One Billion

A few years ago Dave Brouse and I stumbled upon OneBillionMazes.com. It's a site that has, well, one billion mazes. I learned two things that day:

1. That there is an absolutely foolproof way to navigate out of any maze. Apparently, Dave had learned it from Sean Connery.
2. That I truly didn't grasp the magnitude of one billion.

I wrote the following as an exercise for Sherry's class. From what she tells me, most of the kids really enjoyed it.

Let's print all of the mazes found on onebillionmazes.com! Why not? It's only a billion.

Before you start printing, please compute the following:

A) How long will it take to print them?
B) How much money will I spend on paper?
C) How much money will I spend on ink?
D) How much would the paper weigh?
E) How much room (volume) will I need to store my printouts?

Here is the information you need to compute your answers:

Paper is purchased in packs of 500 sheets, called reams.

• A ream of paper measures 8.5 x 11 inches and is 2 inches thick.
• A ream of paper weighs 5lb (2.25kg).
• A ream of paper costs $5.
• An ink cartridge costs $50
• The printer can print 10 pages per minute.
• The ink cartridge in the printer can print 800 pages before it needs to be replaced.
• Oh, and one more thing. Each maze requires two sheets of paper. One for the maze, and the other of the answer key.

A) 138,888 days, 21 hours, 20 minutes. If you started printing now, you wouldn't finish until the year 2388.

You will have dead for over 300 years.

B) $20,000,000.00 ($20 million)

C) $125,000,000.00 ($125 million)

D) 20,000,000lb (20 million pounds) which is 10,000 tons.

That is equivalent to 758 adult elephants, 5000 cars, or 22 Boeing 747 airplanes.

E) 18,036,265.4 cubic feet, which doesn't mean very much. So let's express it differently.

If the reams of paper were stacked vertically, the column would be 666,666.6 feet high, which is 126 miles. Earth's atmosphere is 29 miles high.

If you laid column paper on its side, it would reach from New York, NY to Ocean City, NJ.

If the reams of paper were stacked in a big cube, it would be 262 feet high, which is as tall as a 26 story building. If we filled every room of our house from floor to ceiling with reams of paper, we would need 600 more houses.

Boomer Net

Our nation is bracing itself as the baby boomer generation dodders into retirement. Industry analysts have been calculating the stress this generation will inflict on our health care system and eventually our cemeteries. But I don't think we're considering the real problem. What about the stress on the interweb?



My mother recently sent an email to my son and me. I noticed that she had the wrong email address for my son.

me:	“Has Grammy ever sent you an email?”
son:	“What? What do you mean?”
me:	“I mean, since you've had your email address, has she ever sent you an email?”
son:	“Dad, I've had my email address for 2 years. I emailed her as soon as I got it. So she could put it in her address book.”
me:	“Right. And since that time, has she ever sent you an email?”
son:	“Dad, that's crazy. Wait. Oh my god.”
me:	“Say it...”
son:	“You know, I've never gotten an email from her.”
me:	“For 2 years.”
son:	“Why?”
me:	“She had the wrong email address in her address book.”
son:	“2 years? Didn't she get a delivery error or something?”
me:	“I'm sure she did.”
son:	“But she never knew what it was or did anything about it?”
me:	“Right.”
son:	“WOW!”

Our boomers also suffer from hearing loss. Tragically, they're unable to hear phrases like:

"DO NOT SEND ME EMAIL FORWARDS AND OR JOKE EMAILS!"

Go ahead and try it. Scream it, if you like. They still won't hear (listen to) you.
Even worse, they won't ever understand simple email etiquette. For example, if you must forward an email to someone, please have the courtesy to trim the chaff, maybe even personalize the message. I had the pleasure of receiving this email from my father-in-law:

with a staggering amount of chaff.



How many terabytes of bandwidth is consumed by boomer email traffic alone? How much disk space is wasted on the same WMV file depicting a monkey falling off of a branch after smelling his own finger? I'm treated to this gem (and many others) about once a year.

Password Madness

I'm usually OK dealing with stupid people. Laughing at their misfortune seems to help. But, I find it really annoying when they make my life difficult.



Like any self-respecting paranoid geek, I proudly employ secure passwords whenever possible. My passwords have:

• 10 or more characters.


• letters (uppercase and lowercase), numbers, AND "special" characters.


• no words or personal information.

Oh, and I use different passwords for each of my accounts.


Recently, I tried to change my passwords for my bank, electric company, and prescription drug provider. They each had their own restrictions.






I like (a phrase, which here means, "I don't like") that they further define "special" characters. No '~', '@', '=', or ':'?


My prescription drug provider assumes their users know what "special" characters are. Oh, and they can't allow their clients to use those crazy spaces.







My electric company explicitly defines the allowable characters, but in my opinion, it is too restrictive.







They also have a nice undocumented restriction (yeah! my favorite). They don't allow passwords greater than 10 characters. They don't tell the user that until they try. I'm sure that doesn't annoy anyone.



As a software developer, I can't think of a reason to restrict a user's password. Maybe the developers were concerned about SQL Injection, which is noble, but why should the user suffer? Why restrict the password maximum length? Is disk space really that precious? Make the database column unrealistically large and forget about it.

Having to lump the developers at SourceForge.net into this short-bus-web-developer category really cuts deep. I feel like I've lost my geek innocence.







It's worse than the time I realized that Hackers wasn't a documentary.