About TheZooCPU.com

I built this site to offer tools that I hope will be useful to others.

My original inspiration for creating the site came from volunteer work I do for the Badger Prairie Needs Network, a food pantry in Verona Wisconsin. I help with their Flags for Food fundraising effort by creating maps for the drivers who distribute flags to donors on holidays in the summer. I originally created those flags with a Python program running on my local computer. I converted that program to the Web version you see on this site so that others can make use of it and do the mapping if I am unable to for a particular drive.

I also built this site as a learning experience. I have programmed over a long career in consulting but (almost) always to make tools and do analysis on a local computer. I wanted to learn how to create web apps and the more I thought about it the more ideas I came up with. Now, in retirement, I can devote all the time I want to learning and hope that some of what I create will be useful to others.

Some of the tools on this site are free for all to use and some will require you to register as they use resources that would be costly to provide beyond a certain scale. As long as your scale keeps me under my cost thresholds, my tools will be free to use. If my apps prove popular, I will create user tiers to provide expanded capabilities to those willing to pay for those capabilities.

If you register and log in to gain additional capabilities, I will never sell your contact information or spam you with a lot of email. I may send you email as I change features and capabilities when I believe I am making a change that will affect your usage.

Why TheZooCPU.com? I wanted a domain that reflected my goal for the site. I wanted a name that wasn't too long and reasonably memorable. Every time I came up with the perfect domain name I found it was already taken. This happened a LOT! With some help and a bit of Python I made a list of common 3-letter English words, grouped in random sets of 3 words and began searching the list for inspiration. I finally settled on TheZooCPU.com. A zoo is a collection of animals available for public view. Some of the animals are closely related to each other (think African Savanah animals). Others are not. My vision for this site is for a set of apps, available to the public. Some of them will be closely related to each other, others not so much. And the site name made me smile. :)

About Me

I have had a long career in consulting to electric and gas utilities on their energy efficiency programs. Early in my career I did a lot of programming for data analysis. Later in my career I continued to program but mostly aimed at making tools that facilitated work tasks. When the web was a simpler place, I built a few web pages in simple HTML and later using PHP. However, as the importance for strong security on web pages increased, I ceased creating things visible on the web. Now I have ideas for web tools I want and have the time to learn how to make them secure and, hopefully, useful to others.

If you have questions, suggestions, or requests, you may contact me using this form.