Some illustrious bits from my 30-year career as a cowboy coder. . .
ONLY SERIOUS NERDS WILL APPRECIATE THIS, but I was the author of Monty the Amazing Weather Man, the inspiration for the following jargon-file entry:
monty /mon’tee/ n.
1. [US Geological Survey] A program with a ludicrously complex user interface written to perform extremely trivial tasks. An example would be a menu-driven, button clicking, pulldown, pop-up windows program for listing directories. The original monty was an infamous weather-reporting program, Monty the Amazing Weather Man, written at the USGS. Monty had a widget-packed X-window interface with over 200 buttons; and all monty actually did was FTP files off the network. (New Hacker’s Dictionary)
MY FIRST WEBSITE WAS MADE FOR FREE for my wife’s vet clinic, Planned Pethood in Denver. This clinic was run by Dr. Jeff Young who would eventually become the reality TV star of “Rocky Mountain Vet” on Animal Planet. I was really proud of the rollover buttons which (for fun) I got working here using the original images and old-school HTML mouseovers. TRY HOVERING OVER THE BUTTONS BELOW. The original site can still be found on the wayback machine.

THE ONLY OPEN SOURCE PROJECT that I ever contributed to was an IRC client for EMACS called zenirc. My contribution was a magic-8-ball bot. The code took maybe fifteen minutes:
;;; zenirc-8ball.el — magic 8 ball for ZenIRC
;; Copyright (C) 1996 Mark S Bailen
;; Copyright (C) 1997 Noah Friedman
;; Bozo: Mark S Bailen
;; Maintainer: Noah Friedman friedman@prep.ai.mit.edu
;; Keywords: zenirc, extensions, magic, 8ball
;; Created: 1996-10-4
;; This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
;; it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
;; the Free Software Foundation. . .
;;
;;; Commentary:
;; Code hacked from Noah’s zenirc-yow.el and Eric’s zenirc-random-away.el
;; Rewritten 1997-03-03 by Noah to use zenirc-trigger.el.
;;; Code:
(require ‘zenirc)
(require ‘zenirc-trigger)
(defconst zenirc-8ball-prefix “magic 8-ball says ====>”)
(defconst zenirc-8ball-responses
‘(“CERTAINLY”
“DEFINITELY NOT”
“MAYBE”
“NO”
“REPLY HAZY, TRY AGAIN LATER”
“YES”))
(defun zenirc-8ball ()
(concat zenirc-8ball-prefix ” “
(nth (random (length zenirc-8ball-responses))
zenirc-8ball-responses)))
(zenirc-trigger-register “8ball” ‘zenirc-8ball “\b8 ball\b”)
(provide ‘zenirc-8ball)
;;; zenirc-8ball.el ends here
IN THE HISTORY OF WEB-DEV, flash gets a lot of hate, but I thought the animation tools were a lot of fun. Here’s a couple of my flash gems that still sort-of run on the wayback machine (click images below).


I WAS AN AUTHOR (OR CO-AUTHOR) on many fascinating? USGS/NASA abstracts. These can be found on space pub sites by searching for my name, but here’s a few:
- Abstract #2154 LPSC 2011. FGDC GEOSPATIAL METADATA FOR THE PLANETARY DOMAIN.
- Abstract #2478 LPSC 2012. ASTROPEDIA – A DATA PORTAL FOR PLANETARY SCIENCE.
- Abstract #2246 LPSC 2013. USING THE PDS PLANETARY IMAGE LOCATOR TOOL (PILOT) TO IDENTIFY AND DOWNLOAD SPACECRAFT DATA FOR RESEARCH.
- Abstract #1467 LPSC 2017. USING THE PDS PLANETARY IMAGE LOCATOR TOOL (PILOT) TO INVESTIGATE SMALL BODIES.
- Abstract #7054 LPSC 2019. THE ANNEX OF THE PDS CARTOGRAPHY AND IMAGING SCIENCES NODE.
I DESIGNED A HANDFUL of logos for USGS/NASA, including the one below (pulled from wikimedia commons). David Portree, the space historian, fondly called this logo, “Voyager Blowing Bubbles”:

I LAUNCHED TWO MAJOR WEBSITES while working at the USGS Astrogeology Science Center: PILOT and Astropedia. One of my favorite things to do was make posters for my websites and submit them to serious-minded conferences like LPSC and the Planetary Data Workshop. My posters were often arsty-fartsy and absurd, especially compared to the usual stodgy scientific poster. I took inspiration from movie posters and minimalist book-covers from the fifties. More than one of my posters was refused entry to a conference. Here are some examples:









SOMEWHERE BACK IN THE 2010’s, scrolly sites were a big deal. I managed to create one (and only one), collaborating with David Portree and Emily Bartman. If you click on the screenshot of 2015: The Year of Dwarf Planet below, maybe it still works?
