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.

Snarky Son

My oldest son has developed a cutting sense of humor. I'm not sure where he gets it. Probably from school.Sherry was holding up individual housewarming gifts a friend had given her to show me:

Sherry:	“See? I got a some chocolate, a cookbook, a measuring cup, and (showing oddly shaped kitchen shears) scissors for cutting.”
son:	“Really? For cutting”
me:	“He's gotta point.”
Sherry:	“Nice.”

We were shopping at Lowe's. I was busy trying to figure out which plumbing parts I needed for our bathroom renovation. I heard an announcement over the P.A. system about a car in the parking lot. I ignored it.

son:	“Dad, did you hear that?”
me:	“Uh, yeah, but I wasn't listening.”
son:	“They said that there was a red Honda Civic illegally parked in the parking lot and that it was going to be towed.”
me:	“REALLY?!”
son:	“...(rolling his eyes) No dad. And we drove the van.”

Oldest son and I were having a nice conversation about cars. It's a common interest we share, so it makes it easy for us to have father-son-bonding moments. It was going well until he decided to dial-in a little more snark:

me:	“Oh, I had an idea. You know how the stuff always rolls around in the---”
son:	“wait---”
me:	“Hold on, let me finish. The stuff in the trunk is always---”
son:	“Dad, wait!”
me:	“What?!”
son:	“(pausing for dramatic effect; revealing just a hint of a smile)...You have an idea. I just thought you'd want to savor the moment...”
me:	“(struggling to conceal my pride)...Wow...That's harsh!”
son:	“(still maintaining his composure)...Did you to want write this one down? Just to make sure it sounds right, you know, before you embarrass yourself.”

World Wide Asshole

Over a year ago I published an article about the sweet demise of my childhood bully. I know you probably think I'm sick in the head, and I am. But luckily, I have someone to blame.

Writing that article was a cathartic experience for me, and to this day, rereading it lifts my spirits.

I noticed that the visitor count on my blog was steadily rising. I thought this was kind of odd. Sites usually become more popular because they produce compelling content at regular and frequent intervals. Then I realized that the majority of my hits were coming from Google Image Search. People who searched for an image of an "asshole" were rewarded with David Fleming's high school yearbook photo. Awesome.

Warning: Unless you're a Goatse fan, you may want to edit your Google search preferences and the set SafeSearch Filtering to Moderate before you perform this search.

Over the past 6 months I've been watching Mr. Fleming's Google Asshole Index rise. When I first started checking (Yes, I was checking regularly. Shut up.), he appeared on about third page. I got more and more excited whenever his Asshole Index afforded him a higher result position. It was kind of like watching the ball drop on New Year's Eve, or refreshing the Olsen Twins legal age countdown page.





When he finally broke into the top ten, I just couldn't contain myself. I had to let someone know. It feels good knowing that people all over the world associate "asshole" with "David Fleming".

I Heart Amazon

I hate Walmart; not because I'm against a free market economy, but because I despise being in that store. So, since I can't bring myself to buy items at inflated grocery store prices, I'm forced to patronize Walmart about once a month.

Amazon to the rescue!

I've started using Amazon's Subscribe & Save. It's a grocery store with a limited selection. Their shelves are stocked with nonperishable bulk items at cheap¹ prices and the shipping is free. This isn't anything to get excited about.

The "Subscribe" part is what I'm excited about. There are some things I can never seem to remember to buy. When I notice that I'm getting low on razors, I'm never in situation where I can write it down. So when I decided to buy a 12 pack of razors from Amazon, I had to specify a "Delivery Schedule". I'm thinkin' I'll need another 12 pack in 3 months. We'll see. If I've miscalculated the delivery schedule, I can change it later. Also, if I'm running low, I can tell Amazon to send the next shipment right away. Or, if I'm overstocked, I can tell them to skip the next shipment.

Subscribe & Save helps me cut down on mind numbing minutiae of everyday life.

me (head):

"Do I have to stop by Walmart on the way home from work today? No I don't!"

¹Always calculate the unit price, not all items are great buys.

Friendly Competition

It's been a little over a year since I started working at the new company.

I'm feeling more comfortable with my coworkers. Mr. Kratzer and I figured it was time for some friendly competition.



Bring it on Highspire First Church of God. Bring it on.

In related news, one of my religious coworkers tried argue that because atheists are morally bankrupt, it would OK steal candy from our box. Yawn.

Just two days after the competition began, our opponent resigned and removed their candy box.