Archive for January, 2008
After many weeks of seeing a (supposedly “volunteer technical support”) queue swamped with depressing-to-read letters from frustrated donors who haven’t gotten their laptop yet, this is a blessed sight for sore eyes.
For those of you who haven’t used RT, this is the equivalent of having nothing - nothing - on your to-do list floating around in a state of not-getting-done’dness. IT FEELS GOOD.
Thanks to alc, who (I hear) heroically went through the multi-screen queue we had backpiled. My hat is off to you, sir.
Now it’s my turn to categorize volunteers into the type of their offer of help. We have… nearly 900 queries we haven’t responded to yet because everyone’s just been so dang busy. It will be… fun.
Thursday, January 31st, 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Before my mother was a mother, she was a dentist. I’m not sure how many other kindergarteners got bedtime stories about gingivitis, but I always thought they were hilarious (if somewhat embarrassing).
So when I was 11 or so, I wrote her this parody, set to the tune of “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” from Mary Poppins. I’ve written many parodies since, including “Stuck in the Dealership” (to “Day-Oh”) when my parents were buying a new car, but none have ever quite become as popular as this one.
I’ve made two minor edits from the original here. “While demonstrating this with plastic teeth she had out on display” was originally “And ended with a sermon saying why I couldn’t play,” (which worked a lot better when I was 11…) and the last line’s “modify” was originally “work upon.” Otherwise, what you’re seeing is the original from 10 years ago.
Love you, Mom. (Miss you too.)
(In case you don’t know the tune, listen to this - song starts a minute or so into the video.)
The dentist song
Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious
You should brush your teeth or you will get some halitosis
Or else rinse with Listerine in super-heavy doses
Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious
Um-diddle-diddle, um-diddle-ay
Um-diddle-diddle, um-diddle-ay
One day I didn’t brush my teeth and went down in a rush
My mother yelled because I smelled and said “go back and brush,”
I asked her what the big deal was and after a short pause
She said “well, you should brush your teeth more often just because…”
(Oh!)
Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious
You should brush your teeth or you will get some halitosis
Or else rinse with Listerine in super-heavy doses
Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious
Um-diddle-diddle, um-diddle-ay
Um-diddle-diddle, um-diddle-ay
Another time I didn’t brush my mother came to say,
“Your teeth will rot, your breath will stink, unless you brush today,”
And she went on to talk about how plaque can cause decay
While demonstrating this with plastic teeth she had out on display
(Why!)
Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious
You should brush your teeth or you will get some halitosis
Or else rinse with Listerine in super-heavy doses
Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious
Um-diddle-diddle, um-diddle-ay
Um-diddle-diddle, um-diddle-ay
So finally I brushed my teeth and joined my smiling mother
She told the ranks of pearly teeth, “we finally have another!”
Your questions and your stinky breath were such an awful bother -
Come on, let’s try to modify the hygiene of your brother!
(Since!)
Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious
You should brush your teeth or you will get some halitosis
Or else rinse with Listerine in super-heavy doses
Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious
(Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious!)
Wednesday, January 30th, 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Assembly still makes my head hurt (…working on it - see Andrew Harrington’s Pip [.zip of .py and .txt files], a Python application that lets you play with assembly - yes, I know that’s backwards) but disassembly is fun.
Didn’t realize this until now: The XO has a couple of extra screws embedded in its handle in case you lose one - they’re screwed into otherwise nonfunctional plastic nubs. Now that’s thoughtful design.
I’ve also been telling people that if your laptop’s hinge breaks, you can still use a headless laptop perfectly well because the motherboard’s right behind the screen. I finally decided to film it; the video is here. I point out the three cords attached to the laptop (power, USB keyboard, USB mouse), demo all three working, then lift the laptop up to show the hinge is an empty tube of metal with wires dangling from it (the keyboard/bottom-half of the laptop is shown half-disassembled in the background).
In contrast, my computer from college was rendered much less portable this summer by having its hinges (a common failure point in laptops in general) rip off, leaving me with an unintentional tablet - a maze of dangling monitor wires were the only thing keeping the screen connected to the rest of it.
It’s also fun to freak bystanders out by pouring some water on the membrane keyboard, which is a sheet of rubber set on top of a multi-layer PCB screwed onto a thin metal backing. I have no idea how the PCB works. Pressure sensitivity?
I found the monitor-half of the XO to be easier to assemble/disassemble than the keyboard-half, although that could be because I’ve taken apart the former several dozen times by now and took the latter apart for the first time just now. The white bottom panel (with the two hold-in-the-battery latches) is a little tricky to pop back in; it took about 30 seconds of futzing the first time, so I made myself take it out and do it again faster. Then, after I’d finished reassembling everything, I realized I’d popped out the spring-loaded latches that hold the laptop locked. So I had to take everything apart and put it back together again. It was considerably easier, and I got the white bottom panel in in about 3 seconds.
Getting the hinge screwed back in (connecting the two halves) was mildly annoying. I eventually realized I could magnetize my screwdriver and do away with the “can I drop the screw into the right place from 1cm up?” game. There’s a strong magnet on one side of the keyboard (and a hall effect sensor on each side of the display so the laptop can sense when it’s closed and in tablet mode and turn off keyboard hardware accordingly) and a few strokes of screwdriver-on-magnet made life much easier. (Note to self: next time do this before sealing up magnet behind bottom of laptop case.)
My fine motor coordination skills need some work; I’m a horror at surface-mount soldering, and my control with the multimeter probes tonight was… not good (much shorting ensued). Of course, the freezing weather (and the inadequately heated room) probably contributed to the butterfingers somewhat - my hands are constantly cold and stiff - but maybe I should take up those exercises little kids do to learn how to manipulate their fingers… handwriting practice? Embroidery? Detailed electronics kits and a fine-tip iron?
It’s pretty obvious which one I’m going to pick. ;-)
Sunday, January 27th, 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
The OLPC support-gang is wonderful. Since we have weekly conference call meetings and I can’t hear over the phone, Ian, Chih-yu, and others transcribe furiously for me in chat, and ask questions on the phone that I’m typing equally furiously in return.
I’m incredibly grateful for this, and try to make up for it by posting copious amounts of notes afterwards. I feel kind of bad about needing it, since translating for me means that my friends only have part of their attention in the main chat, which puts them at a disadvantage. I wish there were another way.
Playing with hardware, code, and talking to people en masse is actually easier for me to get started with in a text forum than in a real-life one. I’ve known this for a long time. With one-on-one conversations, things that require physical presence/interaction, and people I already know, in-person talking is best, but when the input in question is raw information, text is much, much easier to understand.
Whereas other people catch snatches of conversation around them and learn about gossip and tips and shortcuts that way, I catch peripheral conversations in text. I don’t have to spend most of my concentration and energy in figuring out the words other people are saying, so I can spend more of my time figuring out what they mean. And what I should do about it. And thus I have more time to do it, and can communicate back more clearly when I’m done.
Anyone who’s been in a class with me where we had a text chat (such as Rob Martello’s course on SciFi, where DJ and I did our presentation has discovered that I can be a real chatter-mouthed terror in that media - everywhere at once, typing all the time, managing a dozen or more separate streams of conversation while reading other references and intermittently stabbing at circuits in front of me.
Anyone who’s seen me in a large classroom, a busy multi-person conversation, an area with high levels of background noise, or talking on the phone has seen just the opposite. As long as I’m immersed in a visual/text stream, I’m good - the instant auditory data enters my list of things to pay attention to, I sink. In the absence of lips to read, I need perfect silence and my ear pressed up against the blaring speakerphone turned up on highest volume to function well.
I can read and type like one possessed, and draw and write at rates that most people can’t keep up with. I’ve optimized for it, both consciously and unconsciously. But auditory data… my ability to handle that needs practice, and a lot of it, and even then I think my limits are already close to being reached.
There’s much to be said outside of words, though - how can I keep myself from overspecializing into a one-input-type life?
Sunday, January 27th, 2008 | Uncategorized | 3 Comments »
Confirmed why I can’t hear sound from my XO unless I stick my ears right up next to the speaker (and even then, only just.) It’s something I’ve known for a long time, but never quantified.
From [[Sound]]:
The speakers in the XO are from and for cellphone speakers. They are optimized for voice, and have less quality frequency response at the low end of the spectrum… What this means is kids will likely crank up the volume so that they can hear some of the lower frequencies. Since the physical size of the speakers prohibits any frequencies below 350 HZ… The speakers start rolling off at about 600 Hz and are virtually worthless below 400 Hz.
I have almost no high-frequency hearing. I can only hear low frequencies - as a matter of fact, my hearing begins rolling off at about 400Hz and is virtually worthless above 600Hz, which is… the exact opposite of what the laptop’s speakers do.
If severely amplified and piped into my ears, they might make an interesting rough hearing aid for my particular kind of loss, especially since there’s a strategic spike at the frequencies cell phones use to transmit human voices; I must find my headphones when I return to Boston.
I also wonder what the frequency response of the headphones-out jack is compared to the frequency response of the speakers themselves, and how you would test that. The former would be easy with equipment if I probed the jack directly with a nice scope and then had the laptop sweep from low to high (oh, how I miss not taking advantage of Olin’s lab equpment now). But the latter? Much as I’d love to have an MLLSA graph (a 3D graphic of frequency response, graphing frequency, amplitude, and time, pronounced “Melissa”) of these things, I can’t think of a way to do it short of an echo-proof room and… a good way to factor out the frequency response of the microphone used to record, and - I really have no idea how sound engineers actually do this. I wonder if someone who took the “Engineers’ Orchestra” class would know.
In other news, apparently other people can hear the beeps the laptops make when they’re using the Acoustic Tape Measure program (sorry, Activity). The measurement algorithm and development notes are fascinating - apparently there’s some really freaky math in the code that even the original developer didn’t understand. I haven’t looked at it yet, but it would be a fun thing to poke around in with a couple of other people who want to play with SigSys for an evening.
Broke (and fixed) my B4 again today, which put me behind on testing I’d planned. (Look, I like disassembling this laptop; I’ve had so few things to disassemble before.) After the fixing-it part, I probed around the motherboard a little to get some voltage levels for Ian and found some “missing” components, such as this diode (photo by Seth). You can see the diode symbol directly to the left of the black box in the bottom right corner (which is the power connector), even solder on the contacts - but no diode. There’s also what looks like a similarly omitted capacitor at the top. Last-minute board revision?
Also cool: the black stickers affixed to the heat spreader, which is a plate of metal that rests on top of the XO’s CPU to drain off heat in lieu of a (noisy, breakage-prone, power-sucking, dust-gets-into-me) fan. Seth’s photographic skills again come to the rescue: in this picture, the big silver plate spanning most of the left half is the heat spreader, and at the top towards the middle of the picture you can see there’s a notch cut in it to accommodate a round black component labeled 5R0R (upside down).
Between the silver of the heat spreader and the round black knob that is the component is what looks like a thin black sticker that’s been pasted over the notch cut out of the heat spreader, then trimmed to make room for the 5ROR - almost like fenders for the heat spreader. From the angle of this particular photo, it looks like a fat black “L.” Similar sticker-bumper-cutouts are in a few other places where the heat spreader has to fit around the rare sticking-up component. The sticker-stuff is not particularly thermally conductive, but it’s also not electrically conductive, so my best guess is that they are bumpers for the heat spreader that prevent it from accidentally shorting something.
Incidentally, I have no idea what the “5ROR” component is. Google thinks it’s a ceiling fan.
Saturday, January 26th, 2008 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
I found an old email tonight. It’s from the fall of last year (my final year of undergrad at Olin). It’s probably applicable to institutions that are trying to create or reinvent themselves in general.
What is so special about Olin College and why?
I’ve been trying to figure that out - started doing interviews on this topic for my Anthropology project, actually. I’ll be presenting the prelim results at Expo when I’m done analyzing them. So far, I’ve found it’s something in the Kool-Aid. ;-)
I agree that ownership, entrepreneurship, leadership, an emphasis on education, an atmosphere of service, and so on are important aspects of the culture - or at least symptoms of an awesome culture. However…
“The O that can be told is not the eternal O.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.”
-with apologies to Lao Tzu
It’s difficult to see what makes you special. However, social scientists answer this kind of question for other people all the time - we should ask them. Get some non-Olin ethnographers in here for a semester and see what they come up with, see if you can persuade someone from the Harvard Grad School of Education to use Olin as a thesis topic.*
*If you give me a couple years, I might take it up as my first PhD thesis. I think I’m going to study education first, then engineering again. (Ed. Note - my topic of study has refocused slightly since to be the intersection of how hackers learn and how undergrad engineers are taught, but… Olin’s still very much a big inspiration in there, and always will be.)
How can this be captured in a few words and simple concepts?
Anthropologist Clotaire Rapaille has some unique procedures for doing what he calls “finding codes,” which are simple words and concepts describing cultures and viewpoints - it may be worth it to learn more about the way his group figures these things out, since it seems that this is the sort of identity-discovery Olin needs right now.
As best I can tell, the one-word Olin descript is PIONEER. It’s a very frontier American image - a gutsy, tight band of brave souls, skilled enough to improvise, preserving some aspects of their old way of life (for them, clothing/music/language; for us, classrooms/transcripts/thermo/etc) but striking out through vaguely-described, sparsely traveled territory in order to “make it” ourselves and take personal ownership of something ourselves.
What is the ideal size for Olin College and why?
I would actually hazard around 200 students (Ed. Note - Olin was about 300 students while I was there, and still is, but there was talk of doubling the size), but I realize that’s pushing the envelope on the extreme-low side. This would shatter our attempts to do everything, because it’d make it obvious that that is impossible and that trying to be too much at once is what is killing us.
A small size would encourage the image of Olin as home base and bring more fresh air into the bubble - there would be even fewer premade opportunities so folks would wander out, cross-register for classes, work off-campus, start businesses, etc. but at the end of the day you come home again, and here is where you’re nurtured, where you reflect on your experiences, where your posse is. A nest (of fledgling flaming sparrows, so to speak*.)
*this might be an in-joke among the class of 2007 - students can’t call ourselves Phoenixes since there’s only one mythological Phoenix, so we’re little flaming sparrows.
The above is based on the following assumptions about things which are facilitated by smaller sizes:
- Everyone should know everyone else. (Students especially need to talk to admin & staff more; staff workload needs to be reduced to allow them the flexibility to “build Olin” in their own way.)
- Everyone should get involved in building the school - not just working at or attending it, but building the institution in a broader sense.
- Funding should never, ever be a problem. (I must admit to having an ulterior motive here - I wish we could reinstate room scholarships.)
What does it mean to inspire change in engineering education on a large scale?
First, what it doesn’t mean - graduating more students. More students does not mean more total alumni impact! UIUC has over 100x as many undergraduates - do they have 100x the impact we do? (I think UIUC is a great school and have many friends in the engineering program there, but what I’m trying to say is that impact doesn’t scale linearly with size.)
When it comes to people, quality > quantity. True institutional agility only comes when *everyone* buys into a change, and at 300 students we’re already having trouble getting everyone on the same page fast (look at how long the curriculum rev and strategic planning process is taking because we are involving the entire community!) and the solution to that is not to grow larger and then decide not to involve the entire community!
It also does not mean exporting specific content (course syllabi, etc.) We keep saying that it’s not the material you cover but the way you learn how to learn that’s important in college. The same goes for colleges themselves; it’s not the particular way you teach or run your institution, but the way you learn to teach, the way you learn to run your institution - in short, the way you learn to change, so that your only definition is that you’re indefinable and that the only prediction you can make is that you’ll be unpredictable, both in wonderful ways.
We can change engineering education by… being ourselves. If we find that and do that, whatever it is, we will naturally be exporting (through example) the idea of continuous improvement and, occasionally, processes for doing so. These should be of an inspirational rather than a didactic nature. When you see someone else doing something cool at Olin, the typical response isn’t to imitate them - it’s to be inspired to start a cool new project of your own.
Likewise, other schools shouldn’t imitate us so much as they ought to make cool changes of their own, take ownership of their own places. If we end up with lots of carbon-copies of Olin in the world, I will be very sad.
And finally, a passage I thought you’d enjoy:
“…when human beings find they enjoy or appreciate some aspect of life, they “institutionalize” it and protect it from further change. What was once a rational response to social need becomes a ritual, performed without regard to its origins. This leads to a puzzling contradiction when a society learns that it can benefit from technological change: scientific discovery becomes a kind of ritual. In this view, scientific research laboratories are the institutionalization of change; they are the facilities set up so that ‘tomorrow can be better than today.’”–Richard Burke (slightly paraphrased)
Thanks for continuing to inspire and catalyze us to make… I was going to say “Olin,” or “this place,” but I think it’s really the process of creating something you believe in that is awesome, so thank you for inspiring us to Make. Building a school is the best engineering project in the world.
Friday, January 25th, 2008 | Uncategorized | 4 Comments »
I love reading the reactions of new XO owners, both kids and adults (and then there are the hackers, who are kids in adult bodies…)
Well, the ones that understand that the laptop is still a work in progress by a largely volunteer community of open-source hackers, that they’re supposed to figure things out on their own and tinker, and who don’t expect it to replace their $2000 corporate laptop running Excel and Powerpoint with 24/7 tech support reporting overseas to a pyramid hierarchy.
I have decided that I do not want a traditional MBA.
I want to learn how to run an open-source company.
(Yes, I’m still studying engineering education - but I’m becoming more and more convinced that entrepreneurship, particularly that of the socially-responsible type, is a mandatory skill for good hackers - since entrepreneurship is the creation of value, and hacking is an excellent way of learning how to cleverly create and explosively leverage that value while having fun in the meantime. It’s another tool. You expand your reach.)
This is a larger statement than it might seem - the most common question I was asked while in the Philippines was “so, when are you going to get your MBA?” My father and all my uncles did it; my cousins are starting to head towards the same, and everyone expects my brother to follow (and I guess they figured I would as well). It almost seems like the traditional career/study path of the Chinese-Filipino kid, although I know it’s not the only one.
Trouble is, according to my mother, “you can’t get a degree in it.” (I don’t care.) But there’s also the problem of how you learn to do it - which makes me a very, very happy Mel. Because in the absence of a formal program of study, guess what?
I get to make my own.
Friday, January 25th, 2008 | Uncategorized | 3 Comments »
A friend mentioned the wiki of the Speak Africa UNICEF conference he attended several months ago, and being a curious little bugger I ended up (1) wishing I could read Portuguese and French, and (2) reading the opening speech, the only thing there posted fully in English.
It appears to have been given by a young speaker, and it’s fantastic, even in (what I think is) translation. Young people demanding, not to be treated as adults as a privilege, but requesting that they be asked to share in the burdens and responsibilities of the society they are poised to inherit. Young people calling not for action, but for access to tools so that they themselves can take action.
First of all our participation is not just about making speeches and resolutions at big international meetings. A speech on its own is just decoration and nothing more unless it is a part of a wider participation in our countries. How many children and young people in our towns and villages are participating? …who takes young people truly and seriously…
The African Youth Charter with many more resolutions was accepted by all our Heads of State in 2006 and we thank them for that. But how many young people in our countries know that there is an African Youth Charter. It is now being ratified at country level. How many young people even know what it says so that they can talk to their leaders about what they expect from it…
Stop being afraid of us, give us the space and see what we can do. Then instead of us always demanding from you, you can hold us accountable. If we want accelerated progress in our countries, give it to the people who can run the fastest…
Why cannot we set up such structures, such as children’s parliaments and local councils to do this on a regular basis? Unless this happens, we will come here for Cairo +10 and we will make another set of resolutions which look exactly like all the other resolutions we have been making ever since we were born. And another group of young people will make the same demands…
And we are saying that our sisters and brothers are the best people to be the solutions. We the youth, know where the problems lie… we can show where and why groups of children and young people have been forgotten…
Unless this happens, we will come here for Cairo +10 and we will make another set of resolutions which look exactly like all the other resolutions we have been making ever since we were born. And another group of young people will make the same demands… So we say once more, no more resolutions until we give the solutions to all these resolutions. No more resolutions until you recognize us as the solutions and give us the power to be the solutions.
I want to shake their hand. I’d also love to meet the folks behind the Kabataan News Network (KNN), a television show written, filmed, reported, researched, edited - everything - by youth in the Philippines. Yes, their website is the antithesis of accessibility (woo, Flash) but still, awesome idea. Why shouldn’t high school students get to cover more than home basketball games?
Thanks to the increasing length of compulsory (and then expected post-compulsory) education, a student of 22 is still often considered to be an immature and inexperienced child whereas centuries ago a person 9 years their junior would be considered an adult. At least that’s what I’ve been reading for years, so it’s fascinating to see the pebbles cascading in the other direction (as they have many times before, but I think the tiny footfalls heralds the start of an eventual avalanche).
Ah, the sound of a generation coming of age.
Thursday, January 24th, 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Creeping back into the education world: did you know you can get a Bachelors in Independent Studies? This is the kind of thing I wish Olin had gone for - albeit with a “you must study engineering” requirement - back in the days of the “3 vs 1″ degree debate (we eventually settled on 3 engineering degrees: Mechanical, Electrical and Computer, and General with several concentrations you could choose from, including stuff like Bioengineering, Materials Science, and make-your-own).There’s also this edwired musing which includes thoughts on avoiding classes entirely, and gaining entrance into professions by virtues of things like a bar exam. (Which reminds me that I’ve got a long overdue post series to restart.)
The post is a little vague on exactly what “open source higher education” means. From my reading, it seems like a combination of “education materials should be open access!” which… is great, but isn’t higher-ed specific and access to materials alone does not an education make, and “You should be able to get your degree by teaching yourself and then passing exams, not necessarily showing up in set classes,” which is the case in a large number of huge lecture courses already. I think it’s a good beginning to a conversation, but needs some more thought. Open source higher ed must be more than just a bunch of independent studies.
From the edwired post:
What is the purpose of the college degree? It seems to me that there are several: to provide some assurance that the degree holder has mastered some body of knowledge (at least as much as we would expect from four years of college); to provide access to a more or less privileged elite called the alumni; and to provide a convenient stopping point on the way to even greater mastery of some body of knowledge.
I agree with Derek’s comment to the edwired post on feedback and community lacking in the proposed “study on your own, and then get tested” model. My take on it goes a little further: while these might be some of the purposes behind the piece of paper we call a college degree, it’s not the same as the purposes behind college.
College is (among other things) a learning environment; a degree is “proof” that you’ve completed a set series of requirements within that environment. Whether those requirements correspond to actual capability is another question, and credentialism a debate for another day, but I’d hazard right now that another functionality of a college degree is - usually - to certify that you’ve been resident in a certain learning environment for an extended period of time.
This can be anything from “Wow, you went to a prestigious school, you must be smart!” cachet (however true that is) to “Hey, I was in that program - do you know Prof. X?” A degree, like it or not, carries some assumptions about the kind of people you might have spent your time around, the kind of classes you might have taken, the kind of teaching styles and learning mechanisms you might have been exposed to, and the rigidity of the qualifications that you had to pass in order to get the paper. How much of this can people see from a diploma? Not much, unless they happen to know a lot about that individual school. And even then it’s no guarantee that individual had the “usual” experience.
Not sure where I was going with that train of thought.
There is a precedent for the model the post describes, though - one that’s completely customized, but regarded by both academic and non-academic communities at large to be rigorous, thorough, and a very good indication of one’s knowledge of a field. It’s called a qualifying exam. (I’m not sure about “practicality,” and it’s definitely a labor-intensive option for all involved, but I’d love to hear what people who are in / have been through grad school think about that particular model of schooling.)
At some point I should compile a list of alternative paradigms that could be utilized in undergrad engineering education. That would be an interesting read.
Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Thanks to overhearing Arjun ask Bernie a question in IRC tonight, I figured out why my keyboard “broke” and how to “fix it.” Now that I know the answer, it seems obvious in retrospect. To see why, take a look at the OLPC Nigerian keyboard. Pay attention to the “h” key. (The problem was that my “h” key thought it was a “u”.)
A quick /etc/sysconfig/keyboard edit switching my keyboard layout permanently from Nigerian to United States (until I relearn dvorak) solves everything. I guess my old build before the activated upgrade was set to US, and the activated upgrade… sets to Nigeria? In any case, “it’s a feature, not a bug.”
I can’t believe I’ve never dug around this stuff before. I was always a wuss about breaking my computer (and other projects), so I never got the sheer amount of bug-fixing experiences most hackers seem to have cut their teeth on. Trying… to… fix. MUST BREAK THINGS MORE. Or alternatively, help other folks whose things are broken… which is why I think I learn more doing tech support and teaching than I would futzing about on my own. Instead of feeling guilty for wasting other people’s time, I feel good that I’m helping someone else. (Yes, I’m aware this logic is erroneous. I am apparently not the average hacker, if there is such a thing.)
In other news, I think I’m getting pretty good at getting other people to hack. After spending most of the day in the Chinese consulate waiting for my dad’s visa (last-minute work emergency for him; unexpected day-of-unproductivity for me) my mom and I went to the OLPC Chicago meetup at Google, which had (if I counted nametags right) over 50 people. A week earlier I’d expected maybe 30 to RSVP, tops.
Things went phenomenally well (thanks to all the attendees, not my lack of meeting-holding-skillz; everyone pretty much organized themselves) - but I won’t talk about it here just yet, because I promised Seth I’d save my report for the ‘zine issue coming out soon. Now if I can just attend events that I’m not running and actually get some hacking of my own done… (I really want to go to PyCon, but I’ll be in New York while all the awesomeness is happening, including Mike’s Sugar tutorial.)
I’ve been sleeping on a mattress in the corner of my parents’ room for the past few nights because it is Damn Cold here and my room gets a feeble trickle of lukewarm air from the heater, which (plus thick fuzzy blankets) is Not Enough. Especially since I still have to prop myself up on 4 pillows and cough for an hour before I’m able to conk out. On the other hand, this counts as Getting Better. So I am satisfied.
Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
