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ottod

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First Linux I bought was Walnut Creek Linux CD-ROM. Second was Redhat. I would still be on Redhat if it were not for IBM and their bad faith source-available interpretation of the GPL. Then I bought Mandrake and used it as long as it was Mandrake and not the thing that became Conectiva. Then I heard about Ubuntu which would mail free CDs anywhere in the world. I was in education back then and my students would ask Ubuntu for CDs for a class I was teaching, and Canonical sent them a cardboard display, flyers, stickers, and about 50 CDs. They watched in class Revolution OS and contacted many of the people on it, which were kind enough to answer them. Those were the times; I'm old, yet still looking for a job because I love the industry.

Mouths to feed, mortgage, education, healthcare. I had a business with two single friends as associates, a guy and a girl (me a guy). Both of them checked out at five, they had many chat windows with friends open during the workday (MSN/Yahoo chat era), had friends visit and play Age of Empires in our LAN., while I stayed working late, very focused, not because I was smarter or wiser but because I had an obligation, a duty to bring home the bread. We spoke a couple of times about it, things changed for a week or two and then all back to "normal". Finally I came to accept it: I was no longer in much need of social interactions because I had a spouse, while they were still on the market.

No, I don't. I'm a latino tech worker living in Latin America. If I I were to program in Spanish, I would be closing the global market for my profession. I have seen Russians love Java. I have seen much sustained interest in Go from the Chinese. That is a global market, not the tower of Babel. JS is enough of a nightmare as it is, just imagine if there were localized versions. I have seen it in the first localized versions of Excel years ago. SUMA instead of SUM, so a Spanish Excel sheet only worked on a Spanish Excel. I'm glad now the internal representation is language independent.

The best training is not going to school. My three daughters have always been homeschooled. Every minute they have for themselves, they practice all sorts of creative activities by choice. They paint, write, draw, play music, do crafts.

My girls, then aged 10 and 12, made it through the Coursera ECS first course. They are not geniuses, but the material is stellar. I helped them in a couple of assignments. They enjoyed it, even tough not one of them went the STEM route. They became the smart artsy young women that make art and music with computers.