Andrea's Adventures in Binkyland

Baby Dabbles in IT

The past week, Sasha has made a number of forays into IT and, indeed, personal technology, with wildly varying results.

First, she made use of the floppy drive on one of our desltop machines. She inserted a number of crayons into it. I was able to remove them with the help of a wooden kebab skewer. I did not upbraid her for this improper use of tech because for all I know, she did it a year ago. This is, therefore, clearly a statement on the obsolescence of the floppy drive in this era of optical media, ubinetworking, and thumb drives. How can I possibly scold her for such a cutting commentary on the role of aging technology?

Then, we gave her her very own first brand new computer. She is very pleased with it, and I've been pleasantly surprised at how a Barbie-branded product manages to be a pretty good learning toy. And besides, everyone else in the house managed to get a new laptop this week.

Then, today, at Microcenter, she made a beeline for the computing books. First she tried to grab a copy of Mac OS X Unleashed, but then was unable to lift the heavy tome. She therefore resorted to Short Course in HTML, a much more manageable size. Also it is pink.

She sat her own short self in the middle of the aisle, and proceeded to leaf through the book. Although I laud her commitment to continuing education, I had to point out to her that basic HTML is a dying standard, and only used now for poorly designed static sites. Everybody knows XML, ASP, and DHTML are where it's at. She informed me that everybody has to start somewhere, and a "Short Course in HTML" is as good a place as any to begin studying the meta-topic of data tagging. By the time she's of a legally employable age, all of the standards we use now will be obsolete and denegrated, anyhow. She's a smart cookie, my Sasha.

My father-in-law shook his head and muttered something about how "Nerds breed true." I know he's just jealous.

Posted by andrea at February 6, 2005 07:42 PM