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Leaving the house for a job interview, I found her lying on her side in the driveway, unable to move. The vet explained that she was near-comatose from hypogycemia, the result of an inoperable abdominal tumor. So I put her down. Showed up late for the interview and didn’t get the job.

Chose not to cremate her and couldn’t afford a perpetual care plot. So we decided to bury McBean in our yard. It’s not so easy, finding a place that will “never” be disturbed, digging a 3’ deep hole, getting the shrunken, frozen body of your pet from the vet. My 9-y.o. son wrote a poem which he read, then placed in the ground. We tossed in handfuls of cat litter. The whole absurd ritual took two hours. And there she lies, my first pet, the only cat we’re likely ever to own now that it’s clear the kids are dog people. RIP, McBean.

They look alike
They walk alike
Sometimes they even talk alike…

See for yourself:
http://www.jonasson.org/maps/

But something tells me the likeness is only skin deep. My goal is to code a geodata app using Microsoft’s brand new, “free” mapping service, Virtual Earth, to compare with the work I’ve been doing with Google Maps.

Before Google Maps, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) were proprietary, expensive, arcane. Now, thanks to the GMaps API, in two weeks I was able to build my own mapping application. Along the way I wrote a bunch of reusable classes for calculating distances, clustering by proximity, decluttering … all the features that used to cost big bucks.

Open-source software and what is sometimes called the Age of Mass Amateurization also have their troubling side, of course. Example: my income today is roughly a third of what it was in 2000. But since there seems to be no going back, I take pleasure in having an ever-growing toolset and community in which to play.

This turned out to be an excellent re-introduction to web development, after I spent the last three years teaching 8th-grade science. My greatest challenges were:

• converting address files (in CSV format) to XML
• writing an XML_RPC client to access geocoder.us, which returns lat/long data
• fussing with XHTML and CSS so I could produdly put Valid stickers on my pages

The Google Mapping API itself is trivial.

Now I’m writing some filtering code to turn on/off map markers and show distances in miles from the school to various addresses. Yay!

Neither as powerful as JSP, nor as established as Perl, PHP is nevertheless a very solid, non-proprietary, low-cost server-side scripting alternative. Reliable Linux/Apache/PHP hosting can be had for under $10/mo, and robust, free scripts are everywhere.

Recently, I’ve been teaching myself PHP’s XML capabilities in anticipation of re-entering the technology market. For beginning programmers, I recommend learning Perl (which is a bit harder) first, for the intro to rigorous sw concepts. It’s easier to slap together a few pages of PHP, but it’s likewise easy to get lost in a forest of global variables and unencapsulated objects.

But am doing it this summer for lack of $$. The mowing, and the edging, and the weeding, and the spraying, and the mulching, and the composting, and the tree-trimming, and the hedge-clipping …

Ok, so it’s not domestic altruism. Yeah, yeah, the kids can play down there, ping-pong table, Gamecube, whatever. As long as I get to run underground film festivals every few months. (Underground, in the basement … get it?)

Turns out the interface is not via SOAP/Web Services after all, but a simple, remarkably functional Javascript API. Am coding up a data-driven pushpin map of families in the private school where my wife works. Sound productizable?

One day I found my town’s library website. I searched for Johnny Winter CDs. They had every one. I searched for anything by blues legend Robert Johnson; they had albums, sheet music, videos, books. I began to surf Amazon.com for reviews and recommendations, then order the books though the library. Ohmigod. It’s a wonderful resource, and a reminder of what public support can mean.

After a 20-year career in technology, I am now teaching science at a local college and in a private middle-school. In both settings, I make tricky material accessible and engaging, with gratifying results. But I have a hard time stepping out of the lecturer/mentor role to let students discover science for themselves. It’s much easier to demonstrate an experiment I’ve rehearsed, then guide the room toward a conclusion, than it is to invite students to investigate something and take ownership of the process, as well as the textbook explanation.

Both styles are, of course, valuable, and I am pleased to have a talent for lecturing. Yet I have felt the power of discovery methods myself, both as a student and as a teacher, so I’m hoping to find the courage, patience, and skills to encourage more discovery in my classes.

At first it seemed cute watching McBean grow dreds. Eighteen years old, with bad teeth and arthritis, she could no longer preen herself. One day we cut the big mats off and started brushing out the rest. It took about a week, then another month for her fur to fill in evenly. I’m glad we could do her this small favor.

Finding $5/lb lobster.

Totally gratifying, with one caveat: the money. After prep, class time, grading, and helping struggling students (that’s what we’re there for, right?), adjunct instructors earn about $12/hr. I recommend everyone try teaching at some point in their careers, just to see how challenging, rewarding, and socially undervalued it is.

Plan to access the newly opened Maps API using Perl’s SOAP:Lite. Be interesting to code it up in Java as well and compare development time, performance, maintainability.

So if you like it, keep at it. Take classes, visit Germany, read Rilke and Kafka in the original….

Perl gets portability, productivity, and performance right, and has been doing so since the late 1980s. No other scripting system is as thoroughly supported and robust. Learn Perl! Even if it doesn’t end up being your language of choice, along the way you’ll learn everything you need to code better C#, Java, PHP, etc.

... like Johnny Winter