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Link broken. Sorry about that, http://www.bengarvey.com/2012/03/31/list-of-interesting-places-in-8-bit-google-maps should work

Looks like http://www.bengarvey.com/2012/03/31/list-of-interesting-places-in-8-bit-google-maps/has a pretty good list of interesting places

I wrote a tetris variant in Tk that runs pretty well.

Ok, it barely refreshes fast enough to be playable.

But still, it's awesome. Try it and you'll find out why.

Play Spew.

Here's a shamless plug for my similar ecology simulator with food and bugs that duke it out for survival. They occasionally mutate, too.

bugfight (Windows exe and perl sources included for other platforms)

Shameless plug for my version of Tetris: Spew. The board spins around and zooms in and out. Written in Perk/Tk, but there's a compiled version for windows.

Screenshots here

Shameless plug for my version of Tetris: Spew. The board spins around and zooms in and out. Written in Perk/Tk, but there's a compiled version for windows.

Screenshots here

This old guy used to pay me $15/hour in college to help him out with his computer. I'd set things up for him and transfer files from his Mac to his new PC. He used email and the Internet every single day, so I was shocked to hear him ask me the following question.

"Hey Ben, if I have the address of a web site how do I get there without a search engine?"

"Do you see that white bar at the top of the browser?"

"Yeah, it says 'http://www.altavista.com'"

"Type the address in there"

As odd as that request was, I stopped returning his calls after he left this message on my answering machine. Can you figure out what the heck he is saying?

So far I'm the only person I know who can beat a game I made (not that many have tried).

Spew, a tetris clone where the board spins around while you try to play. There are 7 levels. See if you can beat it.

I recently wrote a game using Perl and the Tk module. It's a tetrisesque game with an awesome variant (I don't want to spoil the surprise), and it has been known to induce motion sickness.

I included the source code and a windows binary (compiled using perl2exe).

Give Spewtris a try!

Don't mind my redundant sig...

If I had to teach a bunch of kids how to program, I'd easily choose Perl as a starting language. It's portable, well supported, and can do just about anything.

Perl/Tk can even be used to make some cool GUI apps, like my new Bugfight! program.

Try my college Assembly game project -

Nuclear Beach Party!

I wrote a module for my site that caches headlines from feeds you enter in.

Check it out.

(You need to register to edit the feeds you want to subscribe to)

I was in McDonalds the other day and the standard menus above the cashiers were replaced by hi def plasma screens with the menus printed on them. They also had ads running for their various food items. It looked fantastic, although I try not to eat there on principle.

It would be great if someone hacked into their wi-fi network and change the menu items to include more exotic items:

French Fries $2.49
Chicken Nuggets $3.99
Grimace Testicles $1.99

"The current rates for bandwidth at this scale are about $1/GB of transfer"

I host my site at ipowerweb and their rates are $7.95/month for 30GB of traffic. That's about $0.27 per GB of data, not $1 as you claim. If your other figures are accurate, you can have 1000 daily visitors on a video blog for $96 a year.

Digging out my car two weeks ago wasn't fun enough.

Feel free to share my music files:

bengarvey.com

I'm trying to do the same thing with my website: BenGarvey.com

Rather than looking for very innovative ways of promoting yourself online I think a better strategy would be to work 10 times harder at it than any other band.

Play your shows and promote your website to the audience, contact online zines (Origivation is a good one for Philly area artists), cross promote with other bands/venues, and try to play gigs at venues with a decent web presence (The Grape Street Pub is a good example in Philly).

Of course, putting your music out there in high quality music formats (the low quality scheme may trick people into thinking your music is low quality) is a no brainer for indie rockers. Do it.

Above all else your goal should be to be a few people's favorite band rather than be liked by many. Word of mouth is always spread faster by hardcore fans.

Not that any of this has worked for me at all...

I just posted the letter I sent to my representative.

In Philadelphia, venues like the Grape Street Pub do much more than promote their own shows. They are trying to build a thriving original music scene in philly, especially with the compilations they sell and put out on the web.

Local music magazines are also much better at promoting local musicians to the people who will actually come out to see them. Origivation is a good example for Philadelphia.

Ben Garvey
Acoustic Rock : http://www.bengarvey.com