I thought they were gone forever, but it turns out two major commentaries I wrote on Y2K in 1999 and 2000 were hiding in the Internet Wayback Machine. It’s 2023 now, and nearly a quarter of a century has passed since these were written.  If you would like to compare where we are now, versus […]

“The real danger is not that machines will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like machines. ” — Sydney J. Harris (former journalist for the Chicago Daily News) I recently watched a YouTube video about an incident which came close to starting a nuclear war, and it reminded me […]

In 1833, the Supreme Court took on one its more unusual cases: UNITED STATES v. GEORGE WILSON The case does not appear that special at first glance. It involved two defendants named James Porter and George Wilson.  They were accused of a few instances of obstructing the United States mail service, and assaulting and wounding […]

After an unusual set of circumstances, my company has shifted its IT and software development staff into a distributed workforce even though all of us are within a local drive of the office.  Previously other terms were used for this type of work, like working from home or working remotely.  But it is so much […]

“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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

The Fall of the Berlin Wall is an event that is very personal to me, since I was stationed at Tempelhof airbase in Berlin with the US Air Force when it happened.  As the 25th anniversary of the opening of the Berlin Wall is being celebrated in Germany, there are two key people being credited […]

I’ve been really amused over the last few months with some discussions about the best (or at least better) place to live. Currently it’s focused on the city of Pittsburgh or the Central Florida area. The debate between Florida and the rest of the country always seems to be a more heated, emotionally-intense debate.  It […]

This analogy, which I heard long ago while living in Europe, is a very revealing exercise. The story goes as follows: “A Taxi Driver is driving his taxi down a city road at 2:30AM. The traffic light at the intersection he is approaching is red.  As he approaches the intersection, he brings the taxi to a […]