The science fiction Culture novels by Iain M. Banks, a series of 10 books published from 1987 to 2012, has become widely known of late, thanks in part to Elon Musk naming the SpaceX autonomous drone ships after some of the sentient Culture ships in memoriam of Banks who passed away in 2013. I first…
Isle Royale National Park
In July 2022, my friend Brian Headlee and I drove up to Minnesota’s North Shore of Lake Superior for a few days of outdoor adventures, including an excursion to Isle Royal National Park and fishing for the elusive muskellunge. After a long drive from Des Moines, we reached the North Shore and had a great…
Commodore in the Cloud : Part 1
For many years, the cloud was a realm I mostly explored at work during the day. When it came time to climb back down the beanstalk and hang up my plumber overalls and pipe wrench, I was perfectly happy to exist on traditional Linux virtual private servers or physical machines at home like my MacBook…
Activation Function
In 1998 and 1999, I had the pleasure of working at the Adaptive Computing Laboratory in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Iowa State University. I was an undergraduate at the time with a major in Computer Science, and the opportunity to do real research in Artificial Intelligence alongside a dynamic and driven…
Hiking Glacier Gorge
In July 2021, my friend Andy and I woke early and began the hike up Glacier Gorge Trail in Rocky Mountain National Park. Our ultimate goal for this 12.4 mile hike was to reach the 13,500 ft. summit of Pagoda Mountain that connects to Longs Peak via the Keyboard of the Winds. Hiking so early…
Simple BBS in a Commodore Emulator
If you roamed the Earth in the time when every household had a personal computer but only a few had ever heard of something called the Internet, then you probably remember using a modem to dial into a Bulletin Board System or BBS. At that time, unless you were among the lucky few with access…
Beethoven’s Ninth
I am always amazed when I have some time to really listen to Beethoven’s Ninth symphony and imagine him composing that beautiful complexity while being stone deaf. May you all master your own craft to such an extent that you can create great work without the full faculty of your senses!
8-Bit Computing in the 21st Century : Part 2
Let the fun begin! Now that I had a working Commodore 64, I was extremely excited to explore the programs and games from a earlier time in personal computing. I didn’t have a floppy disk drive for this Commodore, but I did have the original data cassette (or datasette) tape drive and using that I…
8-Bit Computing in the 21st Century : Part 1
One of my earliest memories of using a personal computer was hanging out at my friend Mike Wolter’s house in 1986 and playing the text adventure game Zork on his Commodore 64. I vividly remember the ritual of taking the floppy disk out of its paper envelope and inserting it carefully into the disk drive….
Have Coffee Will Travel
Thank you to my friend Brian Headlee for the idea on the Have Coffee Will Travel car kit! Ready to grab and go for any contingency, just add coffee, water, and fire. Equipment List JavaPresse manual burr coffee grinder Hario V60 pour over dripper Hario gooseneck kettle MSR Pocket Rocket 2 stove and fuel (outdoors…