I've always enjoyed collecting coins. Starting at a young age, my mother taught me to always check the dates on the coins I received as change. She was primarily focused on collecting nickels that were minted 1964 or earlier. Everything I bought a candy bar, I would check the change, and give my mom all the old nickels I found.

Around the time I entered junior high, the US Mint began releasing the 50 state quarters series. My grandmother bought all us grand-kids a cardboard holder for the coins and I got to work searching my spare change for states I didn't have. At the time, I was not interested in the condition of the coin, or where the coin was minted. Only in finding one of each time.

Now that I am “older” and have spare time/ money on my hands; I have revisited my old coin collections. This time, I am more motivated to create an interesting collection. I decided (in June) that I am going to collect one of each coin, for each year, from today going back to 1965. These coins should be readily available in circulation.

After several weeks of hunting mine, my friends, and my parent's coin jars. I completed the collection, mounted them in plastic 2x2s and admired my handy work. I had completed my mission, but the desire to continue burned bright inside me. I was officially hooked on coin collecting.

I almost immediately discovered the vast Ebay coin auction community and dived in head first bidding on coins. I'm primarily focusing on old Morgan dollar coins and Mercury dimes. The former retails for around $35 each, the former for around $2.25 per coin. Not the cheapest hobby, but one which definitely interests me.

Though my collecting, I have learned a lot about the history of the US Mints and coins. Reading about the inspiration behind different coin designs, the frequency at which the designs change, and about mints as they open and close throughout history. The best part about coin collecting, is the coins will always maintain some value.

I'm definitely looking forward to completing my Mercury dime, half dollar, and presidential coin collections. Although I believe it will be several years before I get a hold of all the coins.

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I just read the most interesting thread on Reddit. A mom is getting ready to bury a treasure chest for her now 1 year-old, to dig up in three years as a fun activity. She wants to know what kind of goodies she should bury.

love this idea. I remember burying small boxes of treasure when I was a kid (our attempt at a time capsule), and then digging them back up four or five months later. It was always a lot of fun, but being kids, we never had overly interesting stuff to bury.

Several commenter’s had great ideas. internettoad suggested an extensive list of good items for a kid:

• eye patch
• toy compass
• hand held telescope
• bandanna
• stuffed parrot to ride on his shoulder
• envelope with cash & map to some local adventure, if you're near the ocean, certainly a sailboat ride
• some seeds to grow a flower or plant to hide (fix) the burial spot, and this will keep his fun going
• constellation map, or those glow in the dark stickers to put on the ceiling of his room
• some old dvd's of Sinbad the Sailer
• a love note of how much he means to you, written in a foreign language, that he will only discover the true meaning when he is old enough and curious enough to pursue it and get it translated. Make him wait until he's old to figure it out.
• a list of virtues to live by
• a kid's Bible (if you're Christian)
• the Pledge of Allegiance (if you're a US American), he'll learn it before he get's to kindergarten!
• a savings account where he can stash all the $1 coins you pour in the chest. He'll want to dress all pirate on his trip to the bank of course!

pattymcfatty recommended playing the game forward, with a club for the next chest to be found in several years time. “Put a key in it that will open a treasure chest he will dig up when he is 6ish.”

leftnut had my favorite suggestion

Bury it under a cryptic marker. Maybe an "X" made of garden stones or something. That way he'll grow up having seen the marker and taken it for granted, only for it to be revealed that there was treasure buried there the whole time! You can even include it in a map or set of clues that he finds later. Plus it'll help make sure you can find it.

I thought about what I would hide and came up with the following list.

• Lego set
• "gold" coins → $1 or fake coins
• eye patch
• pirate hat
• magnifying glass
• model dinosaur bones
• A jar of coins (hundreds of pennies)
• kaleidoscope
• glass gems

As for a container, a military ammo box would work great. The waterproof seal would help keep the contents fresh, they are relatively easy to purchase (~$15), and are roughed by design. Unfortunately, it does not look like a pirate chest. It might be a good idea to paint the outside of the container to look like an old chest or map.

To lead the kid to the treasure, one should make a “old style” map. One with browned paper, burnt edges, that was stored in a hidden place (such as in the attic or in a crawl space).

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During the past several weeks, I have accumulated a short list of rather interesting stories/ videos. Links that I both do not want to lose, but also want to share with others. Why not post to a social networking site, like my favorite Reddit? Simple, these links have already graced the pages of those sites. So, here they are, in no particular order.

Wealth distribution in the United States

Bottom 90% of the population, holds roughly 12.2% of the investment assets (2007).

Is college worth it?

George Town research paper aggregates income data for people based on their level of education, and type of education. The summary page provides links to the detailed data for each field discussed.

Whiteboard animation on motivation

What motivates people to work harder at work? The common perception is pay a person more money, then they will work harder for you. This is true of mostly physical tasks, but it breaks down when cognitive abilities are utilized. The research shows you should pay someone just enough money, so they do not have to worry about money, and then incentivize them with other forms of reward. Such as recognition, autonomy, or difficult problems to work on. All of this is summarized with an amazing whiteboard animation. Well worth watching.

Parking ticket on an asteroid

A staked claim to an asteroid, and then mailed NASA a parking ticket for landing a craft on that asteroid. NASA refused to pay the ticket.

Science is fun ............ And more fun!

Gravity probe B was the smoothest object ever created by humans to date. Its purpose was to detect distortions (eddy currents) in the space-time field around the Earth, caused by the Earth’s spin, as predicted by Einstein’s theory of relativity.

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I am officially half way through my Masters of Science of Software Engineering degree program.  The last 5 months past in a blur of textbooks, papers, and exams. Hardly giving me time to stop and tie my shoes.  With the on set of summer, I expect to have much more free time. With which, I will spend a small fraction of that time updating this site. Cheers!

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For the past month, I’ve been working part time on a Microprocessor selection tool (micro-tool) that my company plans to use to reduce the time it takes to run a trade study for selecting microprocessors for new projects. The primary aim of the program is to encourage/ force the technical leads to re-use processors from old projects to reduce the learning curve of new parts. This will facilitate code re-use, will allow re-use of existing compilers, and will decrease the time to a final schematic layout. (Surprise, parts often don’t work exactly like the spec. sheets state, and prototype boards must be built to discover differences between real parts and the spec sheet.)

I was the third developer to work on the code, the first being an intern who left at the end of last summer; the second was a junior developer who was let go during layoffs in November. Needless to say, the code was not in great shape. I spent a day looking over the code, held a meeting with the project sponsor, wrote up a short requirement description and got to work.

After two weeks time, the program was running. Searches returned the correct data, the user could enter their trade study criteria, rank the various results against each criteria, and everything was exported to an excel spreadsheet so the artifacts could be archived for future reference. The project sponsor was thrilled, “Now, let’s get this running with the production database tables…”

“Tables?” I asked. Turns out, contrary to what everyone had said previously, the micro-tool would be searching not against one table, but five. Furthermore, the five tables were not homogeneous.

1. Same type of data was encoded with different data types in different tables. Integer in two, floating point in two, and a string in the last.
2. Values were stored with different scales. RAM size was stored as bytes in four tables and as words in the fifth.
3. Key search values, such as ROM size, did not exist in all five tables.

Liberal usage of projecting new columns, renaming columns, and unions allowed me to extend my search routine to all five tables within a day. In a similar amount of time, I extended the display portion of the program to notify users from with database table a result originated.

I recommended merging the various tables, or at least fixing the data types to make them the same across all tables and was given a big red light. Supposedly, there are applications that the electrical engineers use that are tied to the current schema, and they don’t want to risk them breaking. Even after I explained how database views could be used to prevent changes in existing applications. While taking advantage of adding data consistency to the database. It would help if the database administrator was a trained in database management, instead of electrical engineering.

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