Programming for me, I can do CSS, HTML, some Java, and PHP, but when I try to learn C++ or C# for a certain project I just get so tired and bored that I either fall a sleep or I go play video games for the rest of the day.
What about you Hubski?
I'm pretty sure I pick up learning French about twice a year, stick with it for a week or two, and then I inevitably descend into the "meh" stage. To avoid feeling guilty about this, I always end up convincing myself "Future Janabutts will have more time to dedicate to this hobby." I also do this with learning to program, building custom effects pedals, and circuitry in general. Oh, and of course, I will never learn how to play that banjo I bought on a whim.
I'm the exact same way with Spanish. I had some formal education when I was younger and I keep trying to pick it up again but I always get side-tracked. I just downloaded Dualingo for my phone and hopefully it will help me stick with it because I may need it if I get the chance to work in Panama for a few weeks in January.
I took spanish in High School and one year in College. I find that when I spend a week or more in a spanish speaking country it all comes flying back to me and I can carry on pretty well. Good luck with it! What will you potentially be doing in Panama? I have a cousin living there.
Like I said to Cortez below, Spanish is the second language of the people that live there, so we will see how much it helps my Spanish, but I'm looking forward to it either way. We're working on getting clean water to rural communities there. We will be building and showing people there how to build simple water filters.
We will be building and showing people there how to build simple water filters.
That sounds like a worthwhile endeavor, best of luck with it. ... I mean, muchas suerte
Well . . . yes and no. There is a lot of research on how immersion can affect language acquisition and the general thought at this point is, yes, immersion can help in language learning, as long as there is sufficient familiarity between the learner's mother tongue (or L1) and the language being learned. Essentially, if a language is too dissimilar to your first language, then being immersed in the culture can actually limit one's learning because it can be overwhelming. This is one reason why it can be really difficult for say, English speakers to learn to speak Cantonese fluently and why it's common to encounter various immigrants in the U.S. who may have lived in the country for a long time, but still speak using grammatical constructions similar to those found in their L1. One reason why language classes can be good, is that a capable language teacher will be able to help break students of their tendency to form sentences in their L1 and then translate them word for word into their target language (L2). This might not seem to be a problem, but it's a bit like when kids learn to read. Most people will subvocalize at least a little bit when reading and this is actually the greatest obstacle to reading quickly. It's easier to tell with kids, because they may be reading silently, but their lips might be moving. Anyway, it's like running two programs on a computer at the same time, generating responses from one program and then pasting them into the second program and hoping that everything will come out right, knowing full well that the second program operates along different parameters.
I think the greatest advantage in living in the culture who's language you wish to learn is that you learn to actually communicate. Colloquialisms are not often taught in a classroom and make a very big difference when actually speaking a language, rather than just understanding it.
This is true, but for colloquialisms to be understood and taken in, context is necessary. Again, if languages are very similar to one's L1, colloquialisms will more likely make sense to the learner. Take English and French for example. For an English learner of French, the phrase "cherchez la femme" might be familiar, but translating it (look for the woman) into their L1 is likely to convey a similar meaning in context. If we take an English learner of Vietnamese (which I speak a bit of and have trouble with) then the idioms and colloquialisms will seem very strange unless or until one has sufficient context for them and a certain amount of accepting those idiomatic quirks as "just the way the language is." For example, a common phrase "không sao đâu" literally translates to "no stars where" but colloquially, it means "never mind". It's hard to become a fluent speaker of languages that are vastly different from one's own using only immersion or only classes. What the literature suggests (which I support, due to my own experiences in teaching) is that learners need high context environments, dealing with realia (real examples of the languages as native speakers use it) supported by exercises designed to break down reaction time and to eliminate word for word translation from L1 to L2. Learners are also helped to acquire language by other learners rather than being taught to as is found in traditional teacher-centric classrooms as it allows greater opportunity for self-assessment, monitoring and comparison of language use.
Well Spanish is the second language of the people I would be working with, so it may be a bit counter-productive to take too much from my experience there. I will probably need to be proficient by the time I start. And it's just a good life skill to have, especially living in Texas.
Also, how is that banjo of yours? Is it in good shape? I've always wanted one.building custom effects pedals
-Very cool. What kind of pedals have you built? I wouldn't know the first thing about how to do this, but I have always thought bgood79 would be good at this. What do you think bgood?
I've only ever built a "baby's first fuzz pedal" which is one of the easiest. You can find tons of schematics hereand on the website hack-a-day. My Banjo is actually pretty nice, when I say I'll never learn it, I mostly mean learn it as well as I can play guitar. I can pick some notes and diddle around on it, but nothing special, but I don't think I can let go of it too soon since one of band uses it. I keep it as an "if you provide it, they can't say no" kind of deal. I can play the Mandolin like a beast though. If you want to pick up a nice starter Banjo I'd recommend a Deering's Good Times. By starter I don't mean dingy, I know a lot of folk who play these all the time.
jonaswildman, have you ever built any of your own gear? Janabutts, thanks for the links. That Deering's Good Times is a pretty banjo and for $400 it's definitely not too expensive. That said, I have to buy a violin next. Actually two violins, one for my 2.5 year old daughter and one for me. Actually, I'll likely rent hers and buy mine. The mandolin is such a lovely instrument to play. I probably play the mandolin like you do the banjo. I know about 6 chords and can fake my way towards almost sounding like I know what I'm doing. I have zero technique though. I play it like a rhythm guitar and have barely any picking skills. They sure are fun to play though, aren't they?
The violin's a heap of fun, and contrary to what most people seem to think, it isn't especially difficult to pick up. I've found so far that the fingering is similar enough to the other string instruments I play for it to be easy to pick up. The bow is the trickiest so far, but it's getting there.
Ive never have had the urge to build anything related to music. That side of music doesn't interest me at all. I thought it was cool that Elliot Bergman made his own Kalimbas (http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1YwFw4ZH8F0) and sold them at Nomo shows and I am intrigued that The Books make their own stuff though.
I keep this 4 string guitar in my office to pick on when I get the hankering: it's a lot of fun.
Don't be jealous, I work from home :-) I could keep a drum set in my office and no one could care less. In fact, I will often sneak downstairs in to my studio mid-day to play the drums. It's really nice. I'll never work in an office ever again. Not ever.
How to effectively manage iTunes. Mainly because it is a farce. I'm not sure I'm being lazy though. It recognized my library on my backup drive and now has added all songs twice and synced them to my iPod twice also. The best I've been able to manage is getting iTunes to allow me to individually remove the second copy of each song manually one-by one.
iTunes destroyed my library one too many times. I don't use a Mac so I just ditched the program, installed Rockbox on my iPod (old video one, 5th gen I think?) and can now manually drag folders onto the device, using it like a normal storage drive. It makes so much more sense to me and I couldn't stand how iTunes obfuscated all the content I stored on my iPod. I use MusicBee for playing music, which supports structuring your music like iTunes in a library or like other players that are more playlist-centric. It seems to be a relatively unknown program but I think it's great and have been using it for years.
Javascript and HTML5. And using Github, I can't understand it.
Javascript and HTML5 can be really easy to learn if you just start doing simple web page projects. Just use Microsoft MVC and you'll be able to learn HTML, Javascript, CSS, and C# all in one package!
Exactly whats MVC? Is it some sort of IDE for ASP.NET?
Yeah it's essentially a streamlined way to make a web app using ASP.net and (usually) Visual Studio. It separates the back end into Models, Views, and Controllers that all play their part in the development of a web app. It mainly uses HTML, CSS, Javascript, and C# and you can load JavaScript libraries and stuff with C# like ORMs. There's a lot of good info on the website: http://www.asp.net/mvc
I was going through Pro ASP.NET MVC 4 before coming onto hubski. IMO, while it's awesome you'll end up using a lot more templating and C# than anything else.
That's possible, though it really depends on what you want to do. I like C#, so I don't mind that side of it, but it's also a great resource for learning the visual languages as well. I guess it just depends on your programming tastes.
True. I also picked it up because I wanted to get more into C# and .NET while also learning about developing for the web, so that's what I got out of it.
Git was a bit of a daunting trip when I first tried to learn it. I almost forgot how hard it was to learn until I tried to teach it to some first year comp sci students for a group project we were working on.
True, though last I checked it still went to command-line when it so much as sniffed a merge conflict.
I'll echo the two most common ones already noted: music and language. Where music is concerned, I've owned mandolins for a few years now and have made little progress; I'll play for a few weeks, and then they'll gather dust for a month or two. This year I started off quite well - I learned a bunch of new tunes. However, I then decided it would be best to switch from directional to alternate picking, which essentially meant starting over and re-learning everything from scratch. I found this so frustrating that I have yet to properly go back to the mandolin. I've also had a friend's bouzouki for the past few months and haven't learned anything on it. Language is slightly worse; at least with the mandolin I've made an effort. At various points I've wanted to learn different languages - Norwegian, Spanish, French, Polish, Italian, Russian. I did French back in school and studied Spanish in my first year of university, and of course learned Irish from way back in primary school. All three I've at various points really wanted to learn properly, but never actually gotten around to doing anything about it so far. There are lots of other things I think about learning - how to program, how to knit, how to ride a motorcycle - but I have yet to consider them as properly as the above. ("Properly" used loosely here.)
I think music and languages have that one really important thing in common: once you've learnt one, picking up more is a lot easier (well, with languages I guess it depends). I've been playing guitar for 10+ years now, and I'm not especially great at it (I know people who started six months ago who are insanely better than I am) but I enjoy doing it - and because I'm able to play that, over the years I've been able to pick up the ukulele, bass, violin, keyboards, et cetera. Mandolin is next on my list.
Music and language also have even more in common. Here's excerpt from an essay I did in the first year of my degree:As language is such an essential thing for humans to learn, infants as young as eight to ten months are starting to determine which sounds are linguistically significant (Kuhl, 2006). Research show that as people grow older and fit into their culture and language, this ability to phonetically differentiate between word and letter sounds becomes more difficult. As music requires careful listening to individual notes and their rhythmic values whilst language requires listening for individual phonemes combined with the intonation, both end up being processed by the brain in similar ways (Kindermusic, 2011). Stanford researchers found that music listening training improves the brains ability to differentiate between fast and continually changing sounds. This is a vital skill to enhance for phonemic awareness, which is important for acquiring a foreign language (Gaab, 2005). Studies also show a high degree of correlation between phonemic awareness and pitch discrimination. “The ability to perceive slight differences in phonemes appeared to depend on the ability to extract information about the frequencies of the speech sounds”. Researchers have suggested that singing is a great way to learn language as it molds these two abilities into an effective method of learning (Lamb, 2007). This not only shows music's ability to calm and improve attention in students, but also the ability to be a whole method of teaching together. So the areas of the brain that are also used to process language are being activated through the listening of music, allowing one another to work in harmony gives was to a much faster learning process.
Lazy isn't the word I would use, but I would like to learn the following if I had more time and resources: 1. French -This will likely not happen until retirement. Just the way it is. Need the time and need to be submersed in the culture as Cortez mentions in his comment. 2. To Code -All about time. There are resources like Code Academy that I've started using. Just need more time and frankly I need to be more excited about it. 3. Play the violin - My daughter starts violin lessons in a few weeks. I will be attending with her and hopefully learning as she learns. Until now I haven't had the time or equipment. -Glad this is happening. 4. Tennis - I have begun to cross this one off of my list. I've been playing for the past two months pretty regularly, two to three times a week. I just need some lessons. My plan is to be proficient by year end.
The violin, I have all the resources to learn it, and I really want to but I keep putting it off. I guess I should take that up. Code Academy is awesome for learning the syntax, and visual aspects of it without having a compiler. Start there, do a a few lessons and I guarantee you'll feel comfortable enough to apply what you have learned on something you're working on.
I'm spoiled, I get to work with awesome programmers like mk and forwardslash and therefore need not learn immediately how to code. More than anything, I want to learn so I can help my children with it as they get older and it becomes part of their curriculum. -Which it no doubt will be.
It's going to suck when I no longer have time to do what I want anymore, if what I'm doing now doesn't take off before I graduate I'm joining the Airforce to get the education I need then hopefully I'd have saved enough while in it to live comfortably while starting a business, if not I'll just reenlist.
Well, perhaps I used the wrong wording. I'm only in high school [computer collecting is an odd hobby for a highschooler, I can see how that threw you off] but I spend a lot of time video editing, working, YouTubing, trumpeting, and of course, doing schoolwork that I often get too distracted to focus on programming. I have a lot of free time, but sometimes I just can't prioritize programming as much as I'd like to.
It's not a weird hobby my brother did it for awhile. I understand what you mean about prioritizing, I guess I should do that more often. But I recommend you do what you can to be successful in High School because for me, right now, I feel like I waited to long to actually start working on something that'll hopefully become a big part of my life.
I know that feel bro. Worse, I'm 7 years into my 4 year degree. One of the things that helped me gain perspective was Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years: 1. Systematically identify top designers as early as possible. 2. Assign a career mentor to be responsible for the development of the prospect and carefully keep a career file. 3. Provide opportunities for growing designers to interact and stimulate each other. This assumes that some people already have the qualities necessary for being a great designer; the job is to properly coax them along. Alan Perlis put it more succinctly: "Everyone can be taught to sculpt: Michelangelo would have had to be taught how not to. So it is with the great programmers". Perlis is saying that the greats have some internal quality that transcends their training. But where does the quality come from? Is it innate? Or do they develop it through diligence? As Auguste Gusteau (the fictional chef in Ratatouille) puts it, "anyone can cook, but only the fearless can be great." I think of it more as willingness to devote a large portion of one's life to deliberative practice. But maybe fearless is a way to summarize that. Or, as Gusteau's critic, Anton Ego, says: "Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere." It reminds me of what my teachers always told us, "You can do anything if you put your mind to it." It seems like the self-esteem fluff that's said to make everyone feel special, but I now think it's much more literal than that. It really is just a matter of discipline to learn a skill and a matter of prolonged discipline to master that skill. Two people embody this, for me at least. The first is Dan McLaughlin of The Dan Plan. He was a 30-year-old photographer before he decided to try and become a professional golfer by following the 10,000 hour idea. The other is Jimmy Carr, the British comedian. He left a marketing job at Shell to pursue stand-up comedy at 25 and now he's one of Britain's most well-known performers. Hell, even my wife only just now got her first job in the animation industry (at 24) and she never even went to school for it! She was only able to do this because she made an effort to work on her skills even through shitty retail jobs and surviving off just my student loans for the past seven or eight months. I struggled for years after high school because some of my best friends just knew what they wanted to do and how they were going to get there. I dropped out of college a few times, worked soul-sucking jobs, and only relatively recently found a passion for programming (I'd been doing it for years, but only out of necessity). One of the great faults of my 'Career and Personal Planning' courses in high school was their insistence on knowing what you're going to be before the end of grade 12. I remember we had a folder which was supposed to contain the best of the best of our work over our high school career and which the Universities we applied to would look at. That was bullshit; not even I looked at the stuff that was in there. But that mentality haunted me: I was already too late to change gears, I couldn't do anything great with my life. I looked at people like Stephen Wolfram who got a PhD in particle physics at age 20. It was only after dropping out, being human pylon, going to and dropping out of bible college, climbing as far as I could up the corporate ladder without going into management that I shook that mentality and worked on realizing that yes, I could do anything I put my mind to, as long as I learned to kick myself in the ass - because I'm a lazy motherfucker.I feel like I waited to long to actually start working on something that'll hopefully become a big part of my life.
Fred Brooks, in his essay No Silver Bullet identified a three-part plan for finding great software designers:
It’s a project in transformation. An experiment in potential and possibilities. Through 10,000 hours of “deliberate practice,” Dan, who currently has minimal golf experience, plans on becoming a professional golfer. But the plan isn’t really about golf: through this process, Dan hopes to prove to himself and others that it’s never too late to start a new pursuit in life. For a detailed description of the project, please read this blog post: http://thedanplan.com/blog/?p=1090
I imagine it's hard to find time when you are conceiving of and creating such amazing things as dice for giants. -Not being sarcastic. I think they look awesome. Nice work.
Alright, story time: Years ago, my dad started a mobile storage business, moving around those big shipping containers and renting them out for storage. The only problem was that it's damn hard to move those things, so he created a special flatbed truck that can move giant containers by themselves. This flatbed has a special chain system that pulls the container on top of it. It's completely revolutionary, so he's been spending the past year or so getting a factory ready to manufacture them. One of the key things he needed was an industrial plasma table to cut steel precisely, sort of like a 2 dimensional 3D printer with steel instead of paper. Of course, it's difficult to have a plasma table without making stupid shit all the time. One day he was sitting at the table, and since we play a lot of board games, he saw a dice sitting on the counter, and it hit him that giants can't play with dice because they're too small. So, he sketched out some giant metal dice with skulls and shit instead of regular dice pips and handed it to me to draw on the shop computer. By that evening, we had the drawings mapped, cut out of steel, and welded together by the welding robots, and we have a Dice for Giants. We kept refining them and realized that we could sell them. Our marketing department contacted ThinkGeek, and we got an order for 100 of them a few weeks ago.
I have a link in my comment to a demo video of them.
Nice! First of all it sounds like you have a pretty kick-ass dad. Secondly, when you have an online store set up, drop a link. I'd potentially be interested.
Programming/coding. I'm sure if I really dedicated myself to it I could learn it. But I always get lost at a certain point, whether it's C++, Python, CSS, HTML, or JavaScript. It just gets to the point that it's overwhelming to me and I can't keep track of anything.
I can tell you how I taught myself how to do HTML/CSS. My boss left the job that I was working (where I still work) and I was cut to two days a week. I had no experience coding, about 2 months worth of designing, and a fat chunk of money spent on half a film degree. He was resonsible for the website and design and all the marketing materials (one sheets, powerpoints, etc.) I figured I better either step up and fill his shoes or start looking for another job. I decided to make a site for myself to offer video editing - maybe some design things for small businesses who don't know much about design - to generate a bit more income while I was gaining experience. Also, so I didn't end up drunk 5 days a week instead of 2. I spent two full days googling, codeacademy, downloaded a couple books, read lesson plans on how others taught themselves, everything. And then I realized I wasn't retaining any of the information. I had typed the freaking doc header so many times but once I got to <body> I had nothing to do. So I decided to stop learning and start doing. I created a pretty horrid site. It was buggy, it was ugly, but it worked and I learned a massive amount. Everytime I got stuck, I googled what to do. Originally everything was div tags. Literally everything. As I went along though, I learned the difference between block and inline elements, I learned css with it instantly and still struggle with inline styling, mainly because a nice clean block of css is so glorious. I learned the putting your css in the html doc is super easy, but makes it a pain when you need to go back. I'm not happy with my current site. I've coded about 10 sites since the most recent version of mine, pretty much mastered what I call "lazy-ghetto-responsiveness" and can code a single page in about five minutes. I needed a contact form a bit ago, so I learned how to write the php mail form. I copied one that existed on my companies site, figured out what things did what, and rewrote it to work with my site. I'm working on a real site for a real client right now for work and I still don't have a fucking clue what I'm doing. Usually it takes about 4 stackoverflow posts before I get a real answer to the problem I was dealing with. But those little bits and pieces stick in my brain and now I use that knowledge on the next site or page. So, my advice to you, is stop learning and start doing. Even if you are recreating something that already exists, the mere process of doing so will teach you skills, bits and pieces of information. Plus it's way more fun and exciting than reading books. Lastly, Ira Glass
It's been a while and I can't say I really read your reply when you wrote it. But I recently decided to dive headfirst into developing apps for Kik, so I guess I took your advice without realizing it.So, my advice to you, is stop learning and start doing. Even if you are recreating something that already exists, the mere process of doing so will teach you skills, bits and pieces of information.
That's exactly what happened with me. I didn't download any books but I kept open references and what not, by the third day I didn't even have to look anything. I use to ask people "How did you learn Lua, how did you learn Java Programming, how did you learn C++" and those people would tell me but it never helped me, finally I just decided to do it my own way but this time I wanted to learn CSS and Java, my friend offered me a chance at something, and I did some designs in Fireworks, went off and made it. Truly the best way to learn programming is to just do it. This is the most truthful thing about programming you'll ever learn.I spent two full days googling, codeacademy, downloaded a couple books, read lesson plans on how others taught themselves, everything.
I'm working on a real site for a real client right now for work and I still don't have a fucking clue what I'm doing. Usually it takes about 4 stackoverflow posts before I get a real answer to the problem I was dealing with. But those little bits and pieces stick in my brain and now I use that knowledge on the next site or page.
Stackoverflow is amazing, I'm really bad at asking questions there, but I guarantee there's always one person willing to be patient with you.So, my advice to you, is stop learning and start doing. Even if you are recreating something that already exists, the mere process of doing so will teach you skills, bits and pieces of information.
I have only asked one question on stack overflow. Usually I just google and then read all the different answers and discussions because my problems have yet to be unique. I'm running into a weird occurrence in IE8 for this project so I might have to break down and post there since I don't even know how search for this issue.
We have a fun site/webapp thing that needs to be vertically responsive. We told them that it was going to be an awesome super futuristic html5, any device, etc. They were excited. We coded it up, figured out how to do it, and sent them the link and all management at the brand that has to approve. They are all running ie8. Our analytics actually show one person on ie6!!! So now we have to re-do, fix the jquery/javasript, do flash fallback, etc. Not too big of a deal, just more work. Problem is... To position the buttons horizontally (because there is no defined width, only a defined height of 100%) I have a shrink-wrapped div (or span I've tried both) around the main image. The problem is in ie8, the shrinkwrapped div (or span) doesn't shrink wrap to the 100% height version of the image but to the actual version of the image and therefore the sizing and positioning of the buttons and videos aren't working.
Without the sticky div properly shrinkwrapped, the buttons and the video are messed up because they are positioned with %'s and sized with percentages - of the sticky div. On IE8, I think it is taking measurements on the size of the actual image, before it resizes based on the 100% height parameter. In dev tools on IE8 I can uncheck the 100% height box and the sticky fits perfectly around the image. I'll pm you the link so you can see better. It's just pretty private, so no sharing.
Yup. I believe the same. Before I knew they were on IE8, I told them that it wouldn't be supported on old browsers. It's like one of the biggest brands. Even they can't upgrade their computers?! They seemed to get it and be excited. But their lazy ass IT dept or whatever keeps them on fucking IE8 so I have to code for IE8 or they don't have a way to approve the site. Seriously, when we found this out we thought it would probably be easier to hack their network and upgrade their browsers than try to fix it. Seeing as they are all running IE8, it can't be that hard to hack, right? //note for nsa: I'm not seriously going to hack their network
Irish. Various code-bases and systems used in my workplace which I should probably know a lot more about but.... actually that is something I should learn, not something I am interested in learning so it doesn't count. Car maintenance/restoration. I like Cars and would love to restore old ones but I never move towards doing it. How to have fun.
How to sew. This is one of those skills that everyone used to have a basic knowledge of, but no longer do. Like ironing, or cooking. I can't tell you how many times I've been travelling and knowing how to sew, be it a button or how to mend a tear or whatever would have come in handy. Fortunately, I am usually able to run into compassionate people when I have these kinds of problems, but I'd like to be able to handle anything that life throws my way without mangling it too much.
Programming as well Cortez; not so much a lazy factor on my end, but more so being daunted by where to start, which programming language to begin with, and how much there is to learn. I know that might sound a bit crazy to most, but my brain never was the greatest with complicated algorithms/hard science equations etc, which is how my brain interprets code when I look at it.
I would love to learn something down pat, not just for the skill acquisition, but also to break that mental barrier of something I've generally stayed away from. Also, I want to learn the accordion.
One of that questions I had to ask while learning it is, what do you to DO with the code, and from there you begin focusing on that. Don't just pick up a book or go to a website and start reading because I guarantee the only thing you will grasp from that is what a variable is. The best way to learn is hands on trial and error. And don't worry about the math, the computer does that for you, over time it will just become the rhythm of the code, you won't really have to think about it as hard, only what number goes where.
I had the exact same advice given to me by a good mate of mine (who runs a startup now in SF), and it was to work out what to do, then go with the coding language/platform that matches. Like probably a thousand people at any given time, I have an app idea that would work for Apple/iOS and Android, and have been hunting an older Mac Mini to start learning the Apple SDK/programming.
Skeptical that anyone is actually making millions on fart apps, I checked and see that people are actually buying fart apps. I didn't see any that had enough installs to break 5 figures, but still, there's some money to be made with silly app ideas. In general, I wouldn't consider app development as a get-rich plan. Some people may strike gold, but your average app developer is struggling to get pennies from ad revenue and many paid apps may make enough money that it might justify the time to build. To me, I think the safest assumption to make with app development, is that you're building a sellable skill. Other people that think they can make millions from their app idea will happily pay you a very high hourly rate to build their app, so you get steady income without the risk.
Haskell. I want to use it for my final year project, since it is supposed to be perfect for machine learning and I will inevitably have to learn it next term anyway. That said, I currently have a programming summer job so all I want to do when I get home is chill out. I suppose it's not the worst that could happen. Like quite a few other people here, I want to get back into languages, especially German. Fortunately I am joining an evening class this year so hopefully I will be able to make some progress in that regard. I would like to live in Germany for a while, Munich and Berlin are good for technology.