This Fall two friends & I have been leading an apprencticeship through Citizen Schools at their 8th Grade Academy using LEGO Mindstorms to have kids build robots. They’re building a robot to navigate a maze. The Mindstorms robots are a great way to introduce various procedural programming concepts like branching, loops and algorithms. So far it’s been a blast, aside from the hassle of keeping track of a million Lego pieces and installing the software.

Student’s Mindstorm robot with Spider-Man aboard.

This Saturday’s class went especially well I thought, after a few that were a bit chaotic. We cut the lecture portion to the bare minimum and got them working with their Mindstorms robots and programming them using Tufts’ ROBOLab software. Sort of a “Less talk, more rock” approach. I was really impressed with how quickly they all took to using the visual programming environment. In their teams they programmed their robot to drive forward until detects it hit a wall, then backs up, and spins around for a random time. Then they learned about loops and had their robot do this a bunch of times.

Programming mindstorms using ROBOLab

Saw the Decemberists at the MidEast this week. Solid show - they played a bunch of their better songs and some good new ones.

Since Cambridge has banned smoking in bars and restaurants, my clothes & I no longer smell horrible afterwards. And instead of the faces in the darkened room glowing in the orange light of cigarettes, they are bathed in the blue-green of cell phones & digital cameras. Progress!

On something of an impulse I bought an iPod (along with the new Belle & Sebastian and Shins albums). The combination of the 3rd gen iPods and iTunes for Windows got the better of me. And something about the red-backlighting on the buttons clinched it while I was in the local Apple store. I’m glad to see I’m not the only one who feels this way. On a crowded plane last week, while trying unsuccessfully to drown out the conversation of those sitting behind me with a bad movie, I thought “What would be even better is if I had every album I own with me”. Now I just need to rip a couple hundred CDs.

I left my heart in San Francisco (okay, actually Palo Alto) where I watched the Red Sox lose the heartbreaking 7th game to the Yankees. The bar was definitely pro-Sox, which was comforting (even erupting in a spontaneous “Yankees Suck” chant). Now that they lost I can see that it would have been out of character for them to win. What would sports writers do during winter if they didn’t have Grady Little to rip apart for his decision to leave Pedro in? What would people live for in a post-Curse world?

People watching the Blue Angels fly overhead.

On the plane out west, I read an article on the attraction of the Golden Gate Bridge to jumpers. It reports on the unsuccessful attempts to put a barrier up that would save lives, but damage the aesthetic of the bridge. (Luckily we visited before the Sox lost, so no one was too tempted.)

Walking in the city, it dawned on me that Boston is a little quaint. It just doesn’t have the same edge that a city like San Francisco or New York does. But it’s not as imposing either.

Took a drive down California 1.