That this happens in the liberal arts is understandable. But there’s also a move afoot to reject Computer Science degrees: “go straight into a startup!” people say. I used to oppose this: university taught me what I was doing when I programmed. It didn’t make me a good programmer (though it sorted out some dodgy techniques I had as a self-taught kid) but it taught me how to think about solving problems, to recognize common problems, and to understand the different dimensions of tradeoffs all through languages, operating systems, databases, networking, and more.

So I was in favour of CS. “Go to uni!” I would say.

Past tense.

This weekend I met with a recent CS grad and we talked about what he should do. He had signed up for Honours, then realized he wasn’t interested by the research. And, talking to him, I realized he’d had the wrong approach to university. I had also had the wrong approach to university.

The right approach is to learn as much as you can. For a few years you have a lower pressure to earn, you have wide-open license to stretch your thinking in as many directions as you can, you have huge resources and opportunities around you, and you can do anything.

I came close: I had fun. I played with early Internet services, was hired to write some (learning sockets as I went), set up regional mirrors of software archives, and got caught up in the early web. None of this was deliberate (I never sat down and said “I will try as many Internet services as I can; this Internet thing will be big!”) it just happened to be the right thing for me.

My friend, however, didn’t even come close. He fell into the same trap that most people at university fall into: he thought the goal was to get the degree.

“Fuck no!” I told him. The degree is a side-effect! If you learn as much as you can, expand your mind, discover what interests you, and chase it as far as you can, you’ll get the degree (assuming you also spend some time studying). But to fuck around OUTSIDE university instead of learning, so as to do “the minimum amount of work necessary to pass” (my words, not his) — that’s a mistake.

But nobody tells the kids this. Of course, being kids, perhaps they wouldn’t respond. Education, like youth, is wasted on the young. I stay in touch with a few CS lecturers and they all bemoan the cohorts of students who aren’t interested in the subject, only “will this be on the final exam?”.

This young fellow I was talking to, he came out with the usual patchy set of skills. University didn’t actually teach him much that was directly useful. If he goes and joins a company, he’s going to have to hustle for a year or so to get his programming act together and be useful. University teaches that various computational things exist, but until you’ve used them in anger and had them ingrained into your way of thinking, you’re not going to be a good programmer. It’s the difference between having to struggle to conjugate verbs in a foreign language vs having that stuff be automatic and reflexive. It’s not muscle memory, but it has to become so.

Of course, rightly, universities don’t pretend to be producing useful programmers. “We teach high-level concepts,” they say, just as I did. But the high-level concepts that I learned were useful to me: what an operating system has to do and how you might divide the labour, how to describe and process regularity (hello, regular expressions!), the challenges of randomness and linearity as exemplified by the different approaches to memory management that I’d encounter in various programming languages, etc. The classes I tuned out (AI, for example), I wish I’d paid more attention to now! The stuff he learned, though, struggled to be useful: the description he gave of his HCI class didn’t seem to be coupled at all to the design considerations in my world. I think there’s a minimum amount of useful you have to be, and I wonder what the distribution of useful is across different university CS programs.

I still distrust the “just go to a startup!” people, though. There’s a huge industry whose raw ingredients are programmers. Only a few of them regard those programmers as a resource to be developed instead of exploited. “If you’re a good programmer, skip university and go to a startup” may be right for a handful of people, but for most kids it could easily reduce the probability that they will ever become a great programmer. The leisure to learn at university is NOT afforded you at a startup. The people telling you to join a startup do not have your best interest in mind. And, of course, startups require you to solve a problem–the only problems kids have are getting laid and scoring weed, and those were (not coincidentally) well solved by Mark Zuckerberg.

So what do I tell my kids? Should I urge them to go to university? Should I tell them to jack it all in and run off and join a startup? This is what’s occupying my mind now.

When I look forward to the world they’ll come of age in, I don’t see a world with careers like people had in the 60s. I do see a future in which they’ll have to be self-reliant, know how money works, know how to sell, to start and run a business. That argues for startup, or some kind of financial experience. But they should also know how to learn, to think about the general not just the specific, to analyse. Traditionally, they’d acquire those skills at university. Will they do so in the future?

I don’t know whether I’ll steer my kids toward uni. I’m trying hard to give them business experience before they leave school. I just sat down with Mr 12 and we ran through this month’s set of board papers for a real company, talking about what’s on the agenda and why, and getting our heads around the financials to see what stories they tell about the company’s performance. It was great to have a discussion of the differing risks of fixed-price vs time & materials, see them come up again in the CEO report, and then reflected in the financials.

In the end it’s up to the kid whether university makes sense for them, but if it looks like it’s on the cards then I plan to:

1. Take them on research trips around the various universities to find out what courses are offered relevant to their interests and see how they map to practitioners,
2. Remind them that university isn’t about having a piece of paper at the end, it’s about what you can learn getting it.

We play The Thirsty Dog on K Rd on Sunday, and the set is shaping up to be a good ‘un: the songs we were playing last year have really bedded down nicely. We are, if I do say so, getting good. That gig is Sunday Oct 2, and we’ll start playing around 4 or 4.30. It’s a 45m set, daytime, easy to get to if you’re in Auckland, just $10 at the door. The setlist features songs from Gillian Welch, Tim O’Brien, and Claire Lynch and some beauties I don’t want to tell you about just yet.

A week later, on Sunday October 9, we play the Devonport Bunker. That’s two sets, featuring new material we haven’t played in front of people before. The bunker is a small intimate venue, and we love playing there. The half-time beer is cheap too …. You’ll get our polished favourites and the exciting new songs for $15. Doors open at 7.30 for an 8pm show.

Hope you can make it!

@annaraven: http://bit.ly/G77RQ

@nzfi: @vexus_nexus similar effect on no# 2s too – tho don’t think it is a gene thing (omg can’t believe I’m tweeting this).

@nzfi: oh & don’t forget that the leaves are really yummy too. Chop, Steam, season & drizzle w olive oil. (Can u tell I like beets a lot?!).

@nzfi: oh and if you par-boil it whole first then you can just rub the skin off. Easier and less mess with rubber gloves on though.

@nzfi: wash, peel and grate it, pop it in a pot with knobs of butter & tbsp of balsamic. Medium heat for about 5-10mins – stir now&then. Yum

@Vexus_Nexus: awesome once you know. Not so awesome first time when you forget you ate beetroot last night = ‘oh christ, my kidneys are shot’

@Vexus_Nexus: my other suggestion was run a science experiment to see which of your friends have the beetroot pee gene. It’s a genetic trait.

@Vexus_Nexus: peel ‘em, chop ‘em, put some oil & balsamic vinegar on ‘em, wrap ‘em in tin foil & roast for a few hours. Good. You get beetroot pee?

@johubris: the River Cottage beetroot brownies looked bloody good

@johnmccombs: peel/qtr beets roast 200C in foil bag w red wine vinegar garlic lots grnd peppr, 1hr. rest. dress w good olive oil + balsamic vinegar

@circa1969: I’d recommend something like this: http://is.gd/yfVp

@newts: modified spud gun?

@vodafoneNZ: borscht!

@stevebwriter: Do I gather u dont like beetroot (why grow it)? Burn as a ‘sacrifice’ to gain divine favour. Add caustic soda to juice; admire colour.

@keith_ng: ox tail soup/stew. Good with flavoursome beets.

@vavroom: beets, red onion and horseradish relish, beets, red cabbage and cranberries, beet salad, mackerel & beet salad. Want more??

@dasfreak: beetroot can be used to make a pretty awesome chocolate cake. strange but true

@vavroom: pickled beetroot. apple & beetroot chutney. beetroot jelly. beet, lemon & ginger marmelade, borscht, beet roesti with rosemary… TBC

@ksuyin: Beetroot jelly

@natobasso: Kiwi Burgers!

@davemosk: mmmmm … borsht …

@jamesaduncan: boil ‘em and pickle them… use them on salad. Mmm, pickled beetroot…

• 5. Being not truthful always works against me.
• 8. Drugs feel great in the beginning and become a drag later on.
• 9. Over time I get used to everything and start taking for granted.
• 15. Worrying solves nothing.
• 17. Everybody thinks they are right.

And while it’s still a little early, (2) and (4) are now in the lead for 2009 New Year’s Resolutions.

For the next two days (during low-tide only, when the boat was out of the water) he bogged the keel with fibreglass while I painted. It was fun! I painted the bum of the boat all by myself, scraping off barnacles and working on the thick viscous antifouling paint. I did one side each day, the first with roller (rollers make it much easier) and the second without (because we only had one roller and it was well trashed by this stage).

But one thing I’d not thought through was that where there’s fibreglass being applied, there’s also fibreglass being sanded off. The first I was aware of this was when a shower of white particulate crap blew around me. Some of it must have gotten into my contact lenses because I had to take them out when I got home that evening. My right eye was really sore, it felt like there was a rough patch on it and every time I blinked or rolled my eye, the rough patch scraped and ground against the rest of the eye.

By Friday it became clear that it wasn’t magically going to get better, so on Monday I visited our local GP, Elspeth. Elspeth is Scottish and a hard case. “Soo Nathan, hurt yer eye have ye?” “Yes, fibreglass.” “Ooo dear. Let’s have a lewk at it shall we? I’ll just drap some of this in it, turn your eyelid inside out–nice trick isn’t it?–and ah yes, you do have scratches on your cornea but there’s no fibreglass left that I can see. There’s a lot of light out here, let’s take a peek at it in the dark room shall we? I call it a dark room but it’s really just the cupboard. Yes, lean against the stationery shelf, that’s fine. Ah yes, definitely scratches. Well, we’ll put some cream in it and patch it for a few days.” “Can I turn my eyelid right side out now?” “If ye must, dear.”

So I left with an eyepatch. But not the kind of eyepatch that gets admiring looks from amply-proportioned female passers-by. No, the nurse packed the patch with cotton balls so it looks like I’m a frog that’s just been squeezed (technical term: exophthalmic) and then, because injury without insult is just wrong, she drew a cartoon girly pink eye on the outside in biro. So instead of people thinking “oooh, what a grizzled war veteran, I bet his dong could bring down the Hubble Space Telescope” as I walk down the street, I got “pffft”. Story of my life.

The eyepatch, of course, makes me monocular. So far I’ve stood up inside the fridge, failed completely to put away frypans on the hanging kitchen rack, and was comically beaned by a set of keys that my wife threw to me and I was unable to triangulate on. No wonder pirates are funny. All I need is a pegleg and twin appetites for rum and sodomy, and I’d be set!

I should be back in binocular mode in time for my trip to Sydney for linux.conf.au next week. Until then I’m in squinty bouncing-off-things-mode. Whee!

Anyway, lesson learned. Next time work downwind from Zom. And harden up before I visit Elspeth again.

It’s weird, I can’t point to anything in particular. It’s just that suddenly it became easier. We had friends, we weren’t unhappy, we were actually enjoying ourselves. At that point we lost the drive we’d had to connect back with the people we’d left behind: Jenine stopped mailing her friends amusing stories, and I stopped blogging.

So I’m afraid this blog is going to become mostly boring work and travel stuff from here on. I’ll still sneak some of the kids and school in, I’m sure, but the drama is largely over. Huzzah!

Foolish me for assuming that’d be the end of it. When I got back, there was a note in the school newsletter saying that the Super Kids program was launching. Parents who wanted their children to attend had to fill out a form saying it was okay (no kids without signatures would be taken). This comes just as the bus schedule for the local area was “rationalized” by the Ministry of Education and now there are 5-10 kids whose bus doesn’t leave until an hour after school gets out. I wasn’t happy, but I was prepared to accept it.

Then Jenine called me on Wednesday. There was a woman from Super Kids at the school during the morning assembly time, telling the kids what fun they’d be having at the Super Kids after-school program. This, for me, crossed the line between outside-school-hours and inside-school-hours. I wrote this letter:

From: me
Subject: No Jesus On Leigh School Grounds
Date: 10 August 2006 9:47:50 AM
To: principal

Hi, Debby. I hate to be the bad guy on this, but apparently someone has to. I hear from Jenine that someone from Super Kids was at school today, sitting the kids down in the playground and telling them about how wonderful the program would be and how they’d read Bible stories.

I find this completely unacceptable.

At the last board meeting I attended, I said I didn’t want the Super Kids program operating from the school after the final bell. I still don’t want that. It’s unnecessary and it’s the thin end of the wedge. It’s unnecessary because Christians already have two places to teach kids about Christ: their church and their homes. There’s only one reason for a Christian group to use a school instead of a church, and that’s to ride on the school’s authority.

I also don’t want the Super Kids people talking about the program during school time. School is where we teach our children facts and life skills. Any mention of Jesus, particularly the unquestioning endorsement that comes with the Super Kids program, makes kids think that Jesus is a fact or life skill. Jesus is neither; Christianity is a religious choice and as such has no place in schools lest it be confused for fact.

I wouldn’t mind a religious studies class where equal time is given to Hindu, Shinto, Maori, Christian, Moslem, and Pagan beliefs. Super Kids isn’t a religious studies class, however: it’s a particular religion being given access to our children. The reason they start with after school time is precisely so that they can get the in-school time and blur that line between fact and fiction.

And that’s unacceptable to me.

Please consider this a formal complaint. I’m happy to meet with you or anyone else about this. I’ll also be at the next board meeting to have them thrown out.

Nat Torkington

The principal replied the same day, saying that as a formal complaint it had to go to the board and she sent it on to Garth, the head of the Board of Trustees. We ran into Garth Thursday night going out for pizza, and he asked me to stay behind after Friday night soccer so we could talk. I just got back from that.

Garth spoke for about ten minutes, laying out his point of view. As I understand it, his case is:

• The school is a community school and serves the community as part of its charter.
• Christianity has a long tradition within our culture and many members of our community go to church or are otherwise Chrsitians..
• Therefore Christian after-school education is no different from after-school soccer or judo.

My response was that it seemed a mistake to confuse soccer for a hot-button topic like religion. I reiterated that I didn’t think there was a reason for the Super Kids program to use the school. He said they’d said they were having trouble getting access to the church and that they were worried about child safety as they cross the road. The one road between the school and the church.

He also disputed Jenine’s version of the Super Kids administrator’s presence on school. Again he said it was no different from sport: “we let the touch rugby coach tell the kids about it to sign them up therefore we let the Super Kids coach tell the kids about it to sign them up.” There was no active proselytizing, he said.

Garth pointed out that many schools in New Zealand are Christian schools and that, for example, the Matakana school hosts church services on Sundays. I replied that I hadn’t sent my kids to Matakana school or to a Christian school. I signed my kids up for Leigh school. He said that twenty years ago there was a lot of deep religious education in schools, which became toned down to Bible class type “what is Jesus’s message” stuff. I replied that the trend is obviously towards the elimination of it and that this happens through the objections of people like me.

Garth said something like a third of people identified as Christian at the census. I pointed that that meant that two thirds of people didn’t. That religion was not like sport, that it is a profound and meaningful thing that changes the whole way people see the world and think about it. And that as such it should be kept a parent’s choice whether their kids are involved in this.

Garth seemed to feel that my letter was very confrontational and aggressive. I’d been quite proud that I’d been so restrained and diplomatic! As Dad pointed out afterwards, Kiwis don’t communicate like that—they hesitantly invite people around for tea and broach the subject 45 minutes into a conversation about the weather. For my part, I just didn’t want there to be any confusion about my disapproval and the reason for my disapproval.

He said that tolerance was another fundamental part of our culture and our community, implying that I wasn’t being tolerant. I said I’m perfectly tolerant of Christians. I’m not objecting to churches, I’m not objecting to people praying in their homes. What I do object to is the insertion of religious education, which is propaganda for something that’s highly personal, into the school. I think it artificially raises the credibility of the religious education and lowers the credibility of the school.

He said it was highly unlikely that, should I demand they revisit their decision on the Super Kids program, the Board would change their mind. I said that I would check with the Ministry to see what the national policy on church and schools is. More immediately, what I want is to have my disapproval registered formally so that when these situations come up again there will be no default assumption that everyone in town is perfectly fine with religious things happening on the school. Until I hear from the Ministry, I’ll hold off on demanding they’re thrown off the school.

That wasn’t not at all the conversation I’d expected. I should have been prepared by the conversation I had at the secondary school a few years ago, when the two people in the office with me (both Christians) could absolutely not understand why church and state should be separate and why having skateboarding Christian evangelists on the school grounds during lunchtime was anything but a good thing.

Some background reading on Super Kids is Evangelization of Children (search for “Wellington”), a paper on how programs should evangelize to children. It’s clear that evangelists often focus on kids who need help (at-risk, troubled, etc.) but by tying their help to their religion just I can’t tolerate it on school property.

Am I really being out-there with this?

Kids are doing great. Tonight Jenine had a meeting of the preschool board, so I was Daddy alone. We played poker with a bag of the 10c coins that New Zealand is removing from circulation. Raley’s getting the hang of how much you should bid for each type of hand—it’s amazing to see her able to identify pairs and threes-of-a-kind by herself now, because a year ago she was struggling to do that. Now she’s figuring out when to bet 2 and when to bet 4. William’s just passed that, and has been taught bluffing by his grandpa. He’s going to be dangerous. I look forward to the day when his Uncle Jon teaches him card counting and takes him to Vegas.

There’s been a heap of rain lately. A family had to be rescued as their car submerged, about 40 minutes from us. It’s nice living on a hill, as we don’t have to deal with the glub glub that people on the flats do. On the other hand, we have to contend with the possibility of slips.

That said, the weather did ease today and it was beautiful. William said, as I drove him and his sister to school, “it’s good fishing weather; I was going to call Grandpa and go out with him.” He didn’t get his trip on the boat because Grandpa was knackered by the time W was out of school, but William was right: it was perfect fishing weather. “Grandpa” (my Dad) has been catching the occasional cray, and smoking some delicious fish. Life’s not bad when there’s smoked fish in it.

The principal of the primary school just agreed to become the overseer for the preschool, which looks like it will turn out to be a good thing. The preschool was pretty hippy and loose, going by the “they’ll get enough pressure to learn and achieve when they hit school, let’s let them play and have fun while they can.” That sounds great, but when I see eight year olds struggling to read and five year olds who don’t know their alphabet I reluctantly come to think that perhaps a little academic work wouldn’t be a bad thing. The preschool had previously not been interested in getting a computer for the kids, but the principal turned that around: “get a computer in here!”.

I worked angles for the first time in a long time today. I used to be able to see a dozen opportunities, everywhere I looked. For the last year or so, I’ve been struggling to see anything to do. Today for some reason I got the “franchise” bit between my teeth and researched the topic to death. Along the way I got that excitement that comes with finding a new area that’s ripe with possibilities.

The family has a restaurant idea we’re looking into. I’m thinking ahead to building a franchisable operation, not a one-off. Hence the research. I also think I’ve found a tradeshow possibility to run in New Zealand, though it’s something that’s completely not computers. I’ll be gathering and running numbers on the restaurant and the tradeshow to see where the juice lies, and I’m looking forward to it.

We had dinner with our friends Pam and Graham on Sunday night, a real treat not just because Jenine made Indian. They’re funny, light-hearted, and a delight to be with. Pam’s gone back to school at 40ish and has a new professional career that she’s just loving the intellectual challenge of. Graham runs a panelbeating business, is the quintessentially competent Kiwi bloke, and has a great life with sound understanding of where he wants to be and how to get there. Because they’re fun people, it’s a challenge to get on their schedules but it’s worth it when we can manage.