Robert Pogson

It went on until 0500 for me… It was a very long day. Highlights:

• the house was full – perhaps 50 people
• diverse food was carried in – everything from roast pig to vegetarian egg-rolls smothered in peanut sauce. My favourites were turkey and Swedish meatballs.
• a new PC arrived – a cute little Atomic dual core thingy with 4gB RAM. I got to install Debian GNU/Linux on it over the LAN. Whoohoo! Everything worked but the surround sound. Will solve that today. It’s a problem with a particular ASUS mobo which has a published solution.
• a young lady noticed the carolling programme I had produced and when I told her it was created on a GNU/Linux machine, one thing led to another and she learned a bit about GNU/Linux. She loved my databases and web applications. She’s a Mac person so I have no clue how that would be done but we discussed virtual machines or migration. Cool.
• due to every light and device in the house operating simultaneously we discovered the kitchen outlet for the microwave oven is somehow on the same line as my wife’s office and the lights in the foyer… Obviously the microwave should have its own circuit. The first sign I noticed was the lights in the foyer blinking when the microwave was started… Then the breaker tripped. Sigh.
• the almost finished basement was used to great effect with those noisey kids making noise downstairs while we old folks sheltered upstairs. Some people actually used ear-plugs…

It was a great party. Wish you all could have been here. The food was wonderful. The people from all over the world (Philippines, BC, Alberta, Michigan and dozens from Winnipeg) were pretty cool. The new arrivals from Philippines got called for jury duty shortly after they arrived. Welcome to Canada.

In conversation with adults there was amazement at how tech-savvy the youngsters are. Of course, the teenagers and twenty-somethings all had smart phones but even toddlers as young as two were using digital cameras and the VCR… I remember when it took a teenager to set the time on a VCR. I guess Moore’s Law applies to humans somehow. If you don’t know you can’t do something, you can do it. As an educator this is quite surprising to me. The common wisdom is that good hand-eye coordination develops around ages 4-7. In my own children I saw that at 5 they could never hit a bull’s eye, just the paper, somewhere. By 7 they could shoot tiny groups. Same with handwriting. The huge pencils and printing don’t go away until a few years after school. Now a 2.5 year old grand daughter can point and shoot a digital camera and frame the picture nicely. She can also assemble multiple jig-saw puzzles simultaneously. I feel so old. It is time to retire.