Scrambled - Software

The 'D' of Digimuzik represents computers, and what runs on computers? Well, clutzy sys-admin joggers I suppose, but I'm thinking of software - the programs that you use to interact with hardware (which, coincidentally enough, has its own page on the Scrambled Mind).

At some point, I hope to chronicle various software I've worked on or influenced, as well as some of my favorite programs. I promise some day this page will have more content, but the Great Scramble of 2019 was mainly intended to create E; creating a new page for software was a fun bonus.

This is by no means a CV; I don't have any source code listed or linked here (and if I do, that means I forgot to update this intro!). Honestly if any prospective employer finds The Scrambled Mind, I hope they have a sense of humor (and know that this site and its descendants have only ever been intended to be personal projects, not legitimate examples of my skills...or lack thereof!)

Fun software I've created or worked on

• Homeschool tracker - desperately in need of a better name, this is my largest from-scratch project made for an audience of 1: my wife. It helps plan and track homeschooling activities for our 5 kids. I keep hoping to develop it into a multi-user codebase and possibly commercialize it, but real bill-paying jobs usually take most of my programming time.
• Epic Care Everywhere - Epic is a li'l ol' electronic medical record (or do they call them comprehensive health records now?) vendor based in Verona, WI. I joined the company long before "interoperability" or "meaningful use" buzzwords were ever thrown around governmental regulations, and essentially helped build Care Everywhere—our health-system-to-health-system clinical information exchange platform—from the ground-up. Through this experience, I became involved in HL7, a healthcare standards organization, and met many great people and companies, all doing their parts to improve healthcare through the use of technology.
• GSAK Plugins - The best TOTT (or Tool-Of-The-Trade) for Geocaching is a piece of software called GSAK - the Geocaching Swiss Army Knife. It has so many features for sorting / cataloging / discovering caches, but the best by far is an incredibly mature macro system. Users can create (and then share) plugins to extend the already-impressive capabilities of this software.

  I've made a few small changes to existing macros (some of E is sourced from a modified macro), but my biggest project was a made-from scratch plugin called "Find Interesting Caches". It lets you filter down a database of caches to ones that you might want to target, either because they have a high favorite, interesting attributes, or just help fulfill a geocaching goal. I haven't updated it in awhile (well, as of writing this in 2019), but if I get back into the game as I hope to, I may find new features to add onto it. In the meantime, check it out over on the GSAK Macro Library!

  October, 2020 - Randomly got a hit on the forum page for this and was able to fix a couple of bugs. Super glad people are still using this!

• Microsoft Office - lol, no, I didn't work at Microsoft. But I incredibly appreciate their ability to extend their software through VBA. Like GSAK, if there's something you want Office to do, and it doesn't out of the box, you might be able to get a macro to do it.

  One time (YEARS) ago, my Android calendar app didn't have any way to create private meetings, though it did sync with my work's Exchange server. I liked everything else about the app, so I looked into Outlook to discover a way to achieve this. Eventually I came up with a method that, given a certain keyword in the description of the appointment, would cause Outlook to re-flag the message as private. Nailed it!

  More recently (and continually), I've made our complicated budget work with Excel. Now, yeah, yeah, I know - people over-hype spreadsheet formulas as "programming," but in this case, there is definitely some VBA magic going on. We have a worksheet for every month but one additional worksheet which records various savings categories we maintain (things like saving for car repairs, vacations, averagizing irregular purchases over 12 months, etc). I got tired of manually copying numbers every month back and forth to this sheet, so I created a set of "Lookup()" functions to populate the savings sheet with numbers from each of the month sheets and then parrot back the balances for each sub-account when I'm looking at a month's worksheet. It's all very confusing, and just writing it out now, I've made myself even more tired. But it's a nifty piece of software, and has saved me tons of time on our budgeting.

• The Scrambled Mind / D-Game - Despite my insistence that this site is just a bunch of Web 1.0 HTML files, there's actually a fair bit of programming involved (and a little more every day). Book/Comic Reviews are database'd and searchable, as is the 555-List. Exploration is highly programmatic. But the most fun bit of "software" on The Scrambled Mind is the D-game! What started out entirely-html-file-based has exploded into a giant behemoth of tangled wiring, well-deserving of its location in The "Scrambled" Mind. As my kids have found it and started using it recently (2019), I've taken to making it even smarter (auto-correct), more maintainable, and more efficient (I just rewrote the codebase a couple weeks ago and removed about half of the code while adding functionality. Woo hoo!)

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