This is a picture of condensation on the inside of a lid on a pot of crab legs cooking on the stove. The water is seconds away from boiling. Crab legs.... yummy.
Many moons ago, in a land far, far away. I wrote my first code when I was working my way through school as a night computer operator. I was so bad at being an operator that I thought they'd fire me, or move me into an accounting position. The reason I was so horrible was that the nightly job consisted of stacking thousands of cards into input hoppers on the computer, and placing critical control cards that had to be absolutely without error in exactly the right place in the stack. It wasn't an impossible job, but to an 18 year old with the attention span of a gnat, I made errors. When I made an error, part or all of the run was trashed and the day people had to rerun my stuff. In desperation, I started reading the manuals, all written in Spanish (Miami), to figure out how I could make the job easier to run and less prone to silly errors. The manuals, were excellently written with lots of examples and flowcharts. IBM really knew how to get the point across. It took me a few we...
In 2005, I wrote one of my first custom mapping projects using the recently released Google Maps API. It was a fairly crude map that used the Census Tiger ZCTA' s (Zip Code Tabulation Area) to display a representation of a Zip Code area. Matt Cutts, at the time, a major player at Google in search, wrote a blog post called "Fun with Zip Codes" that caused my site to get an average of 70,000 unique visitors a day for about a week. The traffic that Matt's blog post caused made me consider that there could be a market for this type of site so I looked deeper into the issue and learned a number of interesting things. The most important thing I learned was that Zip Codes are not areas. They are delivery routes. The USPS draws these delivery routes based on the efficient delivery of mail and nothing else. They can cross city, county and even state lines if it means the mail gets delivered efficiently. Not every address in the US has a Zip Code. This is not obvious for...
Welcome to Zen's World: A Universe of Hard Science and Human Flaws For as long as we have looked to the stars, we have asked the same question: Are we alone? Science fiction has long been fascinated with this idea, painting pictures of first contact that range from utopian encounters to terrifying invasions. But the Zen's World series starts with a more grounded, and perhaps more cynical, question: If we finally got a message from the void, could we, as a species, even handle it? What happens when a discovery of unimaginable value is dropped into a world of corporate cold wars, military paranoia, and deep-seated human flaws? This is the central question at the heart of Zen's World , a narrative-driven science fiction series that blends the meticulous detail of hard sci-fi with the high-stakes tension of a political thriller. It’s a universe built not just on advanced technology, but on the uncomfortable and often brutal realities of human nature. A Future Forged in Rivalry...
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