Jay McGavren’s Journal

Actually it’s my wife’s old Droid! That I inherited after she got a Droid Incredible! But I don’t care! Because the Incredible interface is flaky!

GarageBand was one of the reasons I wanted Lenny to have a Mac. So I was pleased that today, all on his own, he fired up Magic GarageBand and then proceeded to manually edit the generated song.

Lenny’s First GarageBand Song

His “bridge” starts about 1 minute in. It’s, um, a little eclectic, but it’s a start.

Posted (in vain, I’m sure) to Sen. Jon Kyl’s Facebook wall:

I’m a productive, tax-paying, native-born American with inadequate health insurance for myself and my family. Oh, we tried to purchase private insurance, but no one will underwrite us because my wife had major surgery too recently. We wound up having to settle for a $250-a-month out-of-pocket plan. We pay an additional $300 a month for medications because there’s no prescription benefit.

I’ve gone from contractor to salaried status with my employer, so the situation will improve for me. In June, when my benefits start. Until then, I have to wait and worry about my family.

Senator Kyl, I ask you, is this an acceptable situation? Is it acceptable for the millions of Americans who won’t have a reprieve in a few months?

-Jay McGavren, Mesa

Given Kyl’s voting record on this issue I doubt it will even be read. By Senator Kyl, that is. But at least it’ll make the topic a little harder for him to ignore.

I did this as part of MoveOn.org’s virtual march for healthcare reform. Please consider doing the same!

Going salaried at my current employer, and have to fill out a job application as a formality. So I was digging around for past employer info in my archives, and came across this e-mail, sent on the occasion of departing Pegasus Solutions…

Date: Sat, 22 Oct 2005
From: Me
User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.2 (Windows/20050317)
To: John
Subject: Re: New job!

John McGavren wrote:
 > What level are you now, and what did you put your stat points into?
 > Oh! I'm curious about the loot you got from killing the pegasus too.
 > Any tomes of knowledge? Or swords?

Um, no.  But I am gonna take my stapler with me.

-Jay

Puerto Penasco/Rocky Point was fun, if not exactly my cup of tea… This was my first time to Mexico, so we weren’t exactly seasoned travelers, but we got by and actually had a good time.

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The plan was sushi, Golden Gate, jazz bar, hotel. When Logan and Stacey and their 18-month-old joined us, it became sushi, hotel (kid needs his sleep), golden gate, jazz bar, hotel.

What finally happened, though, was french cuisine, impound lot, hotel.

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Huzzah, they posted my Ignite Phoenix presentation on Scratch!

Couple slips, but I’ll be the main one to notice those. If RubyConf goes this well, I’ll be really happy.

My proposal for Ignite Phoenix on November 3rd:

Scratch is a free visual programming language for kids created at MIT. It lets kids as young as 5-6 easily create interactive stories or games and share them on the Web. It’s also easy to teach - just set machines up and turn the kids loose!

A member of the Ignite steering committee was among the parents that brought their kids to my June 6th class, so hopefully they’re half-sold on the idea already.

Wow, the turnout for today’s Scratch class was incredible! I didn’t even have time to count heads, but there were at least 20 kids, each with one or in some cases both parents. Not bad considering event promotion consisted entirely of this page on Upcoming:

Learn to use Scratch (http://scratch.mit.edu/), a visual programming language targeted at kids. Parent involvement encouraged for children under 8. (Ages 5 - 12)

The few terminals we’d set up would have been overwhelmed, but thankfully almost everyone brought laptops with Scratch already installed. (A less-technical audience probably wouldn’t have done that.) Most kids were in the suggested age range, and a few had used the program before.

We gave a brief tutorial with the default project, which simply showed movement, turning, and looping on a single sprite. And that was it - we just turned them loose and told them to flag us down if they had questions. By the end we were seeing rotation, costume changes, sound effects, sprites following the arrow keys, drawing with pens, kids remixing each others’ projects… It was spectacular!

So I’ll echo the advice I’ve heard before if you want to do one of these events yourself:

• Provide machines with Scratch preinstalled and running. (Older hardware is fine.)
• Give a brief introduction (less than 5 minutes).
• Say you’re available to answer questions.
• Get out of the way.

I originally scheduled a break after half an hour and asked everyone to come up with a question to ask in front of the group - I regretted adding even that much structure. When time was up, it became clear I was interrupting 20 kids’ concentrated work, so I left off. My only remaining interruption was to encourage the kids to share their work on the MIT Scratch site, and to ask us if they needed help. Derek suggested adding a “gangplank” tag to posted projects.

You can view the resulting gallery here:
http://scratch.mit.edu/tags/view/gangplank

There were a couple teachers in attendance, and I gave them my contact info and offered help with setup and/or teaching. Hopefully there will be events at a couple schools as a result. If you’re involved with an Arizona school or club and want to host a class, please post in the comments.

Many thanks to GangPlank for hosting the event, and to Derek Neighbors, Mike Bennett, and Jade Meskill for helping field questions!

Or, at least, my attempt at it. The real-world test is this Saturday; I’d be interested in any further advice anyone can offer. I’m trying to balance security with ease of setup. This can of course be adapted to other applications.

• In the Finder, copy the Scratch folder from the disk image to /Users/Shared/ under the Macintosh HD.
• To ensure files can be saved to the Scratch Projects folder (which is the default location for a fresh Scratch install), in Terminal, run “chmod -R ugo+w /Users/Shared/Scratch\ 1.3.1″ (or whatever the Scratch folder path is).
• Enable the Guest account via the Accounts preference pane.
• In the Parental Controls pane, enable parental controls for the guest account.
• Check “Use Simple Finder” (this will make it easier for younger kids to navigate to the app).
• Check “Only allow selected applications”, and ensure all applications are disabled except Safari (for establishing scratch.mit.edu accounts) and Scratch. (If the top-level checkbox has a minus-sign, it means some sub-items are enabled. Click the box until it is empty, then expand the tree view to select individual sub-items.)
• Under the Content tab, select “Allow access to only these websites”, click the plus sign, and add http://scratch.mit.edu/ to the list of allowed sites.

When the machine boots, students should be able to click the Guest account, then select the Shared folder in the Dock to get to the Scratch app. (I don’t know an easy way to add Scratch itself to the Dock under the locked-down Finder; let me know if you do.) They can also open and save Scratch projects within Scratch itself, and they’ll be preserved after logout even though it’s a guest account. Safari access lets them establish an account on scratch.mit.edu so they can upload their projects.

They won’t be able to do much of anything else, though - all apps will be hidden, and almost all paths will be inaccessible from the Finder. (They can still see almost anything from Safari, but next to nothing will be writable.) I’d imagine this is enough to keep most kids out of of distraction and/or trouble, but you can disable Safari and lock the machine down still further if you’re concerned.

Edit: My post on how the class went is here. Summary - I wouldn’t say these efforts were unnecessary, but they definitely weren’t essential. We had the program up and running when kids arrived, and that was all we really needed. Security wasn’t much of a concern in this environment.