From the Doghouse
A look at dogs having fun
Poser Gallery
My gallery of pictures I’ve created in Poser
My Science Fiction and Fantasy stories
Stories I’ve written
Nature by Carol
A look at the less technical side of life
Data Mining For Personality Clues
I find understanding people every bit as difficult as trying to crack an encrypted file. I spend a lot more time at trying to understand people because I believe communication requires mutual understanding. While taking Udacity’s Cryptography course I learned about...
What’s Your Opinion On MOOCs?
A good friend sent me this link because he knew that I often recommend Udacity courses, San Jose State suspends collaboration with online provider. The story tells how San Jose University is scaling back their partnership with Udacity because things were not going as...
Did The Ninjas Use Mental Telepathy?
Remain calm. Act normal and look around slowly to make sure no one is watching you. I don’t want to scare you but I may have stumbled on an ancient technique of the Ninjas. If I'm right, my hope is to spread it widely before I’m silenced. We've all had the sensation...
Sundae Thanks You
In Udacity’s Psychology course, the second lesson discusses the ethics of psychological experiments and how important it is to make sure everyone involved understands they are taking part in a test. I'm sure my readers understood my previous post was an experiment but...
Suppose You Built A Blog And No One Came
Imagine your disappointment, if after building an entertainment park, your only visitors were robots for Google Street View (no references to EuroDisney please). When I started this blog, I never imagined how hard it was to get readers to my website. I should have...
Imagination, It Allows Us To See The Impossible
I did this post after creating a scene in Poser showing my wife’s fondness for old cemeteries. I’ve never understood her fascination with them but her imagination allows her to reflect on these people’s lives and their contributions to society. My imagination only...
Random Posts
Tired Of Being Spied On? Support Data Gathering TaxesIt’s fall again and with the lower temperatures I tend to take longer showers. Those of you that visit my site frequently know what that means, more time for me to think about solving world problems. My first shower of the season and I think I’ve really found a gem this time. It’s a given […]
Where Have All The Mentors Gone?It’s easy to forget there was a time before the Internet, before YouTube and before Facebook. Nowadays if you want to know how to change the power window motor on your 1994 Ford pickup, you pull up Google and do a search. Odds are good that someone has made a video telling you how. As […]
Opinionbypen Hits 10,000 ViewsSometime this last week, Opinionbypen had its 10,000th page view. For those of you who, like myself, love numbers, that’s an average of 556 views a month or 18 views a day. I’m proud of that number because those are page views by real humans, not bots. If I counted visits from bots the number […]
Random Posts
Why You Never Ask An Engineer, What Are You Thinking?It’s been a beautiful evening. The meal was delicious. The waiter had been right, the dessert was to die for. Noticing the smile on his face, you reach out and gently grasp your beloveds’ hand. In a warm voice, full of love and contentment, you say, “What are you thinking?” Your companion squeezes your hand […]
UdacityWhen I signed up for CS101: Building a Search Engine at www.Udacity.com, I had no idea what to expect. I’ll admit what I really wanted to sign up for was CS373:Programming a Robotic Car. After a careful examination of the requirements for CS373, I realized I’d always wanted to build a search engine. Udacity is […]
Nothing Personal But I Don’t Trust Your EmailThe idea for this post started with an email from a friend asking me if I had ever been an attorney and this link, http://abovethelaw.com/2013/02/inside-straight-assuming-that-people-are-idiots/. That’s two strikes against it right there, I dislike attorneys and I don’t like blind links. What swayed me to read this was the relationship I have with my friend, […]
Random Posts
A Design Principle Frequently ForgottenIn his lectures on rhetoric, Professor Michael Drout said write what your audience needs to hear, not what you want to say. Each time he said that I nodded my head in agreement. This concept was important enough that he repeated it several times at various points in his lecture. About the third time this […]
Handwriting as a training method?There are a number of people that would describe my personality as a tightly closed book, written in small font, in code. I wasn’t always this open. When I still lived in the city I had a ritual for starting my weekend. On Saturday morning I would walk to a used bookstore to pick out […]
Saying Thank You, It’s Not That HardThe first time I entered a library I was overwhelmed by all the information. At the time I was more interested in all the science fiction but I soon learned that there was much more than just fiction. I never considered how much work went into putting that repository of knowledge together for my benefit. […]
From the Doghouse -It’s all about them
A look at dogs having fun!
Short Stories
With posts like these, ever wonder what kind of fiction I would write?
Random Posts
- Tired Of Being Spied On? Support Data Gathering TaxesIt’s fall again and with the lower temperatures I tend to take longer showers. Those of you that visit my site frequently know what that means, more time for me to think about solving world problems. My first shower of the season and I think I’ve really found a gem …
The Me Too Movement, One Woman’s OpinionI want to make it very clear that this was not written by me. I could give the standard disclaimer about the opinions expressed here and so on but as a male, I’m not qualified to express an opinion on the topic. However, as a woman who has spent over …
The Sunshine Greenhouse, a Six Hour ProjectEvery year that my wife and I went to the State Fair of Texas, we looked at greenhouses. My wife would always tell me she wanted one. I always had plenty of excuses not to get one, we could not decide on a model, we could not decide on a …
Symbols Of Power, The Exclamation PointThey say symbols have power. My first response as an engineer is to deny that. Symbols don’t have any power, the power of a symbol is based only on our perception of the symbol. You could say symbols represent power. If we’ve never seen the symbol or don’t recognize it, …
The Sundae Style of Management, Please Don’t Try This At WorkIt’s been fairly busy at work this month and nobody wanted to help me out by writing a guest blog. In a moment of desperation, I agreed to let Sundae share her views on management. To be fair, I have worked for managers who seemed to share many of her …