I have been a professional software engineer for over 10 years.
I have written many kinds of software, but my particular strengths are interactive graphics applications,
compilers and interpreters, and algorithms.
I also enjoy writing,
woodworking, and
home improvement.
Also this.
Resumé
Email Me
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Tuesday, October 31, 2000
Like many people, I suspect, we don't watch much TV in the summer when it's all reruns. Inevitably, each summer we'll discover a new show or two from watching its summer reruns, and a handful of formerly regularly-watched shows will fail to retain our interest over the summer hiatus. Our new show is The West Wing, which we discovered once someone pointed out that it's a product of Aaron Sorkin, who did Sports Night, which we loved and mourn (he also wrote A Few Good Men and The American President, by the way). Shows in which we've lost interest: Ally McBeal (mostly), Law & Order, and ER. We're anxiously awaiting, as every year, the return of NYPD Blue (not till January, dammit!). And as much as I like it, after all these years I still can't seem to manage to watch X-Files with any regularity -- I simply must get a ReplayTV!
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Saturday, October 28, 2000
After a little more than a year as neo-Luddites, we finally got a cellphone again. (Actually, I reactivated my old one - it survived a fall off of the roof of my car at 40mph, so I figure it has earned my loyalty.) I have mixed emotions about cellphones, but I got sick of looking for payphones.
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After Kevin made me think about those "flip-clocks," I had to go over to eBay and buy one.
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Thursday, October 26, 2000
Oh man that's funny - pictures of winners of an "I look like my dog" contest.
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Wednesday, October 25, 2000
My brother-in-law and I are such geeks. He asked me to do a back-of-the-envelope calculation of how many leaves there are on all the trees in the world, and he would do the same, and then we would compare answers. When we were done, we found that although we'd used fairly different methods to calculate the number, our numbers differed from one another by just a little over 17%! (His was 5x1015, mine was 5.886x1015.) Now I wish I knew what the actual number is, so we could see how far off we are from that.
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Friday, October 20, 2000
Megan noticed the ram logo on the front of a Dodge van the other day, and I pointed out that our van was just the same except for the logo on the front, which was a...? It's a Plymouth, and it turns out the logo is a sailboat or something, but I had no idea. This got Cathy and I talking about how unmemorable many car logos are; see how many of the ones on the right you recognize. You'll quickly realize how some of these logos are really good, and some you will have no clue which company they belong to. Makes you wonder how much thought goes into these things; doubtless a lot of time and money are spent choosing these logos, and yet, in many cases, you still can't match them to their manufacturer despite seeing them for years. I also find it interesting how very similar many of them are. By the way, here are the answers.
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Tuesday, October 17, 2000
Cathy asked me the other night: How could you figure out how much your head weighs? (Aside from decapitation, of course.) The best we could come up with, which is probably pretty accurate, is to use your weight and the total volume of your body (which you can figure out using water displacement) to figure out your body's average density, and then use that density and the volume of your head (again, figured out using displacement) to derive your head's weight. This assumes that your head has about the same average density as your entire body, which I'm guessing is probably reasonably close to being accurate.
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I wonder why I've never seen any of the photo-processing companies offer the option of printing your photos as a ViewMaster reel?
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Monday, October 16, 2000
Somebody made a thing they're calling a propellor clock; this is a single vertical row of LEDs mounted on a motor, with circuitry that "draws" the clock in the air by changing the pattern on the LEDs as the motor spins the whole assembly. I remember thinking of this when I was about 10 years old (a little over - gulp! - 20 years ago), but at the time I didn't have the mechanical know-how to actually build it. I had completely forgotten about it until I saw that link; I wonder if I still have that page of notes somewhere?
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Thursday, October 12, 2000
Startup idea I'll never use: What if a search engine ranked its results based (in part) on their similarity to the pages in your bookmarks? It seems pretty obvious that pages similar to ones you've already decided you like are more likely to be useful to you. The problem is that the search engine's pages are over there, your bookmarks are here, and the actual content those bookmarks point to is over somewhere else. There could be some sort of handshaking scheme whereby the engine grabs your bookmarks, but that seems invasive, not to mention slow. Perhaps a search engine and one of those web-based bookmark companies could work together (or, more likely, one of the former could buy one of the latter); that way, all the necessary information would be in one place. If someone wants to try this out, be my guest; either cash or options are fine by me :-).
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I just discovered the Overheard section of glassdog. Oh man, best laughs I've had since 100% Cheese Taco.
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Wednesday, October 11, 2000
I saw this on some dumb piece of paraphernalia the other day, but the numerical date of next New Year's is pretty cool-looking: 01-01-01. Cathy and I also noticed that this is binary for 21, and that's technically the first day of the 21st century (though I keep saying, when people say that, that they aren't even sure when Christ was born, so bickering over whether there was a year 0 is moot anyway; for all we know, we could be off by 5 years either way). Similar geeky date trivia: 11-19-1999 was the last day with all odd digits until 1-3-3111, and 2-2-2000 was the first with all even digits since 8-28-888.
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Oh, my redesign buried the link to that wonderful (though embarassing) picture of me and my TRS-80, around 1980.
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Yet another redesign. I like this one pretty well; let's see if I can leave it alone for a while. You may notice the influence of several other webloggers' sites that I've been reading lately, especially 2xy.org (whose design is just gorgeous) and fury.com.
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Tuesday, October 10, 2000
I saw Three Kings the other night (which was pretty good), and I can't stop chuckling about the phrase, "Iraqi ass map." Apparently I'm not alone.
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Another author tries e-publishing a novel, and this one gets it right: David Pesci, the author of Amistad, is electronically publishing his second novel, The Satori Effect. Unlike a certain author, whose baroque distribution scheme involves a lot of waiting and a serious risk of buying part of the novel and never getting the ending because less-honest people didn't pay, Pesci's scheme is simplicity itself. You can download the first 120 pages for free, and then for $10 you can get the rest of the novel. "Keep it simple" in action. Oh, and I'm only 90 pages in, but the book is pretty good, too. However, a note to e-book publishers: make it available in 2-up, and maybe even 4-up, format. This one, for example, is 600+ pages long, in 12-point font, double-spaced; it would be plenty readable in 2-up, and would require half the paper.
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Monday, October 09, 2000
For the first time in literally years, my trip to California last night went flawlessly. My cab arrived on time (and, as an aside, the driver looked and sounded exactly like Marsellus Wallace), my flight out of Newark pushed back 10 minutes early (!), my connection in Denver left on time, I was on the gold board at Hertz and even got a decent car. I feel like I'm going to have to get hit by lightning or something to balance this out.
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Wednesday, October 04, 2000
Something today reminded me of the Suck parody of SlashDot, which I thought was just brilliant. Then again, I've already demonstrated that my taste in parody is, perhaps, not overly discriminating.
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Tuesday, October 03, 2000
When I created this weblog (aka "blog"), I gave it the title "Cup 'o Joe." Not the most original title, but one that's been banging around my web site since there was hardly such a thing as a web. Anyway, it just occurred to me that I should have called it "snoop bloggy blog."
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Monday, October 02, 2000
Fury today was expressing a yearning for a dot-matrix printer, which reminded me: I've been looking for years for one of those clocks where the numbers are printed in halves on little pieces of plastic, and it changes the time by flipping down the next little half-piece of plastic -- plup! There's just something cool about how that little noise marks the passing of time; it's subtle, not a tone, or a chime, or a bell, but just that little plup! that lets you know -- but only if you're paying attention -- that another minute has passed. I've seen funky, modern renditions of this, but somehow it's not the same if it's not enclosed in a big, ugly clock-radio. One of these days I'll find one at a yard sale, and my life will be complete.
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I was a die-hard Mac user for over a decade. Then, about a year and a half ago, my Performa's monitor died, and we had pretty much outgrown the machine anyway. At this point, my development for work was on NT, and I gave in to the cheap hardware, the lure of a heterogeneous home network, and the ubiquity of Windows, and I bought a Wintel machine. Though I think it was the right decision, it still causes me pain, especially now that MacOS X is out. Maybe by the time we outgrow this Wintel machine, they will have ironed the bugs out of MacOS X and I can rejoin the flock.
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After Kevin made me think about those "flip-clocks," I had to go over to eBay and buy one.
