Or at least I haven't been.  Too many blogging platforms, too little energy to write.  I moved my Livejournal over to Dreamwidth, posted there a few times, and that was it.  Tonight for some reason I decided to click on the email reminders I still get, and here I am.  Read a little bit, but decided not to go all the way back.

If I want to keep posting and not get daunted, I guess I should write something quick off the cuff on some random topic, or a few.

Simon (eldest son) is now 18 and just finishing his first semester of university, taking computing science, but he's still at the stage where he's mostly taking other stuff, like physics and statistics and calculus.  And he's having more trouble with the calculus than the other things; luckily I remember a fair bit of calculus myself so I can help.  They're using this system called WebAssign or something where they submit answers online, and apparently it's both fairly capable of scientific notation and fairly forgiving of unreduced forms.  But it also only allows a certain number of tries (in this case three), and it doesn't give you the right answer when your guesses are exhausted (and it sounds like they didn't discuss them in class, either)...and usually he only comes to me after his first two guesses were wrong.  Hopefully he does okay in his final exam.

I was quietly happy to see him sitting with Jinian (his nine-year-old sister) on the weekend, working on a programming project.  I gather there's some framework for building Bullet Hell games (he told me the name, but I've forgotten) which features some programming, and he was patiently explaining the programming bits to her.  So that's nice.  Jinian's been struggling with math a little, but programming is easier than math, isn't it?  Or maybe it just seems that way.  I saw someone write recently that "talent" is just that stuff that you did a lot of when you were young because it seemed fun and easy...