The Wedemeyer Family

One day over lunch, I mentioned to one of the attorneys, who is also on the city council, that the U.S. should promote bicycle border crossings, maybe even with a bike lane. Several advantages: ease inspection for contraband/smuggled persons; help the environment; ease traffic congestion. Many people cross the congested, narrow two-lane bridge on bike, almost skimming the cars, and then they skip to the front of the waiting cars.

The attorney chuckled and told me about a Mexican “corrido” (folk song), that covers bicycle border crossers. According to the lyrics, there was once a man that always crossed the border on a bike and Customs always stopped and inspected him, but never found any contraband. Customs was highly suspicious of the man and they would check the bike frame and the wheels, but they could never find anything.

Finally one day, the customs agent told the man, “We know you are a smuggler, but we can’t figure out how you do it. If you tell us your secret, we will not arrest you and we’ll let you go free, we promise.”

The man replied, “I smuggle bicycles…”

I haven’t been posting much lately, but that’s because all my spare time is being spent working on my secret project.

Every computer programmer’s dream is to take a neat program and turn it into a million dollars. Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, and eBay are our inspiration. We’re all just waiting for the lightbulb to come on for our million dollar idea.

Luckily, with Sarah’s help, I had a great idea. Basically, it’s a social-networking site for Dungeons and Dragons players that will help them connect and manage their D&D games.

To keep track of my progress, take a look at The Obsidian Portal. This is the site that I’m working on. I hope to be recruiting beta-testers very soon. After a month or so of testing to make sure it’s stable, I’ll try to go live with it. At that point, I’ll get to see if I’ve got something valuable, or if I’ll just crash and burn.

So, that’s where I’m spending all my time and why I’m so quiet here lately. Perhaps I’ll try to document some of my progress here. It probably won’t make exciting reading, but it should be a nice glimpse into the world of a computer programmer on his own trying to make it to the big time.