I don't know how or why you are here - in truth everything here is, and always will be, best classified as personal minutiae... the very definition of meaningless - a blast from past when internet was a a different place, bits of my life floating peacefully in the dark void of the forgotten outer reaches of the net... the only new thing likely to happen here is more randomness thrown into this strange rippleless deep!

Why are you here again?

A Programming Story:

The first two computers in the house, that I remember anyway, were an Atari 2600 and a Coleco Adam. Combat, Adventure, Asteroids, Calling into local BBS systems, Basic and Logo, papers for school and games (Ultima IV!) are what I remember from the early years...

Computers were part of my life since I was young but probably the single thing I spent the most time doing was playing the Clarinet - eventually it took me to the Eastman School of Music (Peter Hadcock), Indiana University at Bloomington (Eli Eban), North Carolina School for the Arts (Robert Listokin) and the University of Arizona (Jerry Kirkbride). While in school I had the company of remarkable friends and some of my fondest memories are of our work together to play in the Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition and Coleman Chamber Ensemble Competition.

The real revival of my interest in programming dates to the early 2000s while I was a Teaching Assistant during my Doctor of Musical Arts studies at the University of Arizona. I worked on several classes that had simple online components (just HTML mostly), had to find ways to process grades for classes (Excel/VBA) and in several Electronic Music courses I learned Max/MSP. My Max/MSP work wasn't a true deep dive into programming, but working to create interactive systems that combined music/sound/hardware/computers was an inspiring experience.

Music didn't work out as a career for me and I never finished my Doctorate... In the early 2000s I started climbing and canyoneering, and started working at the Summit Hut. The Summit Hut is an amazing locally owned Outdoor Specialty Retail business in Tucson, AZ. Since the 1980s the Summit Hut has done in-house software development on systems including Inventory Management, POS and Accounts Payable. I started on the Sales Floor and then moved to a Buyer's Assistant Position. As a Buyer's assistant I did my first programming for the Summit Hut developing Excel VBA to help us do restock and stock balances. Over time I became a Buyer - and over time I moved from VBA to .NET and developed more and more tools - reporting, ordering, PO creation, Inventory Search...

Some projects that I work on:

• Dropbox Based Reporting: Each month Excel and self contained HTML reporting files are generated and put into folders on Dropbox for our vendor partners to access. This system gives us easy access controls, great sharing and an interface that is already familiar to many people. Using Dropbox, rather than building/buying a full reporting website, allowed us to write less code and focus on the reporting.
• Inventory Display: The Summit Hut's Inventory Management app is a WPF application that started in the .NET 3 time frame and is now a .NET Core application. Interesting functions include an Item History report that assembles all references to the item in our systems to help figure out what happened and why, Excel matching tools that allow us to add information from our db into any Excel sheet where UPC/EANs are available, the ability to paste in a list of ids to look up items (a simple feature enables lists of items in a reporting emails to easily becomes a list of items inside the program) and drag and drop support across windows and applications.
• Inventory Bulk Item Creator and Updater: If you have experienced Excel users it is difficult to create an interface that is going to be more efficient than Excel for creating and editing long lists items... Our programs lean into this idea and rather than try to apply restrictive data validation in specialized Excel files our import programs bring in string values from Excel, parse those values into our database values, apply numerous validation rules to catch mistakes, applies any changes to the database and write a history of the changes. Inventory Display has more traditional GUI editors for smaller edits and less experienced users - but our buying programs currently support 4 buyers with over 70 years of combined experience so in some tooling we specifically support power users and create tools that take some knowledge and training to use.

These days I work at the Summit Hut doing development, IT and buying, run and hike (mostly in Southern Arizona), love photography (Pointless Waymarks and Hike Lemmon and enjoy living a slightly more rural lifestyle in the Rincon Valley.

Site History:

In 2006 I started writing on cmiles.info using WordPress.com and for a good few years I wrote about tech, life and adventures. By the 2010s the posts were all about adventures and more and more about the Santa Catalina Mountains. The site was never taken offline but the WordPress version of the site had its last update in 2015.

In the early 2010s I started another WordPress.com site - consuming.cmiles.info - on which I put notes about what I was reading, watching and listening to. That effort ended in 2013...

These first sites informed my efforts on Hike Lemmon! | Hiking and Adventures in the Santa Catalina Mountains which I started in the mid 2010s. For many years that site took all my attention - and of course the 2010s were huge for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other now forgotten social media sites that at the time seemed useful and important.

Since 2019 my focus has changed. Pointless Waymarks and the software to generate it - the Pointless Waymarks Project - have taken my time and attention, I'm rarely on social media and other than Flickr largely find my time best spent on my own software and sites. My location has changed too - these days we live outside of Tucson in a slightly more rural location with a lot to explore close to home.

Sometime in 2022 I looked back at cmiles.info, enjoyed it, and used the Pointless Waymarks CMS to convert the tech and life posts to this new version of the site along with the content from consuming.cmiles.info. The posts related to the Santa Catalina Mountains will move to a new version of HikeLemmon (still private and in progress atm) and adventure posts about areas outside of the Catalinas have been moved to Pointless Waymarks.

If you're reading this you are either here randomly and are unimaginably deep into the long tail of internet content or you are a friend - either way send me an email, [email protected], and say hello, if nothing else I will be glad to congratulate you on somehow finding this!

Charles