[Growing Up Geek] Little Geek in the Car

I was just going through some of the pictures I took last month. I'd forgotten I'd snapped this picture of Paul somewhere in North Carolina or Tennessee. He spent a good bit of his time in the car pretending to check his email and read feeds. He's also able to play some of the easier games too.

[Growing Up Geek] Omagles

Paul riding on an Omagle creation.

When I was growing up, one of my favorite toys was Omagles. It was a construction set that you could use to build forts, vehicles, or pretty much anything else. I spent many happy hours playing with them while visiting my grandparents in Shreveport.

Paul is finally old enough to play with them, although he doesn't quite have enough engineering skills to produce a fort or a vehicle yet. He's fascinated with the putting wheels on a straight piece, and putting connectors on the ends to keep the wheels from sliding off.

While visiting my grandparents yesterday, I spent about 45 minutes building this little vehicle with Paul's help. He was really impressed that his Mama was a "good builder!". He was even more impressed that he could make his "bus" go forward or backward by using his feet to push on the wheels in that direction.

It's too bad that they seem to have stopped selling them in the US, because they were one of my favorite toys.

[ Growing Up Geek] A New Name for Ginormobaby

Still Ginormo, but not really a baby anymore. (Paul at the Watauga Dam near Elizabethon, TN)

Back when I was a kid, picking out your first handle was a lot easier. There weren't quite so many people online then, and it was easier to get the one you wanted without tacking on a few numbers. But that was over half a lifetime ago for me, and most people have a handle of some sort these days.

When I first took Paul caching, I decided to log his finds for him, so he'd have a record of some of the places he went before he was old enough to remember. He was 7 months old then, and we went with "Ginormobaby". Like most first handles, it stops being cute/funny after awhile, and sort of embarassing once you outgrow it. (My first group of online friends and I even developed a group case of amnesia concerning our very first bbs handles.)

I've been meaning to change Paul's geocaching handle for awhile, but I just can't seem to come up with anything that isn't taken, or he won't outgrow by the time he hits kindergarten. At two, he's not really partially defined by his interests since he's still exploring what's out there.

And now that he's able to go on caching trips where we find 20+ caches in a day, I really should figure out something before I have to relog 500+ caches for him. The only things that come to mind would be some sort of play on biking, hiking the AT (he's fascinated by the concept of walking that far), and gaming. I wish I had a working crystal ball so I could choose a fitting handle for him.

Growing Up Geek: Team Sports

I guess you might say geekiness runs in my family, or at least it has for the last 6 generations. My great great grandpa is the earliest proof I have of a geek in the family. Being raised by geeky parents (love of math from my mom and computers from my dad) has made me different from other girls.

Where some parents might steer their child away from such pursuits as reading the entire encyclopedia set or trying to teach yourself to write programs, my parents actively encouraged it. (Well, until I wrote a program that tied up our first pc while it was counting to 1 billion and printing each number out.)

But the things they steered me away from also made it harder to relate to my classmates. My grandparents aren't really sports people, so it wouldn't surprise me if my parents never played team sports as kids. They probably didn't know the rules, and therefore, couldn't teach me. People (and especially kids), can be cruel to people who don't know something that is supposed to be common knowledge.

Which brings us to Paul, the 6th generation geek. Things have changed, but little boys are still supposed to know the basic rules of games like baseball, football, soccer, and basketball. My lack of knowledge of baseball caused about half my 5th grade PE class to get really pissed at me, because I made an error that lost our shot at the intramural championship in the first round.

I don't really have a working knowledge of how to play most sports. Usually it involves some variation of "get the ball and run faster (in the right direction) than everyone else". Our local parks and rec offers a class that teaches the rules of the major little league sports, and there's a good chance Paul might find himself taking that class since he's already displaying a decidedly geeky streak.

I don't really care if he plays little league or not, but I would like to save him from the painful experience of others finding out you don't know something that is supposed to be common knowledge.

A New Name for Paul

Geocaching.com is fairly unusual, in that you could change your handle when you wanted. They've finally run into an issue where it's easier to lock down name changes than to work around it. As of May 15, you can't change your username anymore (the official announcement).

This isn't a problem for Clayton or I, since our usernames won't be anymore embarrassing in 10 years than they are now. As for Paul's username... well, I suppose he won't be too happy with being "Ginormobaby" when he's a preschooler, let alone an angsty tween. So I have a few weeks to figure out a less embarrassing handle for Paul. Unfortunately, he's still at age where it's hard to predict what he'll be like next year, let alone 5.