I've talked about it over in that other place. :-)

Nice to see you here!

This disaster did not come about by accident. The whole country has allowed our public schools to decline, but the conservatives have been actively working to destroy them since the 80's. They have been leveraging racism, fundamentalism, and other prejudice-based fears to undermine the curriculum. Meanwhile, they have cut school funding, made teaching a terrible job, and downplayed the value of formal education. Educated people are much harder to manipulate. A minority trying to hold onto power needs a public that is poorly educated and without critical thinking skills.

This is my personal experience. Feel free to skip it.

I was lucky in a number of ways. I started college about two years before the first computer boom hit, but I was already an experienced (if self-trained) programmer. Instead of spacing the programming courses out over four years I took them all in two semesters. That left me with a lot of elective hours to fill.

I had been an avid reader since kindergarten, with major interests in science fiction and fantasy. That lead me to take courses in history and medieval literature. Those lead me to anthropology, which was a world-changing experience for me.

The professors I studied under, outside of my major, were generally pleased, if a little puzzled, to have a technical geek in their classes. To everyone's surprise, I turned out to be a very good student in those areas. After the first few classes I was encouraged to take graduate level seminars, which I really enjoyed. I was still treated as a bit of an oddity, but I got a lot of support.

By the time I graduated with a B.A. in Computer Science, I had also earned minors in Anthropology, English, and Medieval Studies. If I could have stayed for another semester I would have had Anthropology as major and added History as a minor.

That was one of the best times of my life. And it certainly expanded my perception of the world. In retrospect, my Computer Science classes were probably the least important thing I did in college. Studying multiple disciplines forced me to understand different ways of thinking and different sets of values. That has served me very well in the years since, both professionally and personally. I am also happier because of it.

I wish everyone had the opportunities I did. I think we short-change students by feeding them bulk information and telling them that is what an education should be. The most important thing anyone can get from an education is the ability to continue to learn.

Too many universities have transformed what used to be broad liberal arts programs with technical majors into narrow vocational programs. The focus now is on training to get a job and make lots of money. Interest in anything outside of that is discouraged in all kinds of ways.

I think some of this is the result of conservative attempts to eliminate critical thinking skills from the educational system. More of it is a side-effect of the more limited opportunities offered by our late-stage capitalist economy.

I have a computer science degree, but I studied anthropolgy, literature, and history as well. It pains me to see all of that devalued and ignored.

Me too. I believed them and have gotten some of my friends to switch. Now I need to tell them I was wrong and they should look elsewhere. As far as I know, there aren't any privacy-friendly search engines.

I had heard of that, but was just too discouraged to try it at the time. Now that I've had some time to recover I should give it a look. Adapting my code to use it doesn't look like it would take much effort.

Thanks!

Ain Stein lead is good for any purpose, but what it's best at it minimizing breakage. I use it in all my 0.3mm pencils.

If you aren't having problems with breaking leads you may want to try Pilot Neox. They are still harder than average to break and they are the smoothest writing leads I've ever used. You get both a better writing feel and a cleaner line with Neox.

Fortunately, all of the major companies make good quality leads these days. If you aren't having trouble with what you can get easily there's probably no reason to change.

In 0.5mm I generally use B grade leads. 0.3mm is enough finer that want at least B and I prefer 2B for a slightly darker line. I've tried some 4B, and it looked nice, but I go through the softer leads awfully fast.

We have a lot in common. I've been working as a software engineer for almost forty years. I do more consulting and architecture work these days, but I still write code almost every day. The field has changed just a bit since I started. :-)

I hope you enjoy college. I learned an awful lot from it, not all of it from classes. And I had a great time doing it. For what it's worth, I recommend not focusing entirely on your major. Take some classes outside of your field just because they sound interesting. Having a broader range of knowledge and, especially, a broader perspective on the world really pays off in the long run.

Elegant!

He is a majestic creature! Also, really, really cute.

I have occasionally said to our overly large kitten: It isn't just "If I fits, I sits". It's also "If I sprawls, I falls."

IBM bought the Weather Underground. It had a set of developer APIs that allowed small-scale apps to make use of their data. As soon as IBM bought them the APIs were changed and replaced with a set priced to be affordable only to other mega-corporations.

It killed a tiny little free app I had built around it. The real irony is that I took a deep breath, looked around, and adapted the app to use the Dark Skies API instead. A few years later Apple bought Dark Skies and killed off its API too. {heavy sigh}

Yes, they did. And yes, it does.

There's a belly that needs rubbing. :-)

He has soulful eyes.

Most of my pencil use is for notetaking. I've found that I can take notes quickly by writing very small in non-cursive, although I'm not sure why that works so well for me.

When I used a 0.5mm I had to turn it regularly to avoid the thick lines produced by the worn side of the lead. With 0.3mm I no longer have to do that. It took some time to get used to how fragile it could be, but using a stronger lead (Pentel Ain Stein) and developing a lighter hand did the trick.

I favor the Rotring 800 because I generally carry a pencil with me, but the 600 is perfect when I'm in my own office. The only pencil that comes close, at least for me, is the Pentel Graph Gear 1000. That and the 600 are the most precise pencils I've ever used.

The only problem with the Graph Gear 1000 is that the lower body section is plastic and tends to break at the threads eventually. I recently ran across a guy who makes exact replacements for the lower body in aluminum and brass. I bought one of each on eBay. Not only do the fix the one weakness, they also improve the balance, which I've alway found to be a bit top-heavy. The brass replacement does a particularly nice job of shifting the point of balance down to the grip.

You have a magnificent lion.

I love it! Cognitive dissonance is always fun to watch.

As has been said, I expect those will fill in before too long. The wave of fledditors (including me) are still finding our way around and creating new communities that we miss. In a few months the landscape will look a lot more solid.

I don't know, but it could be something inobvious like a relationship to someone who was causing trouble. The security police have been known to go after families and friends to make a point.

Ouch.

My father is left-handed and has a lot of similar stories. Things are slightly better these days than they were in his time, but the world is still designed for the right-handed.

A few years ago I wrote a simple app to pull data from the Weather Underground site via APIs. Because of API limits I did exactly what you're proposing. The app had an easy way to enter a key and each user was responsible for signing up to get a key and putting it into the app.

This was a very small scale app, so the data may not be meaningful, but for every person who used it I got two or three comments from users who chose not to because it was just too difficult.

Bear in mind that the "difficulty" involved going to a website, entering your name and email address, and pasting the key it provided into the app.

I suspect that any app where you have to get your own key would have to overcome a lot of resistance.