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Kill Math is my umbrella project for techniques that enable people to model and solve meaningful problems of quantity using concrete representations and intuition-guided exploration

Sour dough fresh out of the oven. Thanks to our neighbour Peter for bringing this to us. Not much left if it now…

I announced a while ago on a previous post the revival of this blog, and promised to update you on my technological explorations, successes and failures. I know I have failed to do so lately, but I had a few good reasons for my tardiness. The last period I have been occupied with completing some projects but more importantly, with the birth of our second child our darling Inés. She’s great and the birth was a smooth ride compared to our previous birth.

This post is about development, but not the work related one. It’s about the development that takes place above our little ones’ necks: brain development. Idon’t now about you, but I always need to know the theory behind the things that affect me and therefore I’ve been meaning to learn about how our children grow and how they learn, and what’s the best way to assist them. 

Diego and Inés have ensured that we have plenty of waking time which I’ve been occupying the last couple of days with reading Brain Rules by John J. Medina on the Kindle iPad app. I have been totally mesmerised by it, and in fact I still am, as I’ve plenty of material left to read.

By the way, let me tell you when all this reading is taking place; Diego our older child has unlearned how to sooth himself back to sleep, so we’ve been sitting next to him until he falls into a deep sleep, as otherwise he’ll wake up, feel distressed and call us in a whining, ululating voice. This responsibility has been mainly mine as Elena has Inés to attend to and breastfeed. For the purpose our nightly watching over Diego, an IKEA stool has been installed outside of Diego’s room where I can sit comfortably(ish) while waiting for him to be kindly lifted by Morpheus. Meanwhile, I hold onto the iPad and read.

Once Diego is asleep (how do I know he is, you might ask, well our little one has a characteristic toddler snore) I can return back to bed usually to find Elena breastfeeding Inés and I report to her on my readings. It’s the kind of book that needs to be shared by the parents as it’s their behaviour that affects so much of the child’s development.

The book covers pregnancy, parents’ relationships (a crucial developmental factor, as a child who feels secure will grow to deal better with stress and develop a higher IQ amongst other things), intelligence and morality.

I recommend all parents and parents to be (or people simply curious to understand how our brain develops) to go and read this book. Or read the summaries posted in the website (brainrules.net) or look into a similar source.

Awareness of what’s going makes me feel empowered as a dad.

In the waiting room at the local hospital clinic. Plenty of time to get the news and plan for gadget shopping

I did my first ever commissioned website sometime in 1996. This commission found me in rather unusual circumstances, listening to jazz in one of my all time favourite places: The Half Note jazz club in Athens.

I got talking to the venue director, and was going on about sensual and ethereal jazz experiences, when he asked me what I did for work. As a programmer, my profession would have been rather obscure at the time, but I guess the web was catching up and Half Note wanted to jump in this particularly trendy band wagon. “Do you know how to do frames” he asked me. Some days later I started a stint at Half Note designing their website and thus gaining free access to my favourite club.

These days though, I do very little web stuff. I only use what’s required to get our iOS apps up and running, or helping out some other team member in a user experience capacity. However, just this weekend, many years after my Half Note story, I decided to get up to speed with HTML5. It was used quite successfully by the most talented Remy Sharp in a mobile web project I managed for the BBC (Dr. Who Dreamland), but I never spent some solid time with it.

So first thing, I got hold of Jeremy Keith’s book (which I was glad to see is only 90 pages or so). This meant I was able to get through it during my train journey to the infamous ATP music festival. Two days after the event there isn’t much I remember on what constitutes HTML5 other than you can shorten the doc type declaration to a bare minimum. Great stuff. But you don’t build interfaces for an app this way, do you? I was therefore even more pleased when on the return journey I picked up a CSS3 book and started reading more about interesting and familiar things like CSS transitions. I could get them right away, because they just resonate with concepts I’ve been tinkering with for yonks whilst doing Quartz stuff in iOS development.

So, after all these nostalgic ramblings, my plan is to cut my teeth on HTML5, whilst doing cross platform app development with PhoneGap together with Mr. Sharp for a forthcoming iPad book publishing project. I’ll tell you more about it once the contract is signed. Looking forward to see how this shapes up.

Scout Niblett served us with fine mix of angst and sensitivity, cheers

ATP minehead. The joy of ATP discovering new sounds. This time courtesy of the maher shalal hash. Very fitting a big band, literally with 10-20 band members some of them crawling can’t count them with a name that is a challenge to write down on a vir

November snow

What a Sunday it was yesterday. A cold winter morning was followed with some DIY work for our local gardening project and then a royal Sunday lunch, waving goodbye to Jorge and Raquel who are moving back to Portugal.

But this post is mainly about the ATP finals match between Roger and Rafa. I was reminded that the match had started by granpa Jose Luis who I guess was clear who he was supporting. And that’s how the whole match was viewed, with small interruptions to prepare some tea, cater for Diego, clear the mess he was causing and have small chit chat with Los abuelos who Elena was talking to through skype.

While this was happening though and I was losing some of the great points that were happening, I had the chance to watch Roger’s backhand not leaking the usual errors. Actually finishing a protracted exchange by finding an acute and unexpected angle off that side.

I am no tennis coach or expert of that sort but for me that was the big story of this match. Federer was not afraid to take the big shots from that side, was not trying to change side to get a forehand but instead was winning the match from this side. So I was talking with Elena afterwards how does one make this changes? Was it do with the new coach?

Probably it was but the certain change for me was psychological. When watching the Wimbledon 2008 and Nadal dethroning Federer, deservedly so, Nadal was hitting 90% of his serves on federer’s backhand taking away from him his beloved forehand that had given him so many wins. This time I believe he was happy to be playing on his backhand and that was certainly a thing that Nadal was not awaiting and I believe it took away his confidence.

Well bring on 2011 as probably a lot if people are expecting this rivalry has a lot more to give but I for one would like to see new names appear together with these two and win the big titles.

Note: Could very well all be a matter of the surface I’ve very little experience on how the bounce changes when moving to another outdoor surface, but this doesn’t concur with my above discourse so it was pushed as a sidenote.

I think work, life and a very active toddler have got on the way of my blogging, but one of my new year resolutions is to come back to it, and write about all of my pet obsessions: coding, music, tennis, apps and the occasional live observation.

When the curtain opened there was only silence and devotion. Decided to head off to the next stop

Interesting discussion about raising a trilingual child

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