Road to Wales yields book for Racine native
By David Steinkraus
dsteinkraus@journaltimes.com | Posted: Thursday, May 14, 2009 12:00 am
Sitting in a sunlit room for a recent Internet video interview, Sterling Udell was wearing a striped shirt and a Green Bay Packers cap. Distance is not quite irrelevant for this native of Racine. He can't watch Packers games from his home in Llan Ffestiniog in northern Wales, but his work as a computer software author can follow him anywhere, and it was his travels which literally started him on the road to becoming a published author.
The title of the book, which came out in November, is "Beginning Google Maps Mashups with Mapplets, KML, and GeoRSS." The idea is simple, even if the title is a geek's dream as are pages full of type like this:
The idea of a mashup is that anyone can take a list of information, for example where the members of your church live, and then plot those on a map from Google (http://maps.google.com/). It could also mean sending your pictures to Google so that people looking at Burlington on a map could click on a symbol and call up your image of ChocolateFest.
Growing geek
Udell has no hesitation in labeling himself a geek, the type of person who read the works of science fiction authors Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein as he was growing up. He remembers becoming interested in computers early on during school in Racine, to which his family moved when he was 3.
"I was interested in computers sort of from the first time I saw them, which as I recall was in the fourth grade. One appeared in a classroom that I was in, and I think I was taken with it from the start."
"It's always been what I liked to do. I don't know that I really knew that I wanted to do it professionally, but it doesn't surprise me, if you know what I mean."
At Horlick High School, from which he graduated in 1987, Udell was a member of the Academic Decathlon team.
"I was actually there when it started; I was in one of the first teams at Horlick. And that was really quite good for people like me, to be honest, bring us together and get us doing something. And I think it was beneficial to me in terms of confidence as well."
"I don't know if technical areas attract shy people, or if it just reinforces it. You know there's an old joke: How do you know when a computer programmer is an extrovert? It's when he looks at your shoes when he's talking to you. There's a lot of truth in that, and I think something like Academic Decathlon brought out the team spirit, and there's also events in it that are about sort of public speaking and interviewing, that sort of thing. I do think that is quite good. "
After high school came college at Drake University in Des Moines where he received a degree in math and computer science. There was a year of graduate school which he left for a job, more jobs, some consulting work and then freelance work. Slightly more than 10 years ago, he met Teresa Petrykowski who was originally from Britain. Both were on vacation in Glacier National Park. They married, and then decided to indulge a love of travel, and that was the start of the road to the book.
Electronic superhighway
For about two years they toured the United States and Canada in a 25-foot recreational vehicle. A big satellite dish on top gave Udell the Internet connection he needed to continue working, but what he wanted was a way to link all the other nomads.
"There's about a million people in the U.S. that live full-time in RVs, mostly retired, some seasonal."
He built a Web site about the travels of he and his wife (http://www.where-rv-now.com/), but what he wanted to do was plot the locations of other users of satellite Internet service. Google simultaneously introduced its mapping application so Udell, just for fun, worked on plotting the locations of all those satellite Internet users. Because he was in from the start, he developed some expertise in how to use the maps, and he even found money in it.
One such project was for the Library Council of Ireland, which had received a number of old maps of the country from the 1850s and wanted them seamlessly overlaid onto a Google map. Udell had gigabytes of data which had to be adjusted and stitched together. "It was some months worth of work. It was not the kind of thing that you just throw together in an afternoon."
After leaving the RV about four years ago, Udell and Petrykowski moved to London. But they didn't like the big city, and moved to Wales. The book contract came from someone in an online group who had been approached by a publisher but didn't have the time and asked who might.
"I thought, 'That sounds interesting. I quite like that idea,'" Udell said. "It had never been in my head before that to write a book."
He had, however, had some complimentary comments on descriptions he'd written for the Web site detailing his and his wife's journey across North America. Shortly after that he had a contract with the publisher Apress.
The teacher
"This is awesome," said Tim Knautz as he flipped through Udell's book. "You got to love books that have code in them."
Knautz is a lecturer in computer science at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside and has done his own mapping projects, notably the church member plot mentioned above which revealed that most of the members of his church live outside the city of Kenosha.
"Oh, that's how you do that," he said as he flipped through more pages. Although difficult to review with just a cursory glance, Knautz said the book looked good enough for him to buy or use in a class.
Knautz said he'd love to have a class in what have come to be known as "Web 2.0 technologies" - Internet functions and services which emphasize user participation and user modifications instead of functions that are highly structured and can't be modified.
"Students love this kind of stuff. It's new. It's out there. It's visible. They've got a tangible thing on the screen in front of them that does graphics instead of just producing lines of output on the screen. … I would love to pull something like this in."
Traditional computer science teaches core concepts that don't change much in contrast to Internet technologies which change very quickly, he said. Speed of obsolescence is demonstrated by Knautz's office bookshelf. About two-thirds consists of core computer science books which are years old. The other third is books about modern computer technologies. Knautz has just replaced most of those; they last about 18 months.
Writing
Book writing was different.
"The reality of it was a lot more structured than I expected," Udell said. "I'd expected to just sit down at a keyboard and off I go."
Instead he received a set of documents which helped him through the writing process, helped him collect and organize his thoughts, outline chapter, and to meet a set of deadlines. The actual writing took about three months, he said.
But he did find writing very creative, much like his Web work in which he puts together pieces of code to create pages. In fact he's at work on a second book now, not a follow-up to the maps volume but one about Web gadgets. Those are small bits of software that provide different functions in Internet browsers such as Firefox or Safari, and they've become more and more useful on Internet-enabled cell phones.
"I do quite like writing. I've discovered that," he said. "As I said, I'm working on a second book now, and I wouldn't really expect this to be the last, but I don't have any plans to move outside of the nonfiction, technical, probably computer books at this stage."
He chose to write again because the sinking global economy has dried up much of his freelance work. But he's not ready to give that up either after 11 to 12 years of it. He likes it - mostly.
"I like working from home. I like the flexibility of it. I'm very self-directed in it. To a large part I can choose what I want to do."
"The biggest thing I don't like about it is the uncertainty. There is often a feeling of 'I'm not sure where next month's paycheck is coming from.' Most of the time it does come from somewhere, but it's like I've never quite gotten to that point of - I don't know - being comfortable with that."
His wife, who works in the management of social service agencies, is employed full time, and that eases any financial strain. "One of the things to be said about this is that the income can be quite good for short periods, and then not have anything for a few months."
He and his wife haven't given up the RV either. It was a substantial investment which doesn't hold its value, he said. "It's parked in storage in Kenosha, if you want the truth. We don't think we're done with it."
They come back to Wisconsin about once a year to visit his mother, Chris Udell-Solberg, and other relatives, but for the moment they're settled in Wales. Except that in a sense Sterling Udell can never really be settled - not when the flick of a finger can send your mind flying across the planet.