Up and out the door nice and early. I was to work by seven thirty. Not so hot this morning although we are still going to top one hundred again today without a doubt.
This morning Dominica took the girls, all three of them, down to the pool to spend the morning swimming. Everyone had a great time and Liesl was completely exhausted by the time that they got done. She was fast, fast asleep by the time that I came home for a very late lunch.
My lunch break was late and I ended up being quite busy and spending quite a bit of time on the phone. I was rushing to race back to the office the moment that I was able.
After work my evening was mostly spend working with Emily. She was interested in learning to program so I showed her how to write some simple Python on CentOS Linux – in a completely command line environment. It took a little bit before she caught on to what the excitement in programming was about but once we got rolling she got interested very quickly.
We did some very basic stuff like printing, taking input and for loops. It didn’t take too long before we were doing stuff that she found pretty fun. Our big project was to make a simple “Mad Libs” style application where the user put in some random details and then the computer told a story substituting details from what the user had put in.
Emily is the same age that I was when I learned to program. She just turned nine earlier this month. I had the advantage, though, of knowing DOS already before learning to program and not having the annoying abstractions of the graphical environments to confuse me. I also had a lot of typing experience and could touch type at that age. It is amazing how big of a factor having the basic command line environment and the ability to type quickly are.
Tomorrow the girls are all going into Dallas to go to the Science, Children’s and Natural History museums. I’m sure that they will have a good time. I will just be at work and at home taking care of Oreo while they are gone tomorrow.