Author: Sam

San Miguel volcano looking out over Santa Clara During the first full week of January I was able to participate in an Engineers Without Borders (EWB) trip to El Salvador. The Santa Clara Potable Water Project was started years ago and has extensive community support, but securing funding proved a problem. Many of the original…

Three years ago I wrote a chapter about my perspective on the previous year. I compared myself with the blurb about me in my families Christmas letter, and concluded that both the year and the blurb included “not enough stories and no girl in the Christmas card”. By those standards, 2009 has been fantastic. I…

Mom: If you could do anything, what would be it? Monty (age 4): I like to play with my brothers ’cause both of them are big. I like games and batman toys, balls, and “for pretend” typewriting and writing and drawing and pretend eating. Ed (age 7): If I could spend lots of time doing…

Most software patent discussions on Slashdot, Reddit or elsewhere on the Internet infuriate me. They infuriate me because, in my opinion, they fundamentally confuse the issues relating to whether software should be patentable. 1. “Software shouldn’t be patentable because it’s obvious.” You’re talking about multiple legal concepts as if they were one thing. There are…

… a Burning Man 2009 travelogue … Down a wandering road in northwestern Nevada there is a place that doesn’t have many things. Sure, it has sky and ground, but you might be struck by an absence of things most of us consider ubiquitous, such as people, trees, plants, animals, rivers, lakes or even the…