My brother hosts a personal fitness podcast on blogtalkradio. After uploading each episode, he would manually creating a blog post on his business website and embed the blogtalkradio show within that post. This was extremely time consuming, and annoying for him. With a little digging, I discovered I could help him automate the process. Shortly thereafter, the blogtalkradio plugin and widget were born. Continue reading

My music file collection has grown rapidly since 1998, when MP3s first became popular. Over the past 17 years, this collection has become a tangled mess. I had no naming or tagging convention for the MP3s I owned. I had many song duplicates located in various folders and under different names. When I first began ripping my music, I didn't take the time to properly name and organize each track of each album. This resulted in many, many songs labeled track1, track2, etc., in a folder structure consisting of just the album name. Furthermore, these songs were not tagged in any way. Searching for a particular song or artist was nearly impossible. Organizing this mess would be a painful task. I set three goals to accomplish this task: properly tag each file, develop a unified folder structure to store each file, and eliminate duplicate files. I developed a Java program to make this possible. Continue reading

In one of the first classes I took at UIS, CSC 385: Data Structures & Algorithms, the semester project required the development of an ant colony simulation in Java. For the sake of future students taking that course, I will not be revealing the source code or my methods for implementing the project in this summary. Continue reading

Back in 2006, my wife was looking for a game she loved to play when she was a kid called Lock n' Chase. While searching for this game, I came across the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator, otherwise known as MAME. I instantly decided to build the toy I always wanted, and arcade cabinet. My wife quickly agreed as long as she could play Lock n' Chase. Continue reading

If you won the lottery and retired right now, what would you do? Supposedly, the answer to this question reveals the career you should choose. When I realized I lacked passion for structural engineering, I asked myself this question and the answer surprised me. I would go back to school to earn a degree in computer science. Technology has always been my passion, and if I had all the time in the world, I’d spend that time learning all I could about computer science. Why should I wait to win the lottery to make this change? Continue reading