Category: Memories

What makes a teacher great?

~ Veselin ~ 4 Comments
Daily writing prompt
What makes a teacher great?

The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.

— Plutarch

Looking back to what my math teacher did, she would come to class, give the new material, and then give us the hardest task from the book for this new material. We had to learn how to solve problems rather than what was in the last lesson.

I’ve not been able to reproduce anything like that with my kids. I tried teaching my first kid multiplication (or something similarly complicated) and he ran away by crawling when he was 2 and forgot how to walk.

Do you remember life before the internet?

~ Veselin ~ 22 Comments
Daily writing prompt
Do you remember life before the internet?

I do, I’m old enough. The birthday of the Internet is officially 1983. I was 3 years old in 1982, a first-year kindergarten kid. My parents lived outside of Sofia because of permit issues – socialism regulated who lived where and they didn’t have permission to stay in Sofia. We lived in a rented bungalow in a village nearby that had running water but no bathroom. I was banned from visiting the toilet because my parents were afraid I’d fall in. We had flowers, trees, and a manual water pump. I remember that I ate the dandelions. The puddles had frogs. We were told touching the frogs would cause warts, so the interaction was with sticks and stones (no frogs were harmed). We had a small hill that was good for sleds in the winter. A train line was not far, and we had to walk by the tracks to reach the kindergarten.

The Web was invented in 1994, birthing a prototype of the modern Internet and many supergiant services. I was already hooked to computers by 1994. We had 8-bit computers at school, and I studied programming with Basic (ignore the first paragraph on that post). We also had computer clubs where kids could watch how other kids played, which was almost as good as playing yourself. Smoking was permitted inside so you could cut the thick gray air like cheese. I spent my summers around the chess bridge club in Stara Zagora which had 20-ish XT and 80286 computers.

Both milestones I associate with the freedom to roam around and having lots of free time away from my parents. Sofia and Stara Zagora had fewer cars, and it was considered safe to let your kid play on the street with other kids without supervision. I was allowed to go to school by myself from 1st grade when I was 6, a right my kids are deprived of by law. Culturally, we got our highs from books, VHS videos, and audio cassettes. The influencers existed but spoke from the TV, rather than social media.

I’d say, life was simpler and not necessarily better or worse. I like my hot water and inside toilet, the Macbook Air, and the WIFI but playing football every day was also great. And can we get rid of the cars? That was such a civilisation-level mistake.

Blast from the past

~ Veselin ~ Leave a comment

Back in the late 90s, this brand Koop was a symbol of change. We saw the cooperative was some kind of incorporation, a private structure instead of the nearly 100% government-owned everything from that era. The outside A/C unit doesn’t fit though, I don’t remember seeing a single A/C unit in Bulgaria before 1989.

The pavement is from the same period.

1337

~ Veselin ~ 5 Comments

I celebrated 1337 likes last week. It’s a hacker-speak for “elite”, and a short form of 31337 or l33t. Some kids would speak like that on IRC when I first got online in the late 90s. It was some form of an anti-language, made to obfuscate conversations so that you don’t get autokicked by the bots if you type something silly or hacker-related.

31337 was also the default port for Back Orifice. I was a n00b on IRC in 1998 when a friend sent me this funny .exe. It showed an alert with an okay button that could not be clicked because it’d move around on mouseover. I tried to click the button, failed, terminated it, and deleted the program. To my shock, an experienced IRC user pinged later that day to tell me was pwned. The exe had the Back Orifice trojan and my computer could be remotely controlled. It was hugely embarrassing and taught me a lesson 🙂

Desert Fire

~ Veselin ~ Leave a comment

The character is a freelance tank driver, roaming the desert with the tank on a square map. He enters a competition. What does he need to do? Solve a bunch of riddles! Anagrams, basic math, and the music kids listened to in the 80s.

Here’s a riddle from the book.

You have two 6-side dice. What’s the odd for one dice to show 6 and the other to show an even number?

I’ll try to finish the book later this week. After this question, my tank was disqualified because I couldn’t find the solution I knew from playing Backgammon as a child.