Friday, October 26, 2007

Don't you want a title that's not boring?

I've been meaning to create a blog for some time, but have been waffling between using blogspot and making my own blog technology in Haskell.

Well, today my friend Ellie (8) is visiting. She has her own blog (lala090909.wordpress.com) and has been bugging me to start mine. Clearly, she was right, so I had her create me an account at blogspot (she recommended wordpress.com, because everyone at Club Penguin uses it, but all the people I know use blogspot, so she acquiesced: "Fine, if you want to be boring.")

("Wow, that's a lot of writing," she just said.)

After typing in my name, she asked for the title. "Clifford's Posts," she suggested? "Ruminations," I replied. "Oh no, more boring," she moaned. When I insisted, she said, "Fine, how do you spell that?" Halfway through the letters, she said, "All capitals?" "No, just the first letter." "How about one capital, one lowercase, and so on." "Hmm...," I said. "You don't want it all boring, do you?"

Clearly, we have different audiences. The current point of contention is that she doesn't know what "ruminatons" means. I've delayed telling her for some time and she finally said, "Ruminations isn't that bad, I guess."

So here's the rub. I'm involved in starting a new business, using functional programming (Haskell) to make a website that will both teach math skills and be fun. Seems like I've got the boring part of the math down pat. I'm going to have to work on the fun part.

Addendum: After all that fuss, blogspot capitalized the title anyway.

Ellie just read this and said, "You're not boring, it's just that adults tend not to use colors and other things that make it exotic."

3 comments:

Jeremy Shaw said...

If you look at the title of the page as shown in the browser tab or title bar of the web browser, the capitalization is preserved. Also, on the reply page it is shown with the correct capitalization.

In fact, if you load the page source, the capitalization is preserved in the h1 tag -- so I think it is just a style-sheet setting, which you can override.

Unknown said...

Great start Ellie!!

With perseverance you should have Cliff

a) if not colors at least using colorful language, and
b) if not exotic typography at least discussing exotic music.

Keep up the good work!

Adam Jones said...

The fun part is always the hard part. Depending on the type of math and student age "story problems" can be a big win or a huge drag.

For me (undegrad math major) any story problems simpler than multivariable calculus feel contrived. There just isn't enough power in the math to explain what is going on without "discounting friction" or some other nonsense that renders the problem worthless in any real-world applications.

Good luck on it, you've picked a nice hard problem to solve. I'm excited to see what comes out of it.