Generics Day
Well…today I build a silly generic room, and finished off the last little bits of the Generic Talking Stick room. And I spoke to my lovely friend Evita today, who’s sounding sort of blue. I discovered that she works on a moo more local to her, which is sadly lacking in tools. This isn’t their fault, it’s not really anyone’s fault, it’s just that the basic moocore doesn’t come equipped with a whole lot of stuff. Well, comparatively speaking. Especially these moos that don’t have a) any programmers, and b) a whole lot of people to know what else is out there and what can be ported over.
Well, I love Evita. Though I know I shouldn’t talk about it right now, it’s one of my greatest hopes that I’ll see her living in my neck of the woods shortly. And for the most selfish of reasons. I just think my life would be so greatly improved by her presence…she’s one of those people, you know, the ones who will understand (and take seriously) some of the sillier things in your mind that you really want to take seriously. I’ve never met anyone like her. It would just be nice to be able to hop on the subway and end up at her doorstep, bottle of wine in hand, and spend an evening talking shop/fun/social/chicks and so on. But we can do that in any case, even if she’s NOT in my neck of the woods. Ah, the dissertation drama….
Anyway, so I found out that Evita has her own MOO to deal with. Well, perhaps you already know that I have commited myself to building generics of late. Initially I was commited to building Bingen, but lately I’ve been thinking about generics. This started when I built the keyword bot (which shockingly worked completely reliably!) because I accidentally deleted the parent of the fake-out kw bot I’d been using up until then. The new was was a kid of $thing only, so no traceback and no conflicts. And solid as a rock. It was pointed out to be pretty quickly (the next morning) that this bot had many more uses than just fixing my own characters in Bingen. It immediately went into use in Marlene’s Russian-English tutorial, and was a hit at the teacher workshops last week. Evita was saying today that it would be ideal for tutoring, because you can program it to repeat information that teachers don’t need to type in over and over again. This pleases me greatly. After the kw bot, I managed to get the whole world to help me get my Talking Stick Room working (it’s perfect now, thanks to leigh). I built a very simple room that you can add and remove noises from as well, for truna, another fabulous MOOprof from Australia whom I simply adore. So I was sitting on a series of generics that were, for all intents and purposes, mine.
And Evita’s moo needed some tools. So I ported them over. Because I love Evita and I want all her pursuits to be as simple and successful as possible. And a lack of tools shouldn’t stand in her way.
Besides, it feels GREAT to be the author of tools people can use. I hope someone does. 🙂