I had an interesting encounter a little while ago. A 10 year old asked me how much does Distant Suns cost in the App Store. I said “10 bucks.” “Why so much?” he responded…. One of the many paradigms that shifted when the App Store first opened up was the pricing model. It was obvious that the apps would cost less then their CD-ROM/store shelf variants. But how much was underestimated. Apple expected games that might retail for $30 to drop down...

As with so many thousands across this glorious land I stood in line at the local Safeway a couple of days ago eager to see if the rumors were true that the new Second Gen Twinkies had arrived. I was not alone. For after being deprived of its sugary seduction for lo these many cheerless months, relief was but a few hundred feet away. The Twinkie line was a fun filled event as expected. From those who were camped out a week ago to be the first,...

I grew up with space. I grew up learning and memorizing the names of each of the astronauts, their histories, flights and records, much in the same way other kids learned batting averages, home run counts, saves and ERAs about their favorite baseball players. Gemini 7, 14 days in space (14!), Gemini 8, first in flight abort, Gemini 4, first US spacewalk, and on and on. Outside of Christmas or my birthday, launch day for Gemini-this or...

“Green buttons?” you say? Eh? I was working on my own product, Distant Suns for Windows, and thought it would be cool to have some green, retro-type of buttons instead of the usual ugly Windows controls. So I spent about a day crafting some little green buttons only to realize that in the time spent making one window slightly cooler, I could have spent adding a real new feature or squash some real bugs. In other words: I wasted time doing cool...

I think about George at least once a week. George was a teacher. My advanced FORTRAN instructor from about <redacted> years ago to be precise. The reason why I think about this bearded, bespectacled aerospace engineer moonlighting as a community college instructor is that he taught me one of the most important lessons I ever learned in the process of becoming a full fledged software engineer. I had realized that my hopeful career in...

One of most fond memories of my dad were on my inauguration into teen-hood, my 13th birthday, in February 1969.  I don’t recall any of my gifts save for one. I opened up a card from dad, and it was a “ticket” to go out to Florida and see an Apollo launch. I had to choose one of two. The first was the May Apollo 10 mission, when dad was going back to Florida on business. He was planning on stopping by at the Cape and seeing the Apollo 10 launch...