Too much fun for 99 cents.

March 23rd, 2012 @ 2:19 am

Draw something has got a bit of a spike lately – they say it’s been around for 4 years, but it wasn’t till the last few months, with iOS and Android apps out, that it really caught on.

I’ve done my bit.  At first, I had two accounts to test it out, then though Sal might like it.  He did.  But he started playing strangers.

So I had to cut that out.  I started gifting the app to others we knew, so Sal could play with them.

I am amazed at how much joy and pride and happiness I get when I see him guess my drawing.  Or I watch him draw something that I could guess – his scorpion was much better than the one I had to draw for someone else later on – and i was even trying to channel his scorpion while I was creating my own.  It was terrible.  And he doesn’t  turn away from clues like “victim” or “justice”.  Admittedly, I couldn’t guess his drawing of “beef”…but it made sense to me later on as he described what he was thinking while we were chatting on the way to school.

Kalbi.  Nice. (It had the string of 3 bones across the top…which made a lot of sense after hearing his explanation…)

But of course, for all those friends I’ve gifted the app to for him to play with, I’ve been playing my bit.  And I’ve had way too much fun playing the game.  Not because I can draw – I can’t.  But I like to find fun outside of the normal confines of the game.

People have told me they don’t like me guessing words before they are done drawing.  Especially if my guesses are things like “lame” or “bad” or “crap”. Why so sensitive?

I’ve also gotten in the habit of watching others do their drawing.  I’m fortunate to have a few very talented (or at least, practiced) drawing friends out there.  It’s so much fun for me to watch a drawing unfold, because it becomes so clear to me that they see the world in a different way than I do.  They see layers and they share those layers and perspective with me over a few minutes.  I feel like I’m insulting them by answering early and not enjoying the journey of the artistic process that they are sharing with me.

And I learn a bit too, about how to draw.  Plus, it gives me time to make up snarky anagrams…

The learning to draw aspect is fun.  I don’t think my drawing has really improved that much, except, I learned how to copy someone’s rendering of a wedgie.  I didn’t know drawing a women’s hourglass was that easy.  Forgive me, Draw Something partner, for wasting a few pages of your clue, just mimicking your wedgie.  I wanted that lesson to burn in. But I’m at least learning how others do it.  Since I suck at it so much, it’s like watching a magic show each time, as the overall picture unfolds. Then I’m a bad mimic…but who knows, maybe 9,700 more games of this and I’ll be able to draw a great bunny as fast as Sal’s kindergarten teacher.

Also, since I like twisting my own perceptions, I’ve lately found that others are really eager to get clues right.  So I’ve gotten in the habit of when I feel like the clue should be guessed by “now”, I don’t stop drawing.  And I try and transform my drawing into something different, so that when they guess the clue right and the rest of the drawing just “pops in” – that it’s a little jolting.  If only I could draw better, it could be that much more jolting!

As it is, it’s my gift to my Draw Something friends.

Man.  It’s late.  I just drew a nice valley for someone (nice for me at least – I kind of crack myself up now with the attention to detail I put into my horrible pictures and wondering how impatient the person on the other side is getting with my useless, poorly rendered, details?  I’m trying to put a sun into every one of my pictures now.  My goto move…)  Anyway, when I submitted my picture, I noticed I had selected the word “ride” instead.  Good luck with that!

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At least I put you second.

March 2nd, 2012 @ 10:03 pm

I love local competitions among my friends and coworkers.

But even more than the competition, I love the handicapping.

And I love seeing how everyone handicaps differently.  So when my fellow Apple co-workers, who are new to this process, asked me about the odds for the fitness challenge, I was excited to say that we weren’t doing odds, since that would require one unbiased person to handicap.  Instead, I was going to show them all how to expose their biases.

Out of the 9 rankings, 3 people have me finishing first.  One person has me finishing last.

My wife, was not one of the 3 people that has me finishing first.  She went on a little rant about how I’m not in as good of shape as I was last year.

Which is fair – I’m turning 40 this year.  Each year, I’m a year closer to dying.  (Health care workers don’t like hearing that when they ask you how last year was, by the way.)

But it’s all good fuel for the fire.

I just wish I didn’t have some sinus issues that put a sharp pain in the back of my head when I climb a fight of stairs.

Still, the show must go on.

And of course, I’d love it if you’d sponsor me.

We’ll see if I can represent for the nearly 40 crowd tomorrow…

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He gives me very little credit. Which I probably deserve.

February 26th, 2012 @ 10:32 pm

We did some more programming over the weekend.

I was wondering yesterday, as we were going through it, how much of it he is getting and if I am letting him grasp enough of it, or if I am rushing him through it due to my impatience.

Today, I got a bit of a hint towards that, because we needed to add buttons.  Which don’t really exist in the Scratch world, except as their “sprites” and so every button is an “actor” in a sense.  So we started making buttons as sprites and I was explaining to him how they need to have two costumes, a “selected” costume and a “notSelected” costume.  And we colored the two states of the buttons differently so one could tell when they were in each state.

“It’s like you have this all planned out, Dad” he commented as he went through the repetitive process of putting the same set of actions on each of the buttons.

And I laughed and said that I’ve been programming for most of my life, so I am able to see problems earlier.  But I’m conflicted between making the process seem like a natural conversation and having dedicated design sessions with him.  I think that this stage, we want things to flow and have quick, fast iterations and not be weighed down by “lectures”.  Though at the same time, I want to avoid spoon feeding him solutions and make sure that he’s able to learn how to see problems and break them down.  Though I don’t know how to do that explicitly, so we’re going with a leap of faith on implicit learning for now.

Since this hit my soft spot, I changed the subject and told him that our implementation already had a bug in it that I could see.  I asked if he could see it and he couldn’t.  If he could have, I probably would have annoyed everyone with how many times I’d tell the story bragging about his ability to see that changing the state of one button necessitated the states of the other buttons to be updated.

Though he had fun discovering the bug by running the game.

And we had a lot of fun (I think) writing this last game.  And the part he thought would be the hardest, actually took less than 2 minutes.  Programming the “hard” mode of our game turned out to be pretty easy.  I think that aspect of the program tickled his soft spot for word play.

Anyway, to be safe, I think we’ll design our next game (tic-tac-toe?) on paper first.  To go through some of the design process.  I think he’s taking for granted how easy it is to design an application with me as a tour guide.  As we played some other rock-paper-scissors games on Scratch, we felt ours matched up rather nicely.

Though we’re completely biased.  And Sal’s willing to give you a bajillion dollars if you can beat our game in Hard mode.  Good luck.

As a final point, he did understand the abstraction between our internal representation of a rock (1), paper (2), and scissors (3).  We took a walk after we hit a big conceptual design flaw in our program (in “easy” mode, our first mode we wrote, we programmed the computer to always play paper – our result screens were based on that.  So when we wrote “medium” mode, where the computer plays randomly, the results screens weren’t handling the computer’s new freedom of choice.  That change demanded a dog walk) and on the walk, among other things he was talking about, he mentioned the desire to make a elemental based version of the game.  And we found it on Scratch.  Where fire, water and ice battle each other instead of rock, scissors and paper.

So we talked about what we would need to change in our program and it was really only the “costumes” of our sprites.  Internally, our program could still call things rock (really the value 1) and just draw it as fire – and the game would be the same.  We could even just have it as a choice for the user – if they would like to play Rock Paper Scissors, or Fire, Ice and Water.  I was pretty pleased that the idea clicked so fast.

But to test it, when we design tic-tac-toe on paper, we’ll try and use math only to sum up the rows/columns/diagonals to check for a winning condition.  Or maybe we’ll come up with a better way.  You know, cause it’s not like I’ve got it all planned out already…sheesh.

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The guilt trip sucker punch…

February 22nd, 2012 @ 10:09 pm

I knew I had written about the song The Dollar before – I just didn’t realize it was so long ago.

We had our Dollar moment a few weeks ago.

I have taught some LEGO robotics courses for the DMA a few times.  I’ve enjoyed it each time, but always left feeling a little guilty.  Parents could have saved 2k by just buying the kit and doing a little web searching and playing with their own kids, instead of having me do it.  But time and interest isn’t always there.

It hit a little closer to home last year, as I was dropping Sal off for his own 6 year old robot course summer school.  They had some interesting kits, but were a bit pricey on eBay due to being discontinued.  The replacement Mindstorms kits for kids wasn’t interesting to Sal though.

Especially after he went to the last day of the course I was teaching later in the summer.  He really liked tweaking our full on NXT robot to compete with the other kids in the course.  He wasn’t interested in downgrading to the elementary school version of their robotics kits when he had played with the big boys.

Still, when I threw out the option to have me go teach the class this year in San Diego, I thought with LegoLand there, it’d be slam dunk with the little guy.

“I want to do that!” he said.

It was going how I expected, but the phrasing was a little off.  The way he said “that” seemed odd to me. So I probed a little more.

“I want to goto your class!”  Not goto the beach and maybe the Wild Animal park, while I teach the class?  ”No, I want to do the class.”  All day?  ”All day!” Every day?  ”Every day” he said with a huge grin.

Well, that wasn’t going to work.

Bottom line, I got my kid asking to teach him the stuff I’m teaching other kids. How could I focus on the other kids more than my own?

So this summer, I’m not teaching a DMA course, but instead, trying to figure out how to teach a 2nd-grader-to-be how to program.  We’ll use the NXT kit I think, but I really think I’ll get more bang for the buck from the Scratch programming environment.

He’s played around with Scratch with his mom some afternoons.  They had a game where you had to touch the ninja to score some points, then the ninja would jump away, and you’d have to go mouse over him again.  Sal was really proud to tell me about how he had written a bug – since the game didn’t really end.

It’s a little sad, when one’s son’s way of mimicking one is by creating bugs.  Says a lot about what he thinks of the quality of my work, huh?

Anyway, shameful example aside, we have talked abstractly about how we could define the game ending, and he had it in his head that he would want a big “THE END” to appear and when the color of those letters hit the color of the ninja, the game would be over.

We’ve also had long conversations about which came first, the chicken or the egg. He didn’t always see the connection.

But tonight, after his friend couldn’t make it over for some play time, to avoid any drama over the change in plans, we busted open Scratch and fixed up the game.

It was a pretty good first session.  We defined the end of the game would be after X seconds.  They have a very convenient timer that we made a lot of use out of.  We added a game over background.  Then we added another ninja, so you would have to avoid one while tagging the other. This second ninja had us doing a lot of copying each time we wanted to tweak something, so we got to talk about the responsibilities of each character in the game, and the background started to take over a lot more of the “management” of the game.

So he refactored a program already!  And we had to debug some things.  I don’t think he fully got the nuances behind the race condition we had when the game started and the initial state wasn’t set properly, but he did understand how message passing allowed us to have the stage tell each of the ninjas when to start running (which fixed our race condition).  We are definitely hitting upon the notion of a controller.

Now, he’s dreaming of what’s next.  I’m sure I’ll hear about it quite a bit tomorrow.

And I’m scared.  And happy.  And mainly glad that I’m going to be around to see it develop.

Here’s the game, if you want to try it out…and if you see the kid around sometime, I’m sure he’d love to talk to you about the game in more detail…

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Created a monster…

October 14th, 2011 @ 12:21 am

I have a little best friend who’s willing to get up at 6:15 on a Sunday morning and drive up into the mountains to watch another friend try and do a 7 mile obstacle course in less than 59 minutes.  We were excited driving into the fog, rooting for miserable weather, only to get excited when we were above the clouds and enjoying a unique view.  He didn’t even mention getting car sick once.

He knew there was money at stake.  He knew there was a time to beat.  We killed the time looking at their vendor stands, eating some specially branded Chex mix.  When the first finishers came in and jumped in the mud, he let out a joyful cackle as he saw someone willfully do something that seemed so…not right.  He loved watching everyone jump in the mud.

But when we saw Shawn, it was all business.  In the video, you’ll hear him ask near the end “time? time? time?” – he was a little anxious too.  But my favorite line was his candid observation.

Afterwards, he was excited – talking about how easy it was to win money, since I didn’t have to do anything.  I spent the drive back down the mountain trying to explain to him the difference between betting on something you can control and something you can’t.  He spent the drive down the mountain thinking about what Gundam robot he was going to get with the winnings.

He’s seen the fun side of friendly wagers.  He acknowledges that he’s got the easiest task in our family weight bet (Catherine and I have to lose weight, he has to gain weight or grow).

Then he turned on me.

We’ve been playing a bit of Battleship on the iPads now and then.

They’ve extended the basic game a bit by adding super weapons.  You unlock those by achieving various goal through the game.  Sal was talking some trash to me the other day, because he unlocked the Sky Sword.  It basically uses 1 shot to wipe out a 5×5 diamond on the board.  I wasn’t sure if I had unlocked it on my account, since it sounded tough – winning a game in less than 10 turns.  I was impressed he did that.

But you can’t show weakness.

So I told him I had a Sky SuperBomb which would fill up the entire board with one shot.

His eyes opened wide and he leaned across the table towards me.

“I bet you don’t!”

“Yes I do.”

“That’s not even possible in the game.”

“Yes it is.”

“What did you have to do to unlock it?”

“I don’t remember…something super tough though.”

He kept pestering me about the various super weapons.  Till he found enough weakness, mixed with enough self-confidence…

“I bet you a hundred million thousand dollars you don’t have that weapon.”

“Ha.  Sal, you can’t bet money you don’t have.”

“Okay.  Five dollars.”  He said it without a pause.

“Uh…I don’t think I’ll take that bet.”

“Because you don’t have it!”

So the next morning, we played.  I kept bluffing that I’d use the Sky SuperBomb, but of course, I don’t have one.  I was pleased that I had the Sky Sword though at least.  But I missed everything with it.  He got 2 hits with his.

I still won the game.  Couldn’t let him know I didn’t have that super weapon and lose the game all in one fell swoop after all.

But I am pretty sure I only won just a battle…not the war.

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I’ve got this kid…

August 30th, 2011 @ 1:21 am

…that thinks that just cause he jumps on me in the morning, I’m going to open my eyes.

“I found a bug!” he tells me with a sense of urgency.

“You know how to take care of it.” I try and shrug him off.

“No I don’t.”  Lately, he’s really enjoyed practicing the art of argument.  I was kind of pleased that he understood the Argument skit from Monty Python when I explained it to him.

“Just get a paper towel or something.”  By now, he’s sitting on my pillow practically and I don’t sense him moving in response to my suggestion.

“I don’t see how that’s going to make the weather work.”  That response was a little odd, so I crack an eye open to see what’s up with him.

He’s holding an iPhone and eager to show me how the weather app won’t tell him what’s going on in Sunnyvale or NY.

That’s the bug now a days that he wakes me up about…

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