Write-up of a Fun Day

Yesterday was a busy day.  I love busy days.   Hopefully you will find an idea or two in this write-up.

In the morning, I dropped of Andrew at school, loaded up the car with school supplies, ran a couple errands, and headed off to my first stop.

First stop, Give Away School Supplies

I dropped off supplies at the Edison Brentwood, an East Palo Alto public school.   They had the TrueGift Donations sign-up sheet which had been posted in the teacher’s lounge and I was ready to go.  I spent about an hour dropping off over a hundred boxes of crayons, fifty pairs of scissors, a hundred notebooks, and some miscellaenous supplies.  I am now out of scissors, glue sticks, colored pencils, and wide ruled notebooks.  When helping so great a problem, is it better to spread around the supplies or target them to completely fix a couple of schools?

Second stop, Colingo at Sandbox Suites.

I trekked up to San Francisco to meet at the SandBox Suites drop in office.  This is a new pay-by-the-day office with an open design that just opened up a couple days ago.  I met with Benjamin Lowenstein and Arthur Richards, founders of the start-up Colingo.  We spent a few hours chatting through their design for language learning software targeted at children using the One Laptop Per Child‘s XO computer.  We played with the XO and some python XO code, and then I walked them through the XO’s Hello World application.  They are doing good work and I hope to keep in touch with them.

Third stop, Dinner with My Brother.

Hugh and I had dinner and talked over TrueGift Donations.  Hugh just had a packing party where over a hundred boxes were packed in a few hours.  We discussed how my short-cutting the web site did or did not fit into the TrueGift mission.  We chatted about life.

Fourth stop, Ignite Talks at DNA Lounge.

The Ignite talks were hosted at the DNA Lounge.  Good talks on the censorship tangle by Violet Blue; several talks on the Internet being more hopelessly malwared than you can believe; cool burning-man robots; Chicken John for Mayor; etc.  Lamest talk was a five minute infomercial for a backpack company.  The format of having a new slide every fifteen seconds is horrible because waiting for slides keeps breaking up the flow of conversation.

Fun day.