The Setup:
I grew up an only child, raised by a single mother who worked, and finished her education during most of my childhood. This means I learned quite early how to be with myself as my only company. A nice match for my natural introvert tendencies. For reasons beyond the scoop of today's posting this proclivity for the avoidance of social interaction has gone from mildly reclusive, to almost full blown hermit over the course of the last year plus. With freeing of time has come the desire to fill it with something other than movies, games, and maryjane. So like many I have turned to learning, and as a tech lover, many of learning choices have been in that direction.The Flourish:
Once the wallowing in self pity ebbed to a point where the desire for activity could rise through the fog of self medication. What has become a concept of pseudo-productivity began. An interesting concept in itself, basically meaning structured, goal oriented activity, where the activity is the reward. Video games are great examples of pseudo-productivity, having purpose only within the context of the game, and no real bearing outside itself. The sense of accomplishment achieved can have profound effects on the psyche both positive, as well as negative. Leading to a greater healing, or descending into a false sense stability. So between scrambling to keep enough currency flowing to maintain my meager lifestyle, while avoiding as much face to face social interaction with public. I've had plenty of pseudo productivity, some days even measuring my day in these terms only.
The Reveal:
When the student is ready the teacher shall appear, seemingly extends far into abstraction. Back in December a friend gifted me with a Raspberry Pi b+, and it quickly became a great outlet for my desire for productivity. Though after running through Kodi(raspbmc), Retropie, and the basics of Raspbian. It became abundantly clear how end user oriented my interaction with technology had become. While this serves me quite nicely in helping other end users, it does little to really give a sense of creative outlet. It's more about being about to understand and follow directions, with being creative being a hinderance. Than came some practical use ideas of said Pi, a vpn, personal cloud storage, a local file sharing node(priate box), to name a few. Of course these all have the same fatal flaw, it's just following directions to setup. In learning about the Pi, the linux environment, and development. I became exposed to modern programming languages, having stayed away from the software side since the late 80's. Exactly as the Pi's creators intended, my inner child responded. With the Pi as my platform, the language of choice was made easy, python. Off to Codecadey for an interactive course. Big ups to the folks over there, the interface is great, being able to code right in the browser, and receive instant feedback makes for an enjoyable experience. Only issue with that was an odd interaction with the chrome instant translate extension wanting to translate my code as I wrote it. Six days later, now I need to use it, or like so many things it will be quickly forgotten, but what to make. If you came upon this blog from twitter, than you likely have already encountered my starter project. A Pi based Twitter bot, big thanks to Dototot for the basic idea, and a framework to start from. Thus far it's very limited, only tweeting once roughly an hour. A future post will go more in depth on the bot itself, but given it's rudimentary nature. That would be premature.
Share, Flame, Whatever
Just make up your own damn mind
Jack
aka
PanseyBard
No comments:
Post a Comment