Rather than focusing on pre-existing passions, … people are better served thinking about how to acquire skills they can turn into careers. If you master something valuable instead of focusing on a dream that may not be marketable, … love and passion will follow. And you’ll have a better shot at making a successful business out of it.
People thrive when they find the work challenging, feel recognized for their abilities and have control over how they fill their time… Adjusting the work to maximize those factors will rekindle passion better than matching your job to a pre-existing inclination.
Arduino: Getting Started
It was intimidating to open the Arduino box & find nothing but the board itself. I just happened to have an unused A plug to B plug USB cable lying around, which I suppose confirms that I really am the sort of person who would use an Arduino. I followed these directions on line to get myself started:
http://arduino.cc/en/Guide/Windows
It more or less worked the way described, except that Windows 7 labelled the Arduino as an unidentified device in the Device Manager instead of categorizing it as a COM port. So I get the flashing LED when I plug it in now. I played around different timings for the blinking, just so verify that uploading a new program really did have an effect.
Next step is to put together a shopping list for components to start playing with.
Acquired an arduino uno while helping at Maker Faire booth of Tinaja Labs. My take-away from the faire is that the divide between software & hardware is an artificial one.
Wells Fargo stagecoach parked in front of Castro Theater (Taken with instagram)
Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi cannot give interviews, cannot leave the country & has been banned from making films for 20 years.
Strawberry shortcake served to attendees at O’Reilly’s Where Conference
Wearable Awareness. Simon Frid demonstrating his DIY motion capture setup at Mini Maker Faire at O’Reilly’s Where Conference.
Program or Be Programmed
Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age
by Douglas Rushkoff
- Do Not Always Be On: Because computer code is biased away from continuous time, so too are the programs built on it, and the human behaviors those programs encourage.
- Live In Person: Digital media are biased away from the local, and toward dislocation.
- You May Always Choose None of the Above: The digital realm is biased toward choice, because everything must be expressed in the terms of a discrete, yes-or-no symbolic language. This, in turn, often forces choices on humans operating within the digital sphere.
- You Are Never Completely Right: This makes digital technology—and those of us using it—biased toward a reduction of complexity.
- One Size Does Not Fit All: On the net, everything is occurring on the same abstracted and universal level. Survival in a purely digital realm—particularly in business—means being able to scale, and winning means being able to move up one level of abstraction beyond everyone else.
- Be Yourself: The less we take responsibility for what we say and do online, the more likely we are to behave in ways that reflect our worst natures—or even the worst natures of others. Because digital technology is biased toward depersonalization, we must make an effort not to operate anonymously, unless absolutely necessary. We must be ourselves.
- Do Not Sell Your Friends: Our digital networks are biased toward social connections—toward contact. Any effort to redefine or hijack those connections for profit end up compromising the integrity of the network itself, and compromising the real promise of contact.
- Tell the Truth: The bias of our interactions in digital media shifts back toward the nonfiction on which we all depend to make sense of our world, get the most done, and have the most fun. The more valuable, truthful, and real our messages, the more they will spread and better we will do. We must learn to tell the truth.
- Share, Don’t Steal: Digital technology’s architecture of shared resources, as well as the gift economy through which the net was developed, have engendered a bias toward openness. It’s as if our digital activity wants to be shared with others. As a culture and economy inexperienced in this sort of collaboration, however, we have great trouble distinguishing between sharing and stealing.
- Program or Be Programmed: Programming is the sweet spot, the high leverage point in a digital society. If we don’t learn to program, we risk being programmed ourselves.
Print References:
- The Bias of Communication. Harold Innis
- What Technology Wants. Kevin Kelly
- You Are Not a Gadget. Jaron Lanier
- Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity. Lawrence Lessig
- Understanding Media. Marshall McLuhan
- Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality. Randall Packer and Ken Jordan
- Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. Neil Postman
- The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electric Frontier. Howard Rheingold
- Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Hyperspace. Douglas Rushkoff
- Learning Processing: A Beginner’s Guide to Programming Images, Animation, and Interaction. Daniel Shiffman
- Here Comes Everybody. Clay Shirky
- In the Beginning Was the Command Line. Neal Stephenson
- Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. Sherry Turkle
- A Hacker Manifesto. McKenzie Wark
- The Human Use of Human Beings: Cynernetics. Norbert Weiner
- The Future of the Internet—And How to Stop It. Jonathan Zittrain
Learning to Program:
- Scratch — MIT’s site for kids, but easy enough for adults.
- Learn Python the Hard Way — A very accessible approach to a very useful computer language.
- Learning Processing — tutorials by Daniel Shiffman.
- SIMPLE — Some Apple II developers wrote this beginners’ language back in 1995.
- Microsoft Tutorials on Visual Basic — Microsoft’s tutorials on how to learn Visual Basic are actually quite good for the beginner.
- LOGOS — For educators interested in a very easy programming language to teach elementary school childre. Visit here for a system to purchase.
Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google?
