It is now four weeks (July 11) since I came down with COVID-19 and it is nine days after getting home (July 31) from my three-day stint in the wonderful Memorial Hermann Sugar Land hospital.

Here are some random thoughts.

The 16 days that I was ill before I got …

I just finished listening to the audiobook version of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer originally published in 1960. The unabridged audiobook consisted of 64 files and weighed in at 57 hours 11 minutes run time, making it the longest audiobook I've listened to …

When building a slightly more complex application using PySimpleGUI, you may run into the need to store user preferences to a file. This allow persisting some information or custom settings for the next time the user runs the application.

UPDATE: 08/12/2020

Not sure how I missed this the …

I was wondering if some advanced menu features were available in PySimpleGui. Mainly, could you have check boxes next to items on the menu to show the state of that item? The screen shot below show menu checks in action in Visual Studio Code.

PySimpleGui has the ability to create …

Spoiler Alert - I will tell you the answer upfront. I wear a mask for you, my fellow sojourners through a strange new world. By wearing the mask, there is a slim possibility that I may protect someone from contracting this heinous virus.

The mask makes me look stupid. The mask …

The inspiration for this article comes from an email I received from Luke Harrison. He had created an SQL Cheat Sheet that he was rightfully proud of and was wanting to share and promote it.

It just so happens that I love cheat sheets. I find them useful for giving …

Beginner Level

When learning python, the first thing to do is... well... learn python. There is a lot to learn. A basic understanding of the language covers things like:

• Basic expressions (variables, statements)
• What is a function
• Flow control (if, iterations)
• Basic data types (strings, integers, floats)
• Data building blocks …

One of my latest goals is to publish applications that I write. It's called "Pelican Article Generator". It spits out a template for these blog posts. Publishing an applicatin to the world is potentially embarrassing because I'm showing my horrible code to the world. Oh well.

Here are the goals …

A lot of my python work involves writing simple utilities. This means either writing the tool as a command line application or using a minimal GUI.

I have been working on a simple python application recently to automate creating article stubs for this blog. I had a working version using …

For the first time, I ran into a quote where the phrase "around the turn of the century" was referring to the year 2000 instead of 1900. Up until now, I have always associated that phrase with the change from the 1800's to the 1900's.

Sorry, I did not capture …