the_real_nfm

Thank you for sharing that! I'm in my late 20s but it seems like I'm rapidly sliding into middle-age without having made an awesome game or startup or whatnot...this post reassures me that not having accomplished what, say, John Carmack had by my age doesn't mean that I'm a failure. It's something I've been wrestling with lately; not to the point of being deeply depressed about it but it's been nagging me nonetheless.

A lot of native "apps" have either very flexible configuration, or some sort of scripting/plugin framework. Maybe not iTunes, but things like foobar2000 or conky.

I was homeschooled, and I agree that it is great if the parents can make the effort. I think that homeschooling gets an undeserved bad reputation for the perceived "brainwashing" but if it is done right then that is not an issue at all. It does allow the individual learner to excel at what they are good at, though. Once I learned to read my education was very self-driven and I came out very well-rounded because I would read tons (probably literally) of books about anything that interested me; I notice a lot of people identify themselves as a "math person" or an "English person" and I was never like that. I also agree that having other home-schooled kids around is nice; socialization is one of the primary arguments for public schooling but if you have it while homeschooling you've hit the jackpot.

My math professors all preferred blackboards because chalk is an order of magnitude cheaper than markers. Of course, all of our classrooms had whiteboards. :)