So damn much cleaning to be done. Getting to the point where a major trip to the dump may be necessary to get rid of some of the junk around here. Anyone want an old 27” CRT TV? If the answer is yes, followup question: what the hell is wrong with you?

Anyway, still considering the Pub Crawl plans. Did a little writing/planning over it but haven’t been able to put in too much effort, largely due to just being further uninspired following the common stresses of work. But it’s certainly still on my mind and not abandoned. We do need to re-address the drink plan situation. The one test was a complete and total failure of the “likely to cause vomiting” variety. 

A couple weeks back I was invited to be a photographer at my IT department’s annual Innovation Fair, where folks show off the specialized stuff they’ve been working on (as well as a few vendors getting to show off some shit and give away swag). One of the developers I work with brought in his 8 year old son to show off all of the little projects they’ve been working on together, including some Arduino stuff and Lego Mindstorm stuff. More interesting was a child-oriented game programming system called Kodu. I’d never seen this before, but the kid demonstrated the ability to program semi-complex AI on the fly, and built a whole game (after a fashion) in just a few minutes. It was pretty neat, and GUI-based too: no code garbage, just big, child friendly popup menus to assemble it all. 

I love the idea of it and as Zoe gets a little older I’ll introduce her to it. I also really wish something like that had been around when I was a kid. It’s things like this that will start driving the next generation towards development, and not just development in the sense of software, but in developing ideas and… well, innovating. Not all that long ago, programming of this level was the exclusive domain of people who had years of high end training on it. More recently it’s become more accessible in general, but the fact that it’s gotten down to kid-friendly levels is just amazing. I wonder what the widespread effect on education will be as formerly high-end tools trickle down.

Also goes to show that kids themselves are DIY projects, in more ways than just the sexytimes that cause them.