Odd is it sounds, I had an enormous amount of fun at Jump Planet, bouncing around large inflatable bouncy castles, slides and climbing walls. Nathan and I spent most of the time laughing at each and lying at the bottom of each inflatable slide in a heap of arms and legs.
Only injury - grazes on my left arm where the side of one of the slides kept rubbing as I went down.
And the daffodils look lovely today.
And the memories won’t weaken today.
And the longing just wants me to say,
“You were“.
I was introspecting while reading Beautiful Code in the bath (yeah I know, TMI). Subsequently I was later dumping said introspection on long suffering wife, and for now I’ll protect the general public from such boredom. We got onto talking about one thought that had arisen: “Improve your aptitudes and damage control your suckitudes”.
C pointed out that that’s why she didn’t like playing computer games, she sucks at them and never gets better. Not playing is damage control. So, being the arrogant sod I am, I explained my problem with games. I’m great at them, put me down in front of a new game and I will invariably impress by being better than expected.
There’s a but. While I seem to do really well at first, I just don’t improve. Pretty quickly I find that the others who are also playing have reached my level and left me behind. Why, why, why, oh why?
C, being a sarcastic wench at times, pointed out that it was because I was British (I of course would wrestle with whether it was Englishness or Britishness). We invent games and then after a short while of excelling, we suck at them. Bah. Said nature appears to have ruined my gaming skills.
ACT 1
“I’d like to try goat milk”, said I to my wife; she being the knower of where to find such things.
ACT 2
“Oh, and I got you some goat milk today”, said wife to I; delivering upon her role as knower and finder of such things.
“*gulp*”, thought I, “over ambitious aiming trips up husband yet again”.
ACT 3.
SCENE 1.
“Cow milk today… don’t want to mess up the Weetabix”, thinks I.
SCENE 2.
“Cow milk again… Weetabix is important”, scurries I, avoiding a decision.
SCENE 3.
“Stop being a weasel”, says some hidden part of my brain that likes to deal out Anglican guilt (like Catholic guilt, but we don’t need the Pope to apply the pressure). “Try the milk”, says Mr Invisible, “you have to”.
“Let’s try this goat milk”, says I, brave in the face of 474 years of independence from Rome. “Nathan, do you want to try it? It’s goat milk. ”
“Yes”, says my son, he whose only fear is going to bed. “Yum”, says my son, he whose taste buds can actually taste rather than sigh longingly back to Szechuan peppercorn stir frys.
So I try it. It’s not bad. It’s not great, but not bad. Well a little odd in the after-taste, kind of sideways creamy. Not bad though.
ACT 4.
“Want some more goat milk Nathan?”, says I, being called back the next day by this novel liquid in the fridge.
“No”, says son, he whose lexicon is simple enough that not mincing words is a necessity not a virtue.
“I do”, says I, and in so doing I pour a glass, and proceed to explain that I’m drinking it to my wife, she who is the knower of these things. “Want to try some?”
“Sure”, she says, brave as only someone without an English primary school dinner education can be. “Tastes goaty” (by which we ascertain it tastes like goat cheese (feta-like), though I suggest it might be that goat cheese can have many tastes in a desperate attempt to deny the possibility of milk ever tasting like cheese [cf: school dinners and subsequent cowardice]).
ACT 5.
While shopping at the local corporate grocery (Fred Meyer, like their owner Kroger but a tiny bit crapper), I notice they a) have goat milk, and b) the low-fat variant is solidly on sale. So I buy it (rule #1 luxuries must be on sale to be bought). Given that the previous normal goat milk had tasted a bit creamy compared to normal cow milk, it’ll be interesting to see how the low-fat milk tastes.
I’ll be the one hoping Nathan is prepared to take the first taste tomorrow.
Though not our toybox for a bit - under a budget.
Tried this Apple Muffin recipe today - not too bad, though we’ve the urge to add oats and some more brown sugar. They’re a bit bland and anaemic.
Amongst the flurry of boxes that have been showing up in the last few days (Atlantic shipping sucks, so Christmas is supplied by Amazon) there was a box today that contained a nice little green and white number. OLPC’s XO to be precise.
At last - hardware that doesn’t waste time on a manual 
Plug. Battery. Device. Battery shaped hole in Device. You don’t need a degree in Lego to guess what to do.
Then you spend a while trying to open the damn thing. Degree in sofa/stairs manipulation later, it’s open and you’re ready to go. Power button. Nice loading image. Started.
Question: What’s your name?
I lied and gave my son’s. He’s too young to read right now, so he’ll never know.
Request: Choose the colour for your logo!
Or rather, keep clicking on the logo until you like the two-tone colour. After a while I found the purple/yellow combo I wanted, to match the purple/yellow logo on the back of the laptop. I’m very happy about that by the way - my Kick Off team wore purple/yellow, my CM* custom teams wear purple/yellow (with gold/black as the away kit) and a hacky bit of code I did in Delphi years ago was Purplepad, a dumb Notepad clone with the massive value add of a purple background and yellow text. So - very happy with the colour.
Eventually said son noticed what I was doing and wanted into the action. So I showed him the paint program (too hard), showed him the TurtleArt (pretty rainbow) and got him to hold the laptop (too heavy). So it’s all mine! Though for some reason the green toy like demeanor has him believing that in fact it’s not all mine and is his computer. It’s going to take some sweet talking to explain that it’s not the ideal device for his Flash and DOS games; though I do plan to poke a bit to see if I can get a DOS emulator to work.
Mostly - I’m looking forward to pushing myself into some Python programming, using TurtleArt as a teaching tool along with the Lego Mindstorms software and just having fun.
Biggest dissapointment - no solar panel/hand crank power system; but in Sunny Seattle with dodgy carpals, that’s probably a blessing.
One thing I can put on whenever I need to get Nathan to sit down and watch TV with me is the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon series. He’s quite the fan.
Digging around on the wikipedia page and google, I managed to find the script for the never created final episode - ‘Requiem’. Venger is DungeonMaster’s son, as we already knew; there is a Nameless One hidden behind it all who is the real evil and the children redeem Venger before being offered the chance to head home.
Something that always amuses me on the intro is that while Venger is the “force for evil in the land”, Dungeon Master is merely their ‘guide in the realms of’, not a force for good. You’d think the kids would have picked up on that one. It’s a nice bit that matches the real DM concept in the D&D games (I presume). I also liked how the wizard goes from useless to the strongest character - pretty similar to the way wizards usually play.
Also worth mention - a fan film that made it onto the DVD.
Lack of posting for me (despite the many hand scrawled notes) because I woke up on Friday morning with an injured wrist. I think one of my carpals gave up or something like that; I couldn’t lift up a drink of water without the wrist losing strength half way.
Fortunately it’s getting better - I just need to give it some time to recover and not overdo the typing.
The other week I took the plunge and bought Lego Mindstorms. Thereupon it sat on the table for a couple of weeks until I finally got around to picking up some rechargeable batteries. Friday night we built the robot, and on Saturday we discovered the act of programming said robot to do some basic tasks.
Nathan was very impressed by the concept, but obviously it’s a toy for me. It’ll be a while before he groks the concepts involved. My thesis was on computing and education, and while I did a terrible job at that (average code, with hindsight, and poor research), said thesis sparked an interest in me for the ideas of how computing improves education. I was lucky enough to be a part of the 80’s BBC + Logo/Turtle push in the UK and it’s one of the parts of my primary education that stand out in my and my peers’ memories. Another was raising the Mary Rose - an educational ‘game’ in which we painstakingly dug out the Mary Rose and cataloged our finds.
Hopefully I can keep up the Mindstorms energy and have a good play. Lego recently offered up a Tie-Fighter Tank from the Star Wars Expanded Universe - it’d be cool to take one of the Tie-Fighters I have, mix that with the Mindstorms and have a little Tieby that runs around on the floor doing dumb things.
Even better would be to have a robot with multiple CPUs trying to work together. Given that the future is about event driven multi party systems, having multiple mindstorms seems like an educational thing for the lad.
