I used to be an unrepetant nineteenth century grammarian. I never used a preposition to end a sentence; I took care to never never to split an infinitive; I knew “who” from “whom”; and I never, ever, used “they” for “he or she”.
I recently wrote a pretty-printer for LZX, in XSLT. Here is the source code to the Laszlo Weather application; click on “View Source” on the Laszlo Demos page for other examples.
The first third-party Laszlo application is available on the web! The Behr ColorSmart color selector is available at http://www.behr.com (as well as kiosks in Home Depots around the country, where it’s been available for several months now). It’s unreal seeing this finally go live after seeing it from the inside last year and after all the work to build the initial version of the product while this was in development — at times I felt like we were running ahead of the train, trying to lay new track before it reached the end.
I just finished moving some heavy furniture around within my apartment. This was harder than it sounds, because I’m not allowed to put a heavy load through my spine. I had to come up with ways of lifting and moving furniture that transmitted the forces across different parts of my body instead. I ended up sliding around on my back on a towel on the floor, and pushing the furniture above me, so that I could use my arm and chest strength instead of my back.
I just got back from a week with the family at Disney World. I thoroughly enjoyed it. The surface part of my mind was completely taken in by the sensation of being in the jungle (at Animal Kingdom) and in a variety of countries (Epcot), while my analytic self was taken with admiration at how well run it was: the depth of architecture, landscaping, design, marketing, and business operations.
Seymour Papert used to tell a story contrasting the practices of medicine and education, in order to illustrate how little the latter has improved. Place a physician from the previous century in a modern operating room and he won’t have a clue about what to do. Transport a teacher forward in time and they’ll fit right in. The moral is that the practice of medicine has made great strides during the last century; the practice of education hasn’t progressed at all.