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melted_snowball's anti-teenager note today, (which I did find amusing), today my co-workers and I took our co-op students out to lunch. There are two university co-ops, and one high school co-op. I had a wonderful conversation with Alex, the high school student.
His family moved to Canada from Romania three years ago; his father is an electrical engineer, and he's a hardware hacker type. He says in Romania there are a lot more kids who know how to fix electronics, since new stuff costs so much more. (Which I submit as further evidence of why our culture of entitlement makes us lazy and soft.)
While I played around with electronics in high-school (making printed circuit-boards, wiring up chaser-lights, and such), kids these days have a lot more cool options. Right now, he's been working himself up to building a PIC controller (used to program integrated circuit chips) and building himself all sorts of digital projects with sample PIC chips he's getting as freebie samples from distributors. Way cool.
Anyway, we had a great lunch, and afterward, I wasted a bit of time browsing around MakeZine's Blog, which fully satisfied my hardware-hacking itch for a while. Yay, computerized etch-a-sketches... :)
This morning, I also got a USB-based KVM hooked up, since three of the machines in my office only have USB keyboard and mouse connectors. Not only did I get rid of extra clutter of a second keyboard and mouse, but I can use my regular ergonomic stuff, since I daisy-chained the new KVM behind my main KVM, and the connection magically just works. Which is surprising magic, since "everyone" has said that shouldn't work, especially the ps2-connector keyboard, which shouldn't work as a USB device. Plus the ergonomic mouse, which ultimately gets translated from USB to ps2 and back to USB before it gets to the second KVM.
Take that, evil Connector Conspiracy!
melted_snowball's anti-teenager note today, (which I did find amusing), today my co-workers and I took our co-op students out to lunch. There are two university co-ops, and one high school co-op. I had a wonderful conversation with Alex, the high school student. His family moved to Canada from Romania three years ago; his father is an electrical engineer, and he's a hardware hacker type. He says in Romania there are a lot more kids who know how to fix electronics, since new stuff costs so much more. (Which I submit as further evidence of why our culture of entitlement makes us lazy and soft.)
While I played around with electronics in high-school (making printed circuit-boards, wiring up chaser-lights, and such), kids these days have a lot more cool options. Right now, he's been working himself up to building a PIC controller (used to program integrated circuit chips) and building himself all sorts of digital projects with sample PIC chips he's getting as freebie samples from distributors. Way cool.
Anyway, we had a great lunch, and afterward, I wasted a bit of time browsing around MakeZine's Blog, which fully satisfied my hardware-hacking itch for a while. Yay, computerized etch-a-sketches... :)
This morning, I also got a USB-based KVM hooked up, since three of the machines in my office only have USB keyboard and mouse connectors. Not only did I get rid of extra clutter of a second keyboard and mouse, but I can use my regular ergonomic stuff, since I daisy-chained the new KVM behind my main KVM, and the connection magically just works. Which is surprising magic, since "everyone" has said that shouldn't work, especially the ps2-connector keyboard, which shouldn't work as a USB device. Plus the ergonomic mouse, which ultimately gets translated from USB to ps2 and back to USB before it gets to the second KVM.
Take that, evil Connector Conspiracy!
