The Aerie
Well this is cool. Of course, I'll get less writing done.
I discovered (that is to say, I was told by my spouse) that I was taking my son to his Lego League tournament this weekend. His friends joined in, so that I have now taken THREE boys to the Lego League tournament.
I brought my laptop expecting to at least get some writing done. But much to my surprise the school has a full wireless network going. Public IP addresses, no encryption, no passwords, and oddly enough for a school, no content filtering. About as wide open as a school can be.
Sheesh.
So I get to be on the Internet, which in some senses is fun, but onthe other hand offers me tons of distractions from the writing I anticipated doing.
I'm also kept quite busy following the team to their presentations and tournaments. In addition to building a robot that can accomplish various tasks in a theme (this year it's a robotic Mars lander, last year I think it was environmental cleanup), they have to present a report on the topic (the proposed NASA Mars lander), and a techical presentation on how they built and run their robot. Basically that means that I get about 30 minutes of writing between scurrying off to take snapshots of the action.
It's really kind of amazing to me, that kids are growing up programming Lego robots to explore Mars. I remember how amazing my first 110-baud teletype seemed back in 1975. It was incredible! And now they have programmable robot cars...
Of course, I was lucky because when I got into computers they WERE so simple. I could sit down with Lunar Lander and within seconds start rewriting the program. Nowadays you have to learn so much more before you can create something that says "Hello world." You need to know how to open up windows on the desktop, choose color and font, etc. Back then it was just 'PRINT "HELLO, WORLD"' We didn't even need the Shift key!
Anyway lunch break is nearly over and I should get back to writing...