STEVE has a great post. Its a verbose as only Steve can make it - verbose is a good thing here. I have been toying with similar ideas/pains and its good to see someone else feeling the same.
I also have been struggling through Vol1. of Don Kunth’s book.

Its really hard to find time, especially when you have kids, buying and moving into a new house, travelling across 2 time zones and working fulltime (read >40hrs) on the regular job that pays for lattes and such. Hence its hard to keep my motto of “Do your homework today” (which is my scren saver marquee).
I also have been trying to work thru’ exercises in Math for Comp Sci. course on MIT’s Open Courseware. If you havent seen this site, you should definitely check it out.
Happy learning!

We purchased a hause outside Austin..now the fun begins as we move in installments…and did I tell you that we are furnishing the whole house via IKEA? More on those escapades later as well.
Pictures of the house before and after decorations will go on FLICKR as soon as we upload them..

I am in Seattle on a customer project for next several weeks. If you are in the area or will visit this great city in the next few months, drop me a line and we can catchup.
I will write more about Seattle in the next several days.

Due to some personal reasons and for our overall family sake, we decided to settle down and buy a house. We are not making the 3+months trip to OR or CA this summer and will revel in TX heat.
I will post more personal updates and some closures on the RV and original essay on simplification.

I use the best form of code reuse known to mankind - “CTRL C, CTRL V”..no, not from my own existing code, but from the www and samples in books. I have been embarassed at times as I have no clue what some function call meant or how it could fail; all I saw was some form of similarity and used it in my own code. I am talking about programs that I wrote in NEW LANGUAGES. These are the languages that I havent had any exposure to, but I thought was cool and reaally wanted to start using them; convinced the sponsor to use them (and me to implement it) and after the sales job, it was time for search and copy and paste. As much as it sounds baaad, its actually served me well. I was able to jump start myself in a new language that I would have no chance of ever coding in and I deliver something that works. Always deliver something that works. May be I am just lucky or may be I pickup enough to get it running. But just because it runs, a Chevy Nova is no Volvo. There are other non-functional and aesthetic aspects that really matter (to me). Hence there is always this constant strugggle to go back to those apps/programs that are working and try to rewrite them after I have learnt the language in a formal way. Again, the reason for this is my own taste and concern for reliability. Note: I didnt have any taste and I have systems that I am not proud of but are still running and saving some companies money or producing revenue, in the past. I have just acquired and demanded myself of this quality, only in the last 2 years.
One of these days, I will have mastered a formal learning process to master a language really quickly to write nice working programs that solve some pain that exists and have the mental capacity to apply lessons learned from a different language to this one. One would hope that day will come sooner…

In the past, solutions have either come to me naturally or serendipitously OR not at all. In other words, I either get it because I am a super genius or dont because I am an idiot. Very seldom have I worked REALLY hard to get something that I didnt get the first time (I can think of couple of instances - History lessons in 6th grade and Bessel functions in Math 201 at IIT). During other times I picked up things because I have really smart friends or teachers who guide me through the problem at hand. Why all this blabber?
I realize now that I need a formal way of going after things that I dont get the first time - by myself. Its a self descipline. I cant throw mud on the wall and hope it sticks. In the past I threw a LOT of mud on the wall hoping atleast some stuck.
Now you are wondering where all this is coming from…The reason for this post is STEVE YEGGE.
Steve (IMHO) falls in line with writers like Greespun, Eckel, Spolsky and Graham. His writing along with some of Dave Thomas’s had made me think about my learning style. With my recent morning ritual of Karate exercises have taught me the value of practice. I need to learn a technique and then practice it periodically to make it a habit.
To jump start me in this new journey, I am tasking myself to learn Typing. Once I practice and master that, I am taking up EMACS with programming in LISP. I picked up the Mavis Beacon Typing lessons and a LISP book from Austin library this weekend.
As somebody once said, some of the best fruits we get are the ones we have jumped for the highest, not because of the end result but because of what happens to us during jumping higher than our percieved limit..
Wish me luck…

I was a big user of Python. I say WAS, because, I havent coded in a while. I enjoyed my first PyCon last year in DC. I only attended the general session. This year PyCon was in Dallas, and I couldnt make it, even though it was only 2hrs away.
I did see a lot of fun pictures - putting names to faces and kept up with the conference virtually.
If you dont see anything else, check this presentation out by Ian. Most of us can appreciate what Ian is talking about, even if you dont understand or care for Python.
BTW- check out the NEW and IMPROVED Python web site.

Jay got sick couple of weeks ago and was like a dog for a whole week, without eating anything, throwing up anything he consumed and sleeping all day. It was no fun for the whole family and when you are in close quarters like us in an RV, the entire family suffers. Stef had to improvise bacteria handling and cleaning tactics as we all share the same room - to eat and live.
Jay is back to his old rascaly self. Sammy is now sick and is going thru’ the same stuff as Jay. This weekend has been no fun with Sam sleeping and trying to get better.
As I felt really sorry for Sammy (since he couldnt play pool with me or go bike riding with me), I was reminded of Elena. It puts everything in a whole new perspective…