Noel Rappin Writes Here

I was a nerdy kid. I suppose that isn’t much of a surprise, given how I turned out. But in those pre-computer days, I was nerdy about math and baseball. I was the kind of kid that kept a daily log of my batting statistics in the recess kickball games. So you can imagine my surprise and happiness when this image appeared in Sports Illustrated, in May 1981. I was ten:

I want to tell you about LoneStar RubyConf and how my session went and all that, but first I want to tell you this seemingly unrelated story. Once upon a time, my Senior undergraduate project was an educational software tool I built to teach fractions to elementary school students. (To give you the time frame here, it was written in Visual Basic 1 on Windows 3, and I had to ship my own desktop to the school to ensure that they’d have something I could run it on.