good advice

ze frank still makes me laugh. and sometimes he says some smart stuff that's relevant to technologists today.

criticism

stranger: "sorry. i was really bad at that"
me: "you weren't really bad."
stranger: "okay. well i'm sorry anyway."
me: "hmm. if i draw a line between good and bad, where is not really bad for you?"

stranger motions to right next to bad.
i push her hand towards good.
she smiles.

misunderstanding

me: "where are you from?"
girl: "perth."

excitement. it's a joke that's witty, inclusive and nerdy!

me: "great, i'm from earth too!"
girl: "so you know 'some perth suburb'?"
me: "oooh, Perth."

oh well.

refactoring

client: "what's refactoring?"
me: "there's a kind of pink sticky note over there. and it's sort of rectangular."
me: "or i could say"
me: "that is a pink, rectangular post it note"
everyone on my team except me: laughter

girls

i'm trying to learn a programming language with a collegue. she's a girl, and programming isn't her day job. it's called python. we have different goals.

she wants to make something that solves problems. i want to be fluent. how do we make it fun for both of us?

is this a recipe for fun?
1 interactive python shell.
1 xmpp client library.

incoming messages are sent to the python shell. a message is concocted in python. a reply is sent. it's like TDD, with people. i hope a conversation would look something like this:

dave>"hello."
sarah>"hello."
dave>"what is 2 times 7?"
sarah>5
dave>"no"
dave>"what is 2 times 7?"
sarah>14
dave>"yes!"

sounds fun to me. hoping the interactivity and the fact that it does something - ie. answers and asks questions, will be enough to satisfy us both. i'm going to try it on one computer without the chat stuff first to see how it goes.

bye.