Warren Seen » kids http://warrenseen.com/blog freelance software developer Wed, 03 Jun 2009 23:54:34 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 en hourly 1 Getting off my lazy butt and doing something… http://warrenseen.com/blog/2006/11/15/getting-off-my-lazy-butt-and-doing-something/ http://warrenseen.com/blog/2006/11/15/getting-off-my-lazy-butt-and-doing-something/#comments Wed, 15 Nov 2006 02:18:20 +0000 warren http://warrenseen.com/blog/2006/11/15/getting-off-my-lazy-butt-and-doing-something/ Err, yeah. I remember, once upon a time, I used to have time to blog. That was before we built this:
New House

Oh, and before he was born:

Warren and Liam

So despite the fact that I’m lying on the couch there, I’ve been far from idle.

My yard still looks like this:

New House - yard

so it’s not as though i don’t have enough to do! However, I *am* committing to finishing up, in the very near future, the Ruby Web Spider I began to write about some 5-6 months ago.

Consider this, a dusting off of the cobwebs kinda post…

]]> http://warrenseen.com/blog/2006/11/15/getting-off-my-lazy-butt-and-doing-something/feed/ 1 “So I can extract all your knowledge…” http://warrenseen.com/blog/2006/02/10/so-i-can-extract-all-your-knowledge/ http://warrenseen.com/blog/2006/02/10/so-i-can-extract-all-your-knowledge/#comments Fri, 10 Feb 2006 03:19:22 +0000 warren http://warrenseen.com/blog/2006/02/10/so-i-can-extract-all-your-knowledge/ I was just jokingly informed by my ten year old stepson that he intends to build “some kind of mind reading device, so I can extract all your knowledge about computers and rule the world!”

Hmmm, evil genius in training. After discussing whether we should inform his mother of his plans for world domination, he informed me that the reason *I* did not rule the world was because I don’t have a “master plan for world domination.” apparently, HE does. :-o

But it did get me to thinking that it’s high time I start passing on some of my kung foo to him. In the past he has expressed an interest in programming, but really hasn’t had the background to understand the concepts. (It’s very difficult to explain programming to folks that don’t understand basic algebra, IMO)
(side note: it seems the career of “games developer” is this generation’s “astronaut”, as he is quite intent that is what he wants to do when he grows up. I haven’t the heart to explain to him that the developers spend very little time actually playing the games :-) )

Anyway, I think that 10 is probably a good age to start learning these things, but unfortunately I don’t really know where to start. I’ve seen some sites before about teaching kids Python, but since:

a) I don’t know Python, an
b) I don’t need to know it to function at this point in time

I’m wondering if there is something similar out there using Ruby? Ruby’s consistent, natural syntax, everything is an object approach and the instant gratification of 0 compile time makes it ideal in my eyes for this task.

Maybe I should just point him to the Programming Ruby book and leave him alone for a while?

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