Let's start the fun.

I had the idea of starting a blog long time ago. I actually started using my old grtfercho.blogspot.com site as a Internet Bookmark place. Kinda like del.icio.us before del.icio.us existed. I had 210 bookmarks on my old site that I cleaned and moved to my account in http://del.icio.us/grtfercho. My second take on blogging was @ cfblog.com/grtfercho, this eventually will become my official ColdFusion only blog, for now I don't have anything but the name. Too many things to do, a lot of things to organize. So what am I going to blog about? I have too many projects that I'd like to talk about and probably get some feedback. In the past I created my own wiki to organize my ideas and have all information in one place. It didn't work because there was no accountability. I was the only one with access to the wiki, therefore if anything was incorrect I wouldn't know about it because I put it there in the first place. Creating a blog and leaving the doors open for anybody to see makes me accountable of what I write, even if only a handful of people come to these pages I have to write thinking that from now on there's an audience. Blogging also makes me write, simple as that. Since English is not my native language I think that blogging will sharp my language and communication skills. Thank god for spell checker...!! The projects..... I have the domain programmingforkids.org reserved, I started looking for information related to teaching programming to kids and I really couldn't find a central repository. I decided to start my own. The website will help me understand and discover more about computer languages that I either forgot or haven't used in the past. It also gives me the chance to share and receive feedback. I think it will be a great experience. I also have the website LLAJTA.COM that I administer. A lot of things happening there, I'd probably blog more about the site on the site itself and not here. Only because the site is in Spanish and I plan to keep this blog (grtfercho.blogspot.com) in English. I may however write a couple things here related to the challenges found @ www.LLAJTA.com and to programming. What made me start blogging all of a sudden? I think the first step in all this was when I decided to teach programming to my nephew, he's 10 years old (Mar-2007). When I started looking for information about programming for kids I realized that at some point my kids were going to be in that same position and that I needed to start working on something so by the time they reach the appropriate age I can have a nice collection of data in one place. My son Ian is 3 years old now, he started playing with the computer when he was 2 , eventually after a few months he knew how to turn on the monitor (we never turn off the computer), select the bookmarks option from the menu and go to SesameStreet.com to play with Elmo. Now I decided to build a new computer for him. This time I didn't want to deal with Microsoft and Windows. I also wanted to start experimenting with Linux once again. I've done in the past and never successfully, there was always something else that pulled me away from Linux :( . I started looking around to see what distribution was the most acceptable for me and for him to start learning. I'm a Linux noooooobie (for now). After looking at some of them, Suse, Red Hat, Fedora, etc. I landed on Ubuntu and from there to Edubuntu. Needless to say I didn't look any further. Edubuntu is the perfect distribution to satisfy my kid's curiosity with computers and a good starting point for me to retake that lost and forgotten affair I have with Linux. It's been almost two weeks since the computer is up and running. I already found a few problems, no, not with the system, is just me. Since I don't know much about Linux I'm not familiar with the system and with the way to install and run things. I'll be posting my experiences about Edubuntu in this blog as well. cool enough for a first post. I have a lot of things to work on.