Back from my trip and ready to continue the elisp series. Today we're starting our emoji project. When we're done we'll have a minor mode where we can type in something like 🐘 in a buffer and Emacs will replace it with the elephant emoji 🐘. That's part one. We'll then learn how to overlay the emoji over the text so that while it will appear as the emoji (🐘) the actual text of 🐘 will still be in the buffer and file if you save it.

Now that I'm back from my trip (and the subsequent cold that I've battled for the past few days), time to get back to "work." About a month ago, my friend Jonathan Gottfied interviewed me for his State of Developer Education podcast. It's an hour plus dive into CS / Tech education. It dropped when I was on the plane back to NY last Thursday. I meant to write this on Friday but my cold took me out until today.

Last day of the trip we decided to take a day trip to The Hague. On the way we passed through Haarlem For some reason I couldn't get this song out of my head We had some time to do some wandering and even stumbled upon their Chinatown: but the reason for the trip was the Escher museum Cool museum in a beautiful mansion. It had tons of Escher's work along with his story.

We started walking from our hotel to the Van Gogh museum. On the way we passed the Cow Parade store. This was pretty cool since we remember the Cow Parade from back when it was in New York decades ago. Big fiberglass painted cows at random spots in the city. The Van Gogh museum was pretty amazing (and also had wood floors). While most of his best known works might be in other museums around the world there were plenty of great ones to view and admire.

Final leg of the trip in Amsterdam. Train ride and hotel went smoothly but we were hungry so got a quick bite across from the Rembranthuis After some wandering we found our way to the WWII Dutch Resistance Museum. Great place to go if you want to be both proud and inspired and depressed at the same time. It contained propaganda from both sides Photos of hiding people and equipment:

Heading to Amsterdam this morning and we'll be here until mid next week. We spent yesterday in Antwerp but for a while we didn't know if we were going to get there. Unbeknownst to us when we planned our trip, yesterday was the season's first general strike in Belgium. When we found out in Brussels we weren't sure we'd be able to get out of the city at all but it turned out that while the local trains would be out the intercity ones were going business as usual.

We spent the last few days in Brussels. Got in on the Eurostar at around 1:00. We were crashing with a good friend - a teacher who worked with Devorah back in the day but left NY and is now in Brussels. The catch was that she wasn't getting home from work until 5:00 so we had to occupy ourselves until then. Schelpping around rolling suitcases usually isn't a big deal but there were two challenges.

So I'm spending these two weeks vacationing in Europe with my daughter. She was planning on this trip anyway as part of her work "recharge" and is taking me along for a first retirement trip. So, if you're looking for CS Ed content or Emacs come back in a week or two since today is all about travel We spent the last few days in Utrecht. Why Utrecht? Why not.

A friend of mine reached out the other day, it turns out a friend of theirs was all of a sudden locked out of Amazon. Couldn't view videos, couldn't purchase, as far as I could tell and couldn't get to their paid for content. Amazon said that the user violated their terms of service but didn't specify how or when and after a couple of back and forths they declared the case closed.

In many ways we might be entering a golden age for learning CS. After years of hard work by many many people, more and more schools are offering CS, states are making standards (mixed opinions on these), and in some cases, requirements are being implemented. In one interesting way, though, for the self-learner I'm noticing that we're leaving what I think was a golden age. You might say, "but Mike, there are online videos and tutorials for almost everything these days" and that's true but on the other hand, many types of resources that were common around 10 years ago are no longer being made available.