In late January 2010, I went to Seattle. Now it's May, 2010, and I've forgotten most of what happened. It's time I got around to writing that down before I forget it, too:
I caught my worst cold of my life from my co-workers. This was a great gathering of co-workers from around the world. In California, there are billboards that remind you to stay away from work when sick, not infect everybody. People from other parts of the world don't see those billboards all the time.
I ran into Mike Touloumtzis in Tangletown. He was married, with a kid. He looked happy. It was good to see him looking happy.
I kvetched at Matt Armstrong about App Inventor for Android, a graphical programming environment for kids. I was good at typing, not-so-good at mousing. I'd been discouraged at how little I'd accomplished after several minutes of mousing. Matt said that it sounded kind of like Scratch. The thing is, kids didn't think they were programming, they thought they were making animations.
Later on, I saw Davina, Eli, and Torrey. Sure enough, the kids didn't seem upset at Scratch's entirely un-Emacs-like programming environment. I kvetched at Davina: didn't these kids hate how slow it was to create a "for loop" with all this mousing? Davina's wiser than I am: "They don't know how long it's 'supposed' to take to make a for loop. They're doing all this for the first time." They just know that they're doing something cool.
Some stuff from previous trips was gone. The Odyssey Martime Center was gone. That pearl tea place in the U District no longer offered angel jelly.
It was fun to play with Paul in the rain.
Ron's house was a cozy home, no longer just a construction site.
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