Why sigh at the incongruity? Sometimes I can't remember the name of the child who's attention I want, much less worry about the gender preferences of someone who I can't see and don't even know. Respondents are likely to say "Dude" without even having made a decision about whether your login is gendered male or female.

Life is too short to assign weight to the random stuff other people say.

In the SF bay area, there is the Exploratorium in San Francisco, which is kind of like they took the crazy hands-on area of every science museum I've ever seen, and put them all in one place. Just about everything is physically interactive, it's awesome. Then there is The Tech Museum in San Jose, which seems like a lot of displays and button-pushing exhibits - push the buttons in the right order and you'll get a neat printout! But I was terribly disappointed by the entire thing, because it's interactive like clicking things with a mouse is interactive.

Well, that's not a problem, just put it in however the heck you want to.

I've always assumed that the springs were used to provide solid contact. In which case this will probably not be as reliable. Realistically, though, I have troubles imagining that expensive devices wouldn't already have a protection circuit, or that inexpensive devices would be willing to pay a licensing charge.

Which is why I've never quite understood why they want to do it in a "smart" fashion, as opposed to simply giving you a rebate if your appliances are set to tweak their power usage every day during the peak window. The latter would require no elaborate communications system, just dumb timers.

I excitedly got in on the original GIGO scheme, figuring that it would be useful for my young children. The software sucked. I don't mean sucked like it was badly written and crashed a lot. I mean sucked like there was no point to it, it was just a collection of independent geeky tech toys aimed at kids. Some of them were fun, but the package didn't add up to anything nearly as worthwhile as a Leapster.

The hardware is not the right problem to solve. If someone created a comprehensive open-source early-education curriculum, the hardware would magically condense out of the ether. Well, not quite, but you get my point, the missing content means that they are building a solution which is so distant from the problem as to be worthless, except as a PR stunt. The most likely reason this won't happen is because educational curriculum is a terribly hot potato, with lobbies piled nine high on all sides.

And you think it's reasonable to expect the gym teacher in a public school to use their access to data to prevent this? I always considered myself lucky (or not) if the gym teacher actually bothered to learn my *name* during the course of the year.

-scott

I think the take-away, here, is that it's better to just change your normal behavior than to change your behavior when the "smart" grid needs it. If you can run your dishwasher at night, then why not do that every single time?

Survivor ISS.

Yes and no. The thing which seems to dig me out of this kind of hole are:

1) Break work down into bite-sized pieces that should take 10-30 minutes, and do one or two of those every morning before checking email or the web.
2) Work less.

#1 is similar to the Getting Things Done system by David Allen. I don't actually follow the system, but the nothing of breaking things down into doable pieces and then doing a couple seems to help. Builds momentum.

#2 is just common sense. If you are spending more time working because you aren't getting enough done, then you'll set off a vicious cycle. Last year I acquired an outside hobby that is somewhat self-limiting (*), and it helps lots. When I'm wasting time at work, that time comes directly out of time I can devote to my hobby. So I waste less time at work, mainly because I can more easily say no to sub-projects which I shouldn't be doing.

-scott

(*) Bicycling. You can trivially spend 10 hours playing an online video game, to manage that on a bike you need to plan ahead.

Meaning dinosaurs did not have long necks. QED.

+1 to this. A decade ago when I started working at a real company (after a decade as a consultant), I noticed in interviews that a lot of candidates had postgraduate degrees, and they weren't that good. It freaked me out a bit, since I had a B.A. in computer science, and I wondered if that would impact my future prospects?

Turns out, though, that the best way to have a good career is to do something you enjoy, be good at what you do, and work with great people. Those are all somewhat orthogonal to how far you took your education. Do the postgraduate work if it seems likely that you'll be able to do interesting work with interesting people. Go out and get a job if you can do interesting work with interesting people. If none of your options involve interesting work or interesting people, try to figure out why not, because having that network of interesting people is ALL that matters in terms of your future job prospects.

Slight caveat if you're talking about doing your postgraduate work MIT or Stanford or Berkeley or UW Madison or someplace well-known for being awesome in the field. Don't skip that to work at a second-rate company.

I first used Turbo Pascal on an Apple IIsomething in 1987 or 1986. It ran via the magic of the Z80 card and CP/M. It was a real breakthrough compared to the disk-swapping joy that was UCSD Pascal.

In 2007, I got a G1G1 OLPC for my kids, and an Eee 701 (or whatever, original) for me. Honestly, the OLPC has left me feeling let-down. My kids enjoy it, but I don't think they're really learning much of anything, though they do seem to have figured out how to reboot the thing as needed. Whereas the Eee certainly isn't teaching them anything, but it's definitely more useful to me. So they really are different beasts.

I think where OLPC has really let things down is in concentrating so much on the hardware and software, when it's the content that's really important. I don't think they caused the netbook at all, unless you mean that Asus and others got so annoyed with the delays that they decided to do something about it. Rather, I think the netbooks were a right-time, right-place type of thing, which OLPC could have taken advantage of if they weren't already committed to their course.

While something like a LeapPad or Leapster is not a "computer", it's a LOT cheaper. An open-content version of the LeapPad would be very doable, and very directly world-changing, whereas the OLPC seems to be all potential and no delivery.

My assumption is that they couldn't afford to sell that many units.

I got one for my 7-year-old son in the first pass of the program. He likes it well enough, but it's really only worth maybe $150 in value, tops.

My biggest issue is that the system seems to assume that someone else is going to go out an collect a bunch of apps to make it useful for coursework - which, to my mind, is the harder problem to solve in the first place. So my kids enjoy a few specific parts of the system, but there's no scalability to lead them onward and upward. Even something on the order of what the Leappad/Leapster systems have would be helpful. Something where they can keep learning at their own level within the system even as they become more accomplished. I can completely see the potential for the unit to be useful for kids from 4 to 12 or so, but it's not there.

Hmm, a more pointed version of my complaint is that the system has a bunch of stuff on it which I can imagine computer geeks thinking would be useful for kids, but what it needs to have is stuff to make it useful for teaching kids about the world. Computers are just a tool.

I happen to be biased, but right now I'm more excited by the potential of Android in this space. Android plus an Eee 701 seems at least as compelling as an OLPC for first-world usage, and cellphone hardware is getting cheap enough that I can imagine it being able to address third-world usage, too.

What jumps out at me is that the loop is counting 'day' backward and 'year' forward. Far better would be to have a pair of forward-counting values, which you compare with your target. That small change totally changes the character of the loop.