Before I went to sleep though, I googled for Portland English Premiership soccer tv. Among the hits was a forum post entitled “Where can I watch English Premier League football in Portland?” and the most popular answer was Kells Irish Pub at Second and Ash right next to the Burnside Bridge.

I set my alarm for 6:30 AM, went to sleep, woke up four hours later, put on my Red Devils shirt and set off to watch the thrilling climax to ManU’s season.

Central Portland has this neat feature where all the East/West streets are numbered from 1 to N (1 is next to the river) and all the North/South streets are in alphabetical order. I was headed for some Irish pub at 2nd and something beginning with A which, in my blurry mind, was just over the bridge.

I arrived at 2nd/Ash at 7:03 just after the kick off in a very inhospitable looking area. Not at all the kind of place where I would put a pub. In fact, not at all where anyone would put a pub. I had already missed the kick off so drove around frantically looking for an Irish pub and eventually got out of the car to search frantically on foot.

I found two very, very drunk guys getting out of a pickup and heading for a bar. I asked them if there was an Irish Pub in the area and the put their arms around me and said no but, although they liked Irish music, I should join them in this pub because the beer was better. I thanked them for the offer and got back in my car and drove around frantically some more.

I gave up and headed for The Pearl in search of any pub that might be showing it. No luck there either so I went home. By now, I was incredibly sleepy and planned to just get back in bed but my laptop was still open and I took one last look at the map that I had left open the night before. It was the other Second and Ash and I could still catch the second half of the game!

And what a second half it was!

The Kells is an excellent pub for watching sports and was absolutely packed. One half was a sea of red watching the ManU v Wigan game, the other half a sea of blue watching the Chelsea v Bolton game with everyone drinking Guinness (including me).

Giggs’s goal was sublime - what a way to celebrate equaling Bobby Charlton’s record of 758 appearances for ManU - and the whole red end of the pub was up on its feet.

I am sooooo glad, I didn’t get back in bed.

Judge for yourself (click on the photo for more).

In retrospect, I believe that my upbringing in a socialist-oriented family steeped in a class struggle view of society taught me that authorities would often have a different view of right and wrong than mine.

In a thrilling climax to the English football season, Manchester United and Chelsea were level on points with two games to go. They also happen to be the last remaining teams in the Champions League.

ManU won their game on Saturday and were thus 3 points clear. Chelsea had a tough game vs Newcastle tonight that they had to win to draw level.

Imagine my delight when I saw the headline.

Imagine my confusion when I saw the picture. Imagine my disappointment when I read the read the caption.

[Hint for the non-savvy. Chelsea are the team in blue. Ballack scored and he plays for Chelsea.]

Meanwhile, to make up for the lost revenue, McCain says “all we need to do is cut out hundreds of millions and billions of dollars of pork-barrel projects.” These are presumably different pork-barrel projects from the ones McCain is going to cut in order to pay for $613 billion in permanent tax cuts.

Hillary Clinton, who jumped on the gas-tax holiday bandwagon posthaste, wants to pay for it with a windfall profits tax on oil companies. This makes her plan much more fiscally responsible. Not only does she balance the books, she turns a proposal that was unlikely to ever get passed into one that could not make it through the Senate if Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy both rose from the dead and hand-carried it there.

There are few things more satisfying than taking a strong stand in favor of something that is never going to happen. Free pander!

The first 8 books I picked up were OMG-I-could-read-this-all-day books. I had to get outta there before I became lost in the singularity.

If you ever find yourself wondering “Where’s Kevin?” the answer, to a first approximation, will be “he’s at Powell’s”.

One of the themes of Alan Kay’s sparkling career has been to try to make computers accessible to children as a learning tool and his history is full of little anecdotes about how he would teach Smalltalk to twelve year-olds and they would spontaneously invent stuff.

What was so wonderful about this idea were the myriad of children’s projects that could spring off the humble boxes. And some of the earliest were tools! This was when we got really excited. For example, Marion Goldeen’s (12 yrs old) painting system was a full-fledged tool. A few yuears later, so was Susan Hamet’s (12 yrs old) OOP illustration system (with a design that was like the MacDraw to come). Two more were Bruce Horn’s (15 yrs old) music score capture system and Steve Ptz’s (15 yrs old) circuit design system. Looking back, this could be called another example in computer science of the “early success syndrome.”

I get the impression though that Kay thought of this as a failure as he was looking to revolutionize education as a whole rather than train the next generation of super-geniuses (like himself).

The successes were real, but they weren’t as general as we thought. They wouldn’t extend into the future as stringly as we hoped. The children were chosen from the Palo Alto schools (hardly an average background) and we tended to be much more excited about the successes than the difficulties. In part, that we were seeing was the “hack phenomenon,” that, for any given pursuit, a particular 5% of the population will jump into it naturally, while the 80% or so who can learn it in time do not find it at all natural.

I wonder how he feels now when he looks back?

He, along with his team at Parc, invented a huge chunk of the technology that has made modern computing successful.  But computers have still not had much impact on the way kids are taught. When they are not used as glorified textbooks, they are used to teach PowerPoint skills and word-processing.

I wonder if he would have had more success if he had optimized for the kids who are excited about computers? The sweet spot for his glorious Squeak still seems to be kids who find joy in creating and exploring. I wonder what would have happened if he had stuck with that 5% who jumped in naturally instead of trying to satisfy a broader audience? (If someone runs into him, can you ask him for me?)

The rest of Kay’s paper is well worth a read. It’s inspirational despite its underlying theme of if only they had listened to us. He was telling his bosses at Xerox in 1971 that

In the 1990’s there will be millions of personal computers. They will be the size of notebooks of today, have high-resolution flat-screen reflective display.s, wigh less than ten pounds, have ten to twenty times the computing and storage capacity of an Alto. Let’s call them Dynabooks.

The purchase price will be about that of a color television set of the era, although most of the machines will be given away by manufacturers who will be marketing the content rather than the container of personal computing.

He talks a lot about education and about constructionist ideas and about how schools didn’t teach real world skills.

The general topic was education and it was the first time I heard Marvin Minsky speak. He put forth a terrific diatribe against traditional education methods, and from him I heard the ideas of Piaget and Papert for the first time. Marvin’s talk was about how we think about complex situations and why schools are really bad places to learn these skills. He didn’t have to make any claims about computer+kids to make his point. It was clear that education and learning had to be rethought in the light of 20th century cognitive psychology and how good thinkers really think.

He ends on a sad note

When it was hard to do anything whether good or bad, enough time was taken so that the result was usually good. Now we can make things almost trivially, especially in software, but most of the designs are trivial as well. This is inverse vandalism: the making of things because you can. Couple this to even less sophisticated buyers and you have generated an exploitation marketplace similar to that set up for teenagers. A counter to this is to generate enormous disatisfaction with one’s designs using the entire history of human art as a standard and goal. Then the trick is to decouple the disatisfaction from self worth–otherwise it is either too depressing or one stops too soon with trivial results.

Not sure whether he is advocating that we compare our efforts with the entire history of human art and become inevitably dissatisfied or to go ahead and compare and be happy anyway.

Talking to the dead is no big deal…it’s getting them to talk back that’s the really hard part.

Extreme Beginnings

Dangerous Games