http://www.banane.com/2006/08/17/the-family-business/ Thu, 08 Jan 2009 11:59:39 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.7 hourly 1 http://www.banane.com/2006/08/17/the-family-business/comment-page-1/#comment-3736 banane » Blog Archive » Post-MacWorld Write-Up Thu, 11 Jan 2007 23:46:10 +0000 http://www.banane.com/2006/08/17/the-family-business/#comment-3736 [...] This is the conference where my mom found out her business would be made obsolete by PageMaker. Walking the halls, it had a kind of real impression that new tech is always out there, but there are old techs (and dreams) out there too. [...] [...] This is the conference where my mom found out her business would be made obsolete by PageMaker. Walking the halls, it had a kind of real impression that new tech is always out there, but there are old techs (and dreams) out there too. [...]

]]> http://www.banane.com/2006/08/17/the-family-business/comment-page-1/#comment-191 banane » Blog Archive » Tech Post #4: BASIC Thu, 14 Sep 2006 19:31:37 +0000 http://www.banane.com/2006/08/17/the-family-business/#comment-191 [...] Basic was great and visible, and I agree with the author, in that it is like opening the hood of a jalopy, but bigger highlights in my programming learning cycle were: - Learning how to typeset. Talk about old-school. That would be a thousand dollar excercise in fueling up, if I decided that was a way to teach my daughter, in our living room. My mom was a typesetter, and she let me on the box once in a while. It was the beginning of HTML structure, and made it really easy for me to pick up HTML, as I already knew how to do inline text formatting. - Perl. I waded through the “learing Perl” book with some girlfriends, and really pushed through some of the more challenging exercises, by telnetting to my college account, and mucking through Unix and Perl syntax. Now I find it easy, but then I really had issues with simple thing slike fileeaders, pipes, nested loops, and datatypes. - School systems: both my high school and college made serious investments in computers, and I appreciated that, and I think it really gave me a boost. I always had cutting edge NeXt boxes, or high end Macs to noodle around on during study breaks. They hired students to work on the systems- and that saved my ass in college. - Work systems: I got to mess around on computers at work, and they were large servers, that I could definitely not afford. My bosses also gave me tasks like: “Buy the parts of your computer and assemble it.” Or, “nobody knows PCs, so can you buy one and set it up and test all of our competition?”, or, “Create a mini-Internet inhouse and test our mail systems.” These were grueling at the time, but ended up forcing me to learn things I didn’t know. [...] [...] Basic was great and visible, and I agree with the author, in that it is like opening the hood of a jalopy, but bigger highlights in my programming learning cycle were: - Learning how to typeset. Talk about old-school. That would be a thousand dollar excercise in fueling up, if I decided that was a way to teach my daughter, in our living room. My mom was a typesetter, and she let me on the box once in a while. It was the beginning of HTML structure, and made it really easy for me to pick up HTML, as I already knew how to do inline text formatting. - Perl. I waded through the “learing Perl” book with some girlfriends, and really pushed through some of the more challenging exercises, by telnetting to my college account, and mucking through Unix and Perl syntax. Now I find it easy, but then I really had issues with simple thing slike fileeaders, pipes, nested loops, and datatypes. - School systems: both my high school and college made serious investments in computers, and I appreciated that, and I think it really gave me a boost. I always had cutting edge NeXt boxes, or high end Macs to noodle around on during study breaks. They hired students to work on the systems- and that saved my ass in college. - Work systems: I got to mess around on computers at work, and they were large servers, that I could definitely not afford. My bosses also gave me tasks like: “Buy the parts of your computer and assemble it.” Or, “nobody knows PCs, so can you buy one and set it up and test all of our competition?”, or, “Create a mini-Internet inhouse and test our mail systems.” These were grueling at the time, but ended up forcing me to learn things I didn’t know. [...]

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