Skills of an Author

Everyone thinks they have a novel in them. Most people are wrong—what they actually have is an anecdote in them, which is a very different animal, the way a goldfish is a very different animal from a blue whale even though they both swim. But for those who genuinely do have a novel in them, the hard truth is that having the novel in your head is not the same as being able to write it. Writing fiction requires at least six distinct skills, and most writers—including published, award-winning, commercially successful writers—are really good at two or three of them and faking the rest.

75: A Seer Without Peer

I turned 75 today. Most people celebrate with cake. I'm celebrating by tallying up the technologies I've invented in a novel thirteen years ago—and discovering how many of them have since walked off the page and into reality.

Sweatin' With The Oldies

In fifth grade at Cathedral Parish School in Panama City, Florida, first period was P.E. It was already muggy by 8 AM in late spring, and I'd just walked a couple of blocks from home after a nice big bowl of Cheerios with banana. Sister took attendance, and we headed across the parking lot to the old Lyceum building, where Coach Drozd promptly got us out of his hair by sending us on a morning run. Down the street we went—right past my house, which I could see but not escape to—and back again. And with the heat, and the running, and the sweating, I threw up the Cheerios and bananas on the sidewalk in front of God and everybody. I also hate throwing up. But not as much as I hate sweating.

Finding Joy in the Laundry

I used to hike. Real hikes—the kind where you pack a lunch and come home with blisters and a sense of accomplishment and possibly a sunburn shaped like your backpack straps. I played tennis. I bodysurfed. I once ran a 10K because someone told me I could not. I could, as it turned out, but I also could not walk for three days afterward, which in retrospect may have been the point.

How Sharper Than A Serpent's Photo

Everybody wants sharp photos. Camera makers promise ever-more megapixels, TV ads scream about 4K and 8K, and your phone brags about its 108-megapixel sensor. But what do any of those numbers actually mean? And more importantly, do bigger numbers always mean better pictures? (Spoiler: not always.)

GPU Farms and the Future of Personal AI

Imagine your home in 2040. As you shuffle into the kitchen at dawn, the coffee maker already has your favorite blend brewing—it learned your tastes months ago. The living room lights adjust to complement the sunrise outside your window, while your home's AI assistant reminds you of your day without being asked. In your office, a local AI helps you draft important emails, designs visualizations for your presentation, and answers your questions as instantly as you can type them. No cloud. No lag. No monthly subscription. Just your personal AI, running on hardware sitting quietly in your closet.

Two Doors to Every App

This is advice for programmers, but if you're a regular person who's savvy enough to create a desktop shortcut that does something specific—and you'd be surprised how easy that is—you'll find something useful here too.

And When I Die

What happens when I close my eyes for the last time? Humanity has spent millennia arguing about that question, and we're no closer to an answer. What we have is a remarkable collection of theories, beliefs, hopes, and fears—some contradictory, all unprovable, most unfalsifiable.

Aspecta Command Line

Aspecta is not just a pretty face. Everything it can do through its visual interface, it can also do from the command line—which means you can script it, batch it, and let your AI assistant drive it without ever opening a window.

How Aspecta Works

A non-technical look at the technology behind Aspecta—how it processes images, why your originals are always safe, and what makes the live preview possible.

AI-Bridge

AI-Bridge is an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server that gives Claude the ability to see and interact with native Windows desktop applications. It provides tools for taking screenshots, clicking UI elements, typing text, reading accessibility trees, and more—essentially giving Claude a set of eyes and hands on the Windows desktop.

Converting Your Existing Site to OrganizicaWeb

Converting a web site from one platform to another is usually a Big Deal. And, obviously, the more pages the site contains, the bigger a deal it is. While a small site can be converted manually, it makes sense to have a program do the work. If properly designed, such a program would make converting a large site as easy as converting a small one; and could even facilitate a business doing that for various sites.

Dental Implants

I am missing upper teeth 1-7 and 9. I'd love to have dental implants so I can play Santa next year.

Creating a New OrganizicaWeb Site

To create an OrganizicaWeb site, you have two choices: Either create a site from scratch, or copy a template project. Anyone can do the latter; but this section of my site is about understanding it, first. So we'll start from scratch, which means starting Visual Studio and telling it to create a new project of the type ASP.NET Web Application (.NET Framework). That brings up the configuration dialog.

Super Finley

The introductory paragraph goes here.

Organizica: Visual Basic project

On this page we'll create the basic Organizica project. including the main form.

OrganizicaExplorer

In computing, a shell is a computer program which exposes an operating system's services to a human user or other program. In general, operating system shells use either a command-line interface or graphical user interface, depending on a computer's role and particular operation. It is named a shell because it is the outermost layer around the operating system.

OrganizicaDesktop: KnownFolders

Windows has had "special" folders since Windows 95. You remember the Documents folder, right? As well as Desktop, and (with later versions of Windows) Downloads, My Music, and so forth.

With Windows Vista, this conglomerate of folders became known officially as "Known Folders", despite there being no "unknown folders" to speak of.

OrganizicaDesktop: Utilities Module

Any project needs a general module for random, code-saving utility functions. We're going to create such a module in this chapter and put a couple of starter procedures into it.

OrganizicaDesktop: User Interaction

When writing a native Windows application, support of user interaction is a given. But Organizica presents itself via HTML and CSS in a web browser window. So, how can we capture user clicks and other interactions so that the underlying VB.NET code can respond? Well, it turns out that doing this is simple, if not very intuitive.

OrganizicaDesktop: Document class

The Document class provides the basic functionality for all documents, including being able to create objects of the appropriate document type. It is the base class for all the document types. It also does double duty as the default class for unrecognized document types.

OrganizicaDesktop: ProfileDocument class

When Windows was first introduced, in included a feature then called ".INI" files. These "initialization files" stored user preferences for an application, such as whether or not to display a menu, or what color they want borders to be. Later, the name was changed to "profiles", and then to "private profiles". Finally, the functionality was moved to the System Registry. But the underlying code to parse the values in a profile remains (albeit at an unusually low level); and the files themselves are trivial to create (via Notepad, for example). In addition, since they are associated with a folder that contains them (as Registry entries are not), they actually lend themselves to providing folder information to Organizica.

In this chapter, then, we shall derive a class from last chapter's Document class, to deal with this type of file.

OrganizicaDesktop: Preparing for First Use

What happens the very first time a user puts his foot in the water, so to speak, and runs Organizica? We've already made an effort to "position" the running program so that it is "in" the user's home directory. But Organizica needs to be able to create a directory for itself, with at least an INI file with default preferences.

OrganizicaDesktop: LinkDocument class

In the Windows environment, it's common to create a "shortcut" to some program or file, perhaps on the Desktop. In most cases, Windows treats a shortcut (called a "link" in earlier versions of Windows) as if it were the file it points to.

In the Organizica environment, shortcuts work similarly but, of course, they can only point to documents (including Folder documents).

OrganizicaDesktop: FolderDocument

When Organizica first starts up, typically it will display contents of the user's root folder. This is the class that understands what a Folder is, and how to display and allow interaction with it.

Unpublished

This page lists posts that exist in the database but are currently marked as unpublished (Not Pages.Published). It's useful for finding drafts and scheduled items before they go live.