Monday, February 16, 2009

Presidents Day

Tara returned from her ski trip today, a Quaker event. Now we're watching Simpsons, Alexia visiting, a day off for her too. Julie is keeping me up to date about mom.

I've been networking with "the professoriate" today, got a wry one from Dr. Richard Hake, Emeritus Professor of Physics, Indiana University, about the quirky Math Forum archive, appreciating my pithy synopsis of the constructivist meme (an abbreviated account to be sure).

What really surprised me (pleasantly) was this esoteric Java site, brought to my attention by one of the authors. That's very close to the stuff I serve, albeit in Python and at a lower grade level, along with my Vegetable Group Soup in Flash. Both Cryptonomicon by Stephenson and In Code by Flannery fit into our syllabus around here.

I wrote a long autobiographical piece, taking up bandwidth on math-thinking-l, focusing on my New Mexico connections. That got IEEE guy bandit yakking about his friend Glen the Aikido guy in Santa Cruz, reminding of me of Ron Marson's TOPS.

There's a need for "flight plans" in this airspace, or we'll just waste energy dodging each other. Why not fly in formation? What a concept!

My thanks also to John P. Dougherty, Computer Science, Haverford College, for the kind note. "And we also enjoy using Python in our CS1/CS2 sequence, so far so good".

Dr. Chuck
, good at branding, sent me the latest draft of his O'Reilly book on the Google Appengine. I've learned a lot from studying it, wrote a little demo of this nifty new service called OS Garden. This work goes back to my internationalization work, which I've been pitching to clients as a "next big thing" in some sectors, old hat in others I realize.