter and got it in her e-mail yesterday with links to the videos. The two songs are Flood and Show your Love. Christopher is the guy in the back playing a bongo type instrument (it has a name I can never remember or spell), His head is shaved and he has a goatee. And we can see him from time to time when the lead singer moves out of the way. Christopher is coming back this way to play Soulfest with Jars of Clay. Soulfest is a 5 day 5 stage Chri...

Photo-A-Day #91 07/08/05 Tonight Allison and I went over to Andy and Rondi’s house. They have a new Puppy! His name is Stephen. He already knows how to sit and he’s ten weeks old. He is a Golden Doodle. And he is very cute.

I am connected to a free service called Stat Counter that tracks how many visitors come by this site. From time to time I like to check out how many first time visitors and how many returning visitors are coming to the site. What this service also does is check out online searches and how often The BenSpark comes up on searches. It is very interesting what we get hits for. Here are some examples from today. 13:28:13 www.google.com chris cotton blues 12:02:14 search.yahoo.com robot chicken clips 12:01:50 search.yahoo.com pictures of rex quan-do from napoleon dynamite 11:29:01 search.yahoo.com robot chicken clips 10:54:03 search.yahoo.com dane cook quotes 10:43:48 search.yahoo.com dukes of hazzard movie 10:34:25 www.google.com transformers energon treadshot in stock 10:33:27 www.google.com transformers energon treadshot in stock 09:21:47 search.yahoo.com allison williams video free 09:05:02 search.yahoo.com robot chicken clips 08:53:11 search.yahoo.com robot chicken clips And these are j...

Photo-A-Day #90 07/07/05 Chupa Chups Tongue Painter Lollipops. They are to blame for this blue tongued disaster. Again playing with the macro lens and found I could swivel the LCD view screen around to take a picture of my own tongue. I guess I’ll be putting the 360’s tongue scraper to the test when I get home.

Okay I’ve just about had it with Google Adsense. I added it to the sidebar to see if anyone click on the links. People do click the links, however I am not getting any revenue from the clicks. Well sometimes I do and sometimes I do not. It is weird. Another thing that is weird is that it almost always has ads for other blogs. Like the only keyword that the ads pick up is that of blog. It is annoying. Adsense is supposed to pick up on the content of your website. This website is not about blogs! I have links for Beer, Transformers, Musicians. And all google picks out is the word blog. I am trying another experiment and adding the ads to the bottom of each post. Just some small text stuff to see if that makes a difference in the content of the ads. Since the google ads seemed to be only showing up for the first post of the page. I figured that the Amazon.com ads would work the same way, nope. Amazon.com ads ended up affixing themselves to each post. But you know what that is fine. I beli...