Author Archives: sbrandt

Enter the Tweed Jacket….

This morning I received word that the faculty of the computer science department at LSU voted unanimously to make me an adjunct professor. This does not involve an increase in pay, nor is it tenure–but it marks a new education … Continue reading

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I Stitched a Sequin onto Elvis’ Coat…

Well, i did the equivalent thing in the C++ world. Back in 1986 and 1987 I worked in the C++ group at Bell Labs. I was trying to debug my program, but could not understand what I was seeing from … Continue reading

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Geekiness

Java is a great language, but it’s missing a feature present in its cousin languages, C++ and C. The feature is the builtin macros __FILE__ and __LINE__. These are often quite useful for debugging, etc. Well, even though Java doesn’t … Continue reading

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Life

Over twenty years ago my daughter was born. The pregnancy was very difficult. My wife had to lay on her left side for several weeks prior to delivery (her blood pressure was very high and it was slightly lower when … Continue reading

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Word of Honor

I’m a character in a novel, I give you my word of honor. Literally. Nelson DeMille used my name in his book. Of course, I’m neither a medic nor have I been to Vietnam.

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A Green Belt in Paranormal

I’m always interested in the stories of how people go from unpublished to published. Here’s a self-published success story. The real problem I have with this process, as well as submitting to agents or editors, is that failure does not … Continue reading

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Roku Application

Since we lost the controller for our Roku, I’ve had a bit of fun after discovering that you could control it by telnetting to port 8080 on the device and sending it commands such as “press up”, “press right”, etc. … Continue reading

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How Long Should a Query Letter be?

If you’ve finished your novel and are on to figuring out how long your query letter should be, I believe I have a scientific answer! Using the data from the “Successful Queries” column , I have found that successful queries … Continue reading

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Computers that Feel

Many believe that human consciousness is algorithmic, that self-awareness is simply the emergent property of a large number of logic gates. It must at least be partially true. Our brains do share a great deal of common traits with computers, … Continue reading

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Universal Zombie Care

I predict that zombie repairs will prove to be the fatal flaw in Obama’s universal health care plan. In no time there will be a massive shortage of fresh gooey brains.

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