Anyone thinking of starting their own company should watch this great interview/talk at Stanford University

YouGov Polls - Get Paid To Give Your Opinions
This is such a great interview/exchange between Peter Fenton of Benchmark Capital and Jess Lee, Polyvore's CEO. Anyone wanting to pursue their entrepreneurial dream should watch this Youtube video in its entirety

I just spent a week learning MIT's Scratch programming language and I barely scratched the surface.

Spent this past Sunday learning MIT's Scratch programming language. The learning curve is not steep, it is actually fun. The language is highly interactive (made for kids) with easy drag and drop menus to modify building blocks (codes), events, motion, colors, motions for your sprites and backdrops. You can import your own backdrops (your photos for example) and sounds/music. Having said that, there are plenty of music loops and images that will be more than enough for your storyboard/games. I recommend using the materials provided and gets the basics down. The possibilities are definitely endless as is.

Here are 2 animation projects I designed with Scratch, Enjoy







Below are two games I designed on Day 2 and Day 3. The video shows what the screen shots look like on Scratch and as you can see, it is not intimidating, it is like putting a jigsaw puzzle together (of codes and commands). A little about how this works, you register an account with Scratch.MIT.edu, and the projects you designed are hosted under "My projects". You can edit, make new project, delete the ones you don't want, download a sample project and remix. You can download a copy to your desktop, record and export for YouTube. If you are looking to get your kids interested in coding, Scratch is a really fun way to get them interested





To learn the basics, the first thing I did was to go through a few tutorials on Sunday and Monday so I understand Scratch's building blocks and the "freedom" they allow me. On the 3rd day, I started making a few simple games. Today is Day 5 and I have made two games and an animation and am working on an animation for a kid's story. If you enjoy dabbling with colors and using pictures to tell a story, you will have find Scratch a happy medium. The drop and drag blocks make learning curve much shorter as one could test out concepts quickly (in much the same way digital camera gives an amateur photographer the ability to check and improve his shots, more often than not through a series of trials and errors from the instant feedback). I definitely had a lot of fun coding with Scratch. It is satisfying to play a game I design myself and seeing codes I worked on come alive in animation especially after having stayed up late testing and debugging them.

Here are some links to Scratch and Scratch tutorials:

MIT Scratch Site

Explore Scratch, see projects made by others

Scratch Wikipedia page

Free programming class on edx.org

Learning the Open Source R language

I am learning the R language in my free time, which is not much right now until I finish my rather compressed 6 week long summer accounting and QB classes at CSM. But I am reading about R and doing the basic syntax exercises when I need a break from the grind and a distraction...Right now the experience is rather similar to learning html (so that I can edit my blogs). The R code does feel simpler (is that why some say the R language is elegant). Guess I have only just begun. The following links have been very good resources for me:

Below are the two resource pages you should check out first: Beginner's Guide to R Introduction
and
Some Hints for the R Beginner

If after checking out those links you think you might want to give it a try, go to Try R Code School and earn your badges there. What a great way to learn for the un-initiated. Thank you Try R Code School!

I am not sure just yet what I would use the R language for. Perhaps once I have accumulated a bit of knowledge and skills with the language I can attempt to write a simple program to do basic calculations on my favorite subjects: finance, options, accounting?? When I feel I have learned just enough to attempt writing a simple program with R, the idea of what it will be hopefully comes naturally to me.....