Far Too Early
I woke up at 6:30am, and instead of rolling over and falling back asleep, stared at the ceiling for a while. That's what you get for going to bed at a sensible time – usually I'm still wandering the dark corners of the internet into the early hours – last night I was asleep by 11pm.
I've surprised myself – at the time of writing it's 7:39am. I've already had a shower, shave, brushed my teeth, got dressed, washed up, tidied the kitchen and lounge, and made a coffee – which I just downed. Damn. Now I need another coffee. Well maybe not “need”, but “would like”.
Rain is falling steadily outside – looks like it has been for most of the night. Bang went any ideas about cutting the grass today (it will just get chewed up if it's wet). Maybe the idea to teach our middle girl to program the computer might become the “rainy day activity” today. I think she's going to be good at it – she has the right mindset for it.
I should probably expand on that rather random rainy day idea a bit more. There is a huge push going on in the schools in the UK at the moment – following on the coat-tails of the Raspberry Pi – to teach computer programming from an early age. In many ways it's great, because it's far more than coding – it's reasoning, problem solving, visualising, organising, rationalising, and all sorts of other mental processes that will be used for lots of other things in later life. There are wonderful graphical tools to build their first “programs” too, such as “Scratch”. I'm guessing the head-exploding moment with them will come if I show them how to extend Minecraft (I've never done it, but it can't be that hard because script-kiddies everywhere are doing it).
I'm quietly celebrating that basic computer science has returned to the school curriculum in the UK, and has taken off massively. The guys at Cambridge University realised there was a skills gap several years ago – mainly because colleges were not teaching how computers work any more – just how to use them. They set about building the Raspberry Pi, in order to get homebrew kits into lots of hands – and it has exceeded all expectations – they have sold (and continue to sell) millions of them. There are childrens books available everywhere for it. Of course it's not just for education – you can quite easily use them for the same jobs as any other desktop or laptop computer – I ran mine as a webserver for a few months, serving a website to the internet. Here's the important thing – I did it purely because I could. Kids get that.
Rain has stopped! Just checked weather forecast – it's not going to rain again today. And I can hear voices from upstairs – the kids are awake. Get ready for the sound of elephants tramping down the stairs, cereals going everywhere, toast popping up, and jam jars being slid around the kitchen tops, before the strains of some ridiculous cartoon or other start blaring out from the living room television.