Small code with powerful results, the occasional opinion … and beer. 

25 Nov 2015
The electronic toll system is about to go the way of the Telcos.

Before I moved to Florida from Maryland in 2005, I had an E-ZPass in Maryland which we used for the Bay Bridge toll payments.  We got it in about 2000, and it was wonderful.  It was a time when electronic toll systems were just getting started in the US.  The big benefit was bypassing the […]

14 Nov 2015
Technology is so SaaS-y, it’s not modeling the real world

“The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like computers.”  — Steven Harris As a software developer, it is sometimes difficult for me to watch technology evolve into the current direction it has taken:  Software as a Service (SaaS).  I have been programming both […]

10 Nov 2015
The Beale Ciphers Solved! … or not?

When I was about 14 years old, I encountered one of the most fascinating puzzles in history: the Beale Ciphers. The Beale Ciphers are widely-known among treasure hunters. What are the Beale Ciphers?  It is a collection of three documents, each of which contained an encrypted message as a sequence of numbers.  The story goes that they were left by a […]

10 Nov 2015
The 26th Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall

I was lucky to be in the United States Air Force and stationed at Tempelhof Central Air Base in Berlin, on the day the Berlin Wall fell: Nov 9, 1989.  It occurred only one month after I married my wife, so the event is strongly etched in both of our minds.  I am occasionally asked where I was when […]