Summer Projects

[asterroc]

My current list of Summer Projects. Enumerated for convenience, not priority.

1. Organize photos. My high school photography instructor told me the secret to good photography is to take many photos and only show the best ones. With the advent of digital photography I have perfected the former, but need to work on the latter. My goal is to take the best photos from my anonymyzed Flickr account and upload them into my personally identifiable account (for those of you who know my real name, that Flickr username is first initial last name, no spaces or punctuation).


2. Record singing - I have enjoyed singing since at least 5th grade, which makes it 20 years now. My singing voice is somewhat soft, but I have good relative pitch. I also play guitar though a bit crappily. My goal here is to record guitar and vocals for a few covers (Indigo Girls, Dar Williams, possibly Sarah McLachlan) and one or two of my own, using Garage Band. I will need to get something to plug in my guitar (it's got a jack) to a USB port (kelsin, got anything like this I could borrow, or that you could recommend I buy?). I am not adverse to collaborations.


3. Road trip to Philly - one of the two surviving Galileo telescopes is out of Italy for the first time ever and is on exhibit through Sept 7 at the Franklin Institute. Along with this I may visit nerdcamp.


4. Visit the crater photography exhibit at CLAMPART in NYC; open through July 6.


5. Learn programming


6. Inbox 0 - a lifestyle change in which I treat my email Inbox as a To-Do list, and remove everything I've completed, so that my Inbox stays perpetually close to 0 items.

More items may be added in the future, but generally 3-5 items is a good goal and I achieve 2-3 of them.

Edit: Added programming, I knew I was missing something.

Comments

[kelsin.livejournal.com]

Others have already answered this pretty nicely but it is a good idea to start with a "simple" language first. Learning programming languages is like real languages. The more you know the easier it becomes. They are all VERY similar and come in "families" based on how they handle certain things (Functional, Lazy, Strict, Static, Compiled, Interpreted, Object Oriented, Aspect Oriented) and many not only blur the lines of these definitions but have libraries or add ons that try to implement things the language doesn't do well on top of the base language.

Enough of the stupid talk: learning Python is on the right track. Personally I hate Python for many reasons and think it's a stupid language, but with that being said many people like it and it is a "simple" language to learn in some aspects. I won't go into detail here, I'll blab even more than I'm doing now. My vote (as I said below in another comment) is to learn Ruby. Simple, no start up time (installed on Macs) and very clean. Plenty of third party libraries so writing something useful will be possible.

Once you learn one, learning others is very easy.