if (advantages == disadvantages)

I admit it. At MIT, sometimes I'm a miserable ungrateful human being who wishes I'd started learning programming when I was seven. 'cos everyone around me seems to have done so, gotten bored of it, and then picked up another field to master too between seven and eighteen. o__o

Then I ran across this:
http://learnpythonthehardway.org/book/advice.html

I've been programming for a very long time. So long that it's incredibly boring to me. At the time that I wrote this book, I knew about 20 programming languages and could learn new ones in about a day to a week depending on how weird they were. Eventually though this just became boring and couldn't hold my interest anymore.  

So, on other days, I remember to be glad that I have so much to learn and so many people around me to teach me. Because programming, for me and for now, remains a wondrous activity that I've sought to learn how to do for years and still don't really believe I know how.

That, I know, is a problem with my attitude. I'll always think there's more to something than there might actually be, because I've decided to worship the acquisition of some skills. Programming, the mill/lathe/lasercutter/waterjet, simply being knowledgeable... Wah, why is there so much stuff to learn?

In other news, at Code for America, we did rails training [edit: I first wrote this post 6/28/11]. The impression of ruby+rails I got was:
"RVM Synaptic apt-get wait the internet hold on let's try gem install"
"oh now gems won't work because I have a semi-right version of ruby but not gems"
"uh...
*terminal freezes for 30 seconds with no indication anything happened after I hit enter*
...yay UI fail"

Code code code. Feeling a bit overworked as I try to finagle my "it's summer" brain into working on my Media Lab UROP (mostly me learning electronics), code on Code for America work (which I admit is hard to do alone, and not nearly as fun as when I was at the office and everyone was chilling out and working with each other and I could feel not guilty about pestering everyone with questions), and working on My Own Projects. Due to aforementioned balancing act, I'm constantly swinging between "oh it's hopeless, why don't I know anything / why am I so behind" despair and "ahhhh this stuff is due" frenzied work.

Mmm... My Own Projects. Like cloning the hexabot Instructables. I love the feel of electric vehicles... so much quiet power. <3