kahunacohen.com

March 9^th, 2011 started with Clay Shirky's keynote. Clay studies the effect of the Internet on society and the economy, and his talk was by far the best keynote of the conference. The main point I got out of this is that you can't always solve a novel problem by using an existing mindset.

I was fortunate that NCBI and A-tek sent me to DrupalCon Chicago, the annual three-day gathering of Drupal developers. I aim to distill the talks I went to each day, starting with Day 1, March 8th, 2011.

I'm really enjoying Test-Driven-Development (TDD), combined with automated UI Tests for my Web apps. I love the confidence it gives me to code and be relatively certain I haven't broken anything which was previously tested...

My kids' emotions are more complex than their ability to express them, so sometimes we have to tell them that new-age parental cliché, “Use your words!”

I've written about my eldest son's obsession with Jesus before. Today at daycare his little-girl playmate (whose parents are devoted Catholics) began talking about Jesus. J-man interjected:

"Oh, Jesus. He was nailed to a cross."

The little girl said:

"But after he died, he rose from the dead."

On this, Jesse had some pretty serious theological questions like:

Being a good Jewish boy, J-man is obsessed with ham and Jesus.

He was asking today about "the King of the Jews", while we drove home from his daycare. I told him that Christians believe he is like God. He asked me:

"...but does God believe God is God?"

"What a great question!", I praised him, but I had no meaningful response other than that. I looked at his face in the rear view mirror. He seemed proud to stump me.

We call the penis, "winky" in our house. I know, it's juvenille, isn't it? "Penis" is such an ugly word.

Tonight, after we had put J-man to bed, I went into my room, which is next to J-man's and dropped something on the floor.

Jesse opened his door and came in our room and said:

"I was hitting my winky and I heard something fall!"

Courtney asked:

"Why were you hitting your winky?"

J-man said:

I've been at Zivtech's 2-day Drupal module development. The first day, I picked up a few great tips, such as modules and techniques. Here's what I got out of the second day:

I attended Zivtech's Drupal Module Development two-day training class, May 27, and 28th in NYC.

I'm glad that I had been developing Drupal module development at work for a few months previous to this class, or I would have been quite lost.

Of course, as I expected, I am picking up a few things.

Today at Synagogue, during Shabbat morning prayers, J-man and I were sitting near the back, and I was reading him the Shema.

I was explaining to him what it meant, teaching him that we have one god. On the Bima (the area in front of the synagogue where the Torah is housed) sat the Rabbi, the Cantor, the president of the synagogue, all of whom J-man knows personally.