If you haven’t yet seen it, watch this short film about Caine, a 9 year-old boy who builds a cardboard arcade inside his father’s auto parts store. It’s an uplifting story and well worth your 10 minutes.
But there’s something deeper happening here. The thought and effort behind Caine’s arcade speaks to how eduction should work. Give kids an opportunity to explore something that they are passionate about and you will be surprised by the results every time.
How do you stay focused?
I’m not sure that I do. I’m kind of all over the place, with my attention split between web apps, iOS games and apps, and Safari extensions. I’m not especially disciplined. I use plain old text files for todo lists. I try to limit my time on Twitter and in my inbox. If I feel my focus waning, I let it wane. Curiosity or that unpleasant feeling of leaving something unfinished usually draws me back to a problem or task before too long.
5 Minutes on The Verge: Shaun Inman | The Verge.
Yes.
Tonight I’ll be running a HTML5 cram session at the monthly Launch Haven event. Here are the tools and resources that I’ll be mentioning in the talk. If you’re in New Haven, I’d love to see you there!
In gradeschool I was the kid in the back of the class, sketching comic book characters and plotting out the sequel to Super Mario Brothers in my notebook. By age 16, I had discovered Kerouac and Ginsberg and started drafting the terrible free-style poetry that only makes sense deep within the throngs of teen angst. In my early 20’s I moved on to plotless Carver-esque short stories while I sat in sidewalk coffee shops, doing way more smoking than actual writing.
Through all of this, my poorly nurtured love of writing felt at distinct odds with my techie side. I was always outwardly the “computer guy,” though I may have often wished I was something else. Today, I’m excited to announce that I am working on a book for Packt Publishing and those two conflicting sides can finally shake hands and be friends.
More details are coming soon. In the meantime, back to writing.
Recently, Chris Coyier of CSS Tricks posted a list of common “Web Nerd Acronyms” to be used with HTML’s <abbr> tag. Like Chris, I’m lazy about my use of <abbr>, so I created this set of TextExpander snippets to aid in motivating me beyond my default indefference.
For example, with TextExpander, if I type:
,,CSS
TextExpander will change my output to:
<abbr title="Cascading Style Sheets">CSS</abbr>
In hopes that we can all make the web a bit more semantic, I’m sharing this snippet group. I hope you find it useful!
Download the Abbr’s for Web Nerds TextExpander snippet group.
