Read the Screen

We are at the change of am epoch, moving from a time where we would mockingly tell someone to read the manual when they became stuck to now having to literally instruct people to read the screen.

 "READ THE SCREEN!"

If it is not an in your face, center of screen obscure everything until you dismiss it; or worse still a ping followed by a side of screen chat bubble; then users simply do not engage with it.

Time and time again issues arise where some user declares they are stick, some player derisively mocks a game as hard, or bad, because their little monkey brain did not tell them to read the screen.

Away from computer screens, apps and games, in the classroom their are standards to be met in fluency, fluent readers just see the text and can not but help to read the text.  One can forgive none fluent readers, or non-native speakers, when they struggle in this regard.

However the seeming trend one can observe is for native speakers of the language software is delivered in are unable, or unwilling, to engage and read the screen.

This trend seems doubly emphasized in gaming, where modern games design bread crumbs and way markers and all sorts of mechanisms to point the player to a conclusion or action.

Gone are the games of leaving the content and the player to mull over the opportunities, the sandboxing, in a game world.  There can be no more sandboxes, you can not leave a player washed up on a beach and expect them to work out all the mechanics and order to survive:

They are simply unwilling or unable to do so and instead opt for any game play sequence which achieves their aims and that internal self-satisfactory dopamine hit on achievement the quickest.

I believe the major driver to this change in play style is an absolute lack of willingness to engage with the screen and especially players avoiding reading.  The reading comprehension levels have dropped, I can make assumptions that some of this allowed drop in prerequisite levels can be draw between who is playing games along with the kind of games being played.

I do not believe anyone can deny video game players have taken this turn.  And in the market space it is understandable, if frustrating for those of us wishing for a more engaging and interesting game play loop.

Game makers have had to follow the trend to maintain the mass number of players and major titles, they can not and do not take the risk of making a game which is too hard, or has too high a cost of entry.  They want as many customers as possible directed to the short cut the masses to the feeding trough.

The recent vogue of playing World of Warcraft Classic in Hardcore mode is perhaps a phenomenon we can point to where players sought their own meta, to make the game harder and more engaging and I believe more fulfilling because it broke this trend.  If you played badly you died, you were not rewarded, if you did not engage with other players you died and you got them killed, you were ostracized not rewarded.

A literal case where if you were not up to spec you were actively nulled out of the pool, as perhaps Darwin Theory states nature should be.  It was refreshing, if nerve wracking, to see.

Beyond large new titles or established franchises indie makers are a little more able, and some of the most amazing experiences come out of that style of play, a style of play today considered niche, we must remember many of the game play tropes considered niche today were once mainstream.

MadseasonShow: Lifelong WoW Player Plays Old School Runescape

 

I remember fondly feeding coins into a machine to keep playing and death reset you to naught; without wishing to raise a tangential thought too eagerly, I would highlight that feeding coins into an arcade cabinet was the original micro-transaction driven game play loop and I'm surprised it isn't leveraged more widely today (it may very well be and I'm simply ignorant).

All this concern in the drop in seeming fabric of the game play experience all seems to me to stem from the audience attention spans having dropped, memory skills have dropped, social skills having dropped and crucially language skills have dropped.

We no longer interact like group oriented beings, even in team forming experiences, too many games proffer group finding, raid finding and instant way to find two, four or thirty players you hope to maybe mold an effective fighting force out of and it does not work.  I personally believe this is yet another tangential thought, but it is closely related to this degradation in attention and communication skills, as group finding actively assists such lone wolf selfish players to remain competitive, if not dominate, a play experience.

1980's-1990's UK Education Review : Pt1

In this series I am simply going on a tour of my memory, mainly over my time at school.  My schooling started really at Junior School (7-10 year), we learned to roughly read in Infant school (5-7 years) but that was literally it, I just remember playing with toys at Infants and then being made to read at home.

So we'll start there infants school, we painted things, made collages, I do not remember a single day of structured learning.  Everything seemed to revolve around playing.

Highlights include anything with some structure, this included one day going from a classroom at the front of the school to a classroom at the back of the school, I'm guessing our teacher was suddenly ill so the class was divided between the five others.  And going into that other classroom the kids had "grown up" toys, this was lego - and lego technik - they had a TV with a video recorder and a programme of watching structured learning tapes.  There were actual projects on the various boards around the room, things the children had gone.  They'd done tadpoles, with the kids drawing diagrams of each stage f the tadpole development and they were currently doing cress.

I drank all this in, it was like night and day.

When my little brother came into the school three years later, he was in one of those more complex classroom, not the very plane almost dumb class I was in.

That very much reflects my opinion of my time at infant school, I was put in the dumb class, we weren't encouraged to read, we didn't do math, there weren't any really interesting projects, yet I saw this going on elsewhere.

My mother made me read with her at home, when it became very clear I was not learning at school.

And my grandfather I remember him watching me write and coming over to correct me, I remember very distinctly his showing me how to make the "8" shape rather than just drawing two circles atop one another.

So yeah, not very good, this takes us to 1989.

Menstruation is Normal, in 1989 everyone knew, yet not today?

I'm going to come back to this again... In 1989, in a dusty second floor science room at what was Top Valley Comprehensive School I sat down with my then classmates and we had our first sex-education lesson.  Mr Simpson the (unfortunately) body odour riddled and forever exacerbated physics teacher had to teach us young folk about masturbation and menstruation, and ultimately where babies arrive from.

Not one picture of a stalk was had, not one allusion to fact, not one sugar coating, we had a video of (admittedly a cartoon of) a boy holding his penis and the narrator saying it's okay for this to feel good.  We had a young lady (again a cartoon) fondle herself and we were again told this was normal, we were shown putting condoms onto bananas to everyone's mirth as we'd mostly all seen and even used condoms before... This is Top Valley Estate bruv.

And the last part of this talk was about periods.  We were all told all girls start to have periods, it is normal, we were taught about pads, tampons and even moon cups.  We were told, point blank, about how much menstrual blood a girl should expect; and I remember a fair few of my female class mates blankly stating they would say that a vastly conservative estimate.

THIS IS 1989...

Let me make that clear, nineteen eighty-nine.

So, why the hell are articles like this appearing in 2018?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-42871791

I am utterly baffled and confused by this... Was my school vastly a head of its time?  I don't think we were, we were a daggy comprehensive intended to turn our plasterers, car mechanics and dust-bin men.  It was not an Engineering specialist (read that as "turning out car mechanics") as it is now as an rebuilt academy.

What on Earth has happened in this time?

What has the Department of Education been up to?  How can I go back and check the 1989 Personal and Social education syllabus I was enrolled upon against today's?  Because I remember this episode.

I remember it as it made me vaguely uncomfortable, a period was something my mother had, with her big box of giant canoe like panty liners.  The pretty girls in class with me, they didn't have them, "old women" had them.  It was a genuine surprise, and it is one of the few times during my secondary education where I remember being taught something.

So why are kids today not being taught the same thing?  Again, why this retrograde step?

The State of Today (Sex Ed)

Lets take a moment to read this:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/41510170/both-sexes-should-be-taught-about-periods-together-at-school---charity

And realise that this is 2017... 

I'm not saying this to say, "OMG they're not teaching boys about this", but in 1989/1990... When I were at secondary school, we were taught about sex, and periods, and masturbation...

Yes, we were.  I admit there was an awkward moment with Mr Simpson (the Physics teacher - who used to yell - and smell) but he showed us a video and gave us the basics.

Then, in the lower school, there was a personal health conversation with Mrs Salisbury, where she talked to everyone, and explained how periods happen, they're natural, how much menstrual blood (on average etc) ladies deal with and all-sorts of things like that.

I was eleven, I remember it...

So why in 2017 are kids not being taught?... If I had to endure these jaw clenching moments, wondering my eyes around trying to not admit I was hearing this stuff, then damn it kids today should be similarly scarred....

Whilst I'm on the topic, no kids should be able to get access porn online... They need to go get a shot of boobies where I got it, from discarded copied of "The Sun" which have spent a couple of days blowing around the street.

Story Time - My First Serious Program

Having a basic knowledge of Commodore Basic v2.0 I took to my A-Levels in 1994 and started to learn Pascal, both "Turbo Pascal" on DOS and "Personal Pascal" on my Atari ST.

One of the first things I did, as most kids do is start to write a game, it was a 2D grid style war-game, 28x28 tiles to a map and maps stitched together, it was very roughly based on a table top game I had which itself was a dice & splice of the Guadalcanal Campaign of World War 2... Anyway, I had jungle, and grass, Desert and beaches, water and the tanks, and troop counters moved around, you could air-drop paratroopers into spots when you had earned enough points, and I last worked on it in around 1995 when I started to add Sound Blaster driven 16bit effects into it.

But, I also needed tools, I was working on DOS, with no Windows - I didn't get Windows 3.1 until later that year - and at college the compiler only ran in DOS, to stop the compiler and loads Windows, then execute a GUI tool just to exit again and load the IDE was not a workable solution, therefore I started to write a bunch of EGA based tools directly in DOS, drawing graphics in DOS.

The first tool was a simple string comparer, almost a version of "Diff" which I used for comparing old and new files.  The second tool was a back-up tool, to indicate the copying of files into a floppy, so I could squirrel them away.

Finally, I needed a serious tool, this was a graphics tool... Almost a version of Paint for DOS.  To help design maps and other information in my game.  It worked by letting me place squares and circles, lines and even text into set places on the screen... It looked just like this...

Unlike anyone else in the class of A-Level students (as far as I know) I was the only one who knew about Interupts and could therefore use the mouse in DOS, so this blew a few people away.

This could save my image too, and I built up a very basic form of "Vector" graphics, without actually knowing what vector graphics were.

Later on, I came to add scale and delete to these items too, and this is where my innocence as a new programmer came along, I first started doing delete by using "GetPixel" to return the colour of the pixel below the mouse cursor, however, this failed terribly the moment I run it up and realised if I clicked on either the red circle or the red square both would vanish and I only had 16 colours in my pallette and really got disheartened.

So, I came up with a scheme to get more colours and workout which item I had clicked on... I went to grey scale, I converted each shape in the list of shapes to a grey scale of RGB (0x01, 0x01, 0x01) to RGB (0xFE, 0xFE, 0xFE)... This suddenly gave me 253 possible shapes in my list (as I used black and white as control colours), but 16 versus 253 I thought I was making HUGE strides.

I could then look up the pixel at the X, Y of the mouse to delete the actual shape below the mouse when delete mode was set... Nifty... So my mind thought, it was certainly a programming exercise, and very laborious on the 25Mhz 486 CPU's the college had.  Only much later did I think about accessing the back-buffer directly, locking the bits and stepping over the image in scan lines at vastly higher speed, anyway...

My next challenge for this program was to stop shapes overlapping, I immediately went to my grey scale mode, and started to so this... as the song goes... with "White Lines".... 

As the line of white moved across line by line, pixel by pixel, really really slowly, it checked if it found a grey - rather than black - making the pixel flip from RGB (0x00, 0x00, 0x00) to (0xFF, 0xFF, 0xFF), if the pixel ALSO was the RGB of the Grey shape I was adding, then this was left black, like so...

And I knew the shape was "free floating", with no overlaps... However, if there was an overlay, I added the RGB differently... So I could see the overlay... like so...

I was not only doing the processing live on screen, but it acted as a debugger for me as I went, without needing to spool up the Turbo Pascal Debugger on my measly 543K of free RAM.

This was a serious amount of work for me, when I learned a lot more about programming I came back to this briefly, but it never warmed my cockles more than when I wrote this program for the first time, I learned so much, I learned patience, to think a head, to plan, to process flow, to research the topic and ultimately to get things done first - in a prototype - and then revisit them.

I also ultimately used this same code later, at university in C++... Making this the first time I had prototyped a working application in one language (Pascal) and converted it to another (C++) and could say it was properly prototyped.  The latter use as as s tool to layout gardens in a sort of designer, I remember far less about the C++ version than the Pascal version.  But it's shadow lasts a long time, and remains over me today, I recall so much more about this one application than most of the others I wrote at the time, because it was something I engaged with.

I can only express to any budding programmer today, no matter that language you use, to just dive in there... 

Computing Education 2017

Here in the UK there have been several waves of trying to educate new generations as to the art of compute science, this started when I was a boy with the BBC Computer Literacy project and concluded soon after with a drought of interest from non-technical educators and politicians a like through until fairly recently.

The BBC reports that there has been a low amount of uptake of new Computer Science GCSE studies.

And I can believe this, however the neither the BBC nor government seems to even point as to why this is, they talk about pupil disengagement or lack of interest.

I however contend that the government and educators and indeed the BBC completely fail to spot the elephant in the room, kids study not for jobs or skills, however they do study what is emphasised, IT has always been an "also ran" topic, it's not Maths, nor English nor seemingly as important in appearance as any other topic out there.

In my day this was the case because few understood computing, today however it seems IT is still an unimportant subject, today it's seen as unimportant because of it's ubiquitity.  Kids see easy to use computers, they walk around with them on their wrists, on their pockets, they are the always online generation.  If they need now know how to do more than turn the wifi on why should they care?

Likewise the educators see using a modern computer as easy, so why should it be a subject of study really?

And finally, the basest of problems, is the employers, if employers are willing to employ a programmer who studied horticulture, why should one study computing?  If the employer will take on an IT support operative who has no qualifications but whom is handy with a screw driver and knows how to plug the right parts of a PC together, then why should they bother to get formal qualifications?

Ultimately, for computing to be taken seriously, you need a passion for it, you also however need a reason to study it, and until that reason exists in the form of accessible all tier jobs that actually require a formal computing qualification there is little hope in pushing back up the chain to educators or government that computing is important and needs to be studied.

People : Some Life Advice (Reading)

My grandfather was quite a serious fellow, an absolutely lovely fellow, he was a (or even "the") chief quarter master for the Royal Mail in Nottinghamshire before he retired.  However, a mere five years, after he retired he had a diagnosis of lung cancer and was dead shortly thereafter.  The first major figure in my life to pass away.

I was eighteen, had just started university, and being honest with myself it affected me deeply, both personally, mentally and spiritually.  Personally as my mother then assumed she was the helmsman of the family, never have I seen the monkey leading the organ grinder more ineffectually.  Then mentally, he was gone, the one great intellectual figure in my life was gone.

His intellectual influence was deeper on me today than perhaps I ever realised, I remember when I was around three or four he showed me how to write the figure 8.  I distinctly remember his being behind me, his affirmative arms either side of me as he intoned an 8 before me, and I copied.  There was always paper to doodle on and pens in a draw, they were the main "play thing" of a wet or dank day, of which there are many in Britain.

He taught me to pronounce things, and to this day I can slap on a lovely accented English, very polite, which he taught me; and which my wife adores when I use it within a telephone conversation.  It empowers me to escape my strong, rough, Nottingham accent whenever I wish, both are part of me, one through nature the other nurture.

I also remember his buying books, or handing me books, the first I remember were the complete Encyclopedia Britannica, a lovely red leather bound set; which must have cost a fortune in the early 1980's; I'd sit and paw over these pages for hours, years later I remember some kid at school going on about French writers, I instantly named Victor Hugo... Thanks to those hours spent with my nose in a book.  Kids today can look things up instantly with the internet, but watch out for the kid who avidly reads anything, they might just be expressing their interests early.

Another day he handed me a huge book, it was a cheat book, with every answer to most all the crossword questions of the day, he was teaching me a lesson... You could sit and think about the intricate layout of the crossword, how things meet, depart and conjoin.  However, you could also just get the bloody answer.  This has become a massive power for me, I feel enabled, even if I don't know anything about a topic, or it's currently not on my mental radar, it is but a quick read away.

I know this, I'm sure reading this, you know it too.  However, how many people out there look at someone judge them and then think they can't do the same as them?  I'd suggest a lot of them do... When really they might just need to read the right book, or take the right advice, don't close yourself off from these people, embrace them, help them, let them help you too.

Reaching Out & Being Pushed Back

I've spent the last few days talking to a few companies I'd love to partner with, to bring you more reviews.  Now, on the internet we already have a lot of gaming related or performance reviews, but I was inspired more about the idea of working environment, development cycles, or throughput for the worker.

I'm interested in things like cables, drives, storage, cases and also the main centre piece of your working time, the machine itself.

I tried to speak to Intel, and was given a pretty flat "you're too small"... Believe it or not, 400,000 of you have passed through these pages in the six years they've been running (thank you so much), and by far the most popular posts are my programming tutorials, followed closely by the reviews.

Combining the two, could only be a win-win situation!

I have today therefore, sent missives to AMD, Asus and nVidia.  I've also sent online messages to some smaller storage firms, like Xstra in the EU and Kingpin.

It is actually quite hard to find UK based reviews of items, often you can be watching coverage of some great ideas from US sources, only to find either the items are not available or they cost an absolute fortune compared to US prices.

What else am I up to this week?... Well, I had a long researched article in the fire, it was related to my uncovering of several cheaters on US based IT courses, at least the US students were the only ones silly enough to get caught by myself.  However, during my uncovering of this situation one of the colleges in question took extreme exception to my posting about their students activities, and they slapped me with a "cease & desist" order.

Their order only covers publishing any names in the US, but my problem is, I can't prove conclusively who the students in question were, so if only one person out of a class of 29 were cheating in the manner I uncovered, then by just posting the name of the course or college, I would be defaming the innocent twenty nine; not something I want to do at all.

So, for now that article, as interesting as it was is on hiatus, and I can only thank the other three colleges and lecturers whom got back to me, however briefly, for your time and frank disclosures.

Story Time - The A3000 Break-in (My Story of Computing at pre-GCSE Level)

Yes, I'm going to tell a story again, this one pertains to my early teens, when at School I really discovered coding computers.  I went to a state Comprehensive, not a bad one, but not a fabulous one, named for the council estate I grew up on it was nothing special.  But in 1990 it was one of the first schools to start shedding it's older BBC Micro's for Acorn Archimedes Computers.

These caught my attention as just a couple of years earlier I had my Atari ST, my brother and I picked the ST because our cousin had one, and he got all the pirated games available, so we had that and loved it, but until after college I never really programmed it, the Archimedes at school however, they had a programming language built in... they had BBC Basic, just as the Micro's before had.

I also knew they were this "RISC" thing, which was big news in the 90's it was going to revolutionise computing, by making things easier and simpler to code.  "Reduced Instruction Set" after all, sounded simpler!

However, when it came time to pick my GCSE options I took one look at the IT (now called Information Communication Technology - ICT) syllabus and thought it a load of crap.  Who wanted to learn about Ceefax, or weather, or news broadcasts, I wanted to sit at the computer and pick through it's electrons.

So, I avoided ICT and IT, and went onto other things, as the years went on however, they moved two of the science rooms from old labs on the third floor down into another block, and in the vacant rooms they had nice power strung around the walls and they installed a suite of new Archimedes 3000 computers, with 2MB of RAM!...

I remember being entranced by these machines, they had the same form factor as my ST, but I only had 512K of RAM, with 2MB of RAM and a built in OS which was much more full featured than GEM was, I got to grips with these things quickly.  Not that I ever ever had a simple lesson with them... Oh no, because, I used to sneak in there.

I would actively bunk off of Physics and go into this often empty computer suite, I soon found built into the machine a RAM disk, so I could put 512K of ram aside as a disk!... And the speed of that was phenomenal!  Ensuring I had a script to write my files back to my disk, and then another script on another disk to load the RAM disk and copy the files in, I had a basic "boot & sync" mechanism such as many USB sticks come with today, but this was in 1991, on 2MB of RAM using 3.5" 720K DS DD Floppy disks!

Pretty soon I had a whole troop of school friends who would bunk off to the computer lab with me, Daniel, Nicola, Tracey, even the most buttoned down hard working lad in our shared physics class Gurpal bunked off to the Computer Lab with us.

I also used my ST at home for reports, especially doing Integrated Humanities, so I would be given permission from that teacher, to go write up my report on the Computers, it was only a text file so it worked a treat copying the data on and off the disk, even if it was formatted for my ST, the ST, IBM PC and Acorn machines could all read one another's disks... Unlike those poor Amiga Schmucks who had to jump through hoops to get their machines to change the disk idents and headers (yes, yes this was a dig - Atari Forever, Amiga Never - hehe).

Anyhew, leading this rag tag bunch, and exploring the inner workings of these Acorn A3000's one day I was found, in the supposedly locked room, by a teacher, I think his name was Atherton, he was a strange one, but what strikes me now is the manner of his reaction, he asked what I was doing, he saw the pages of code, he saw my sync program as I desperately tried to move the RAM disk back into the safe storage of the floppy, because he had his finger on the master trip switch - the teachers, if they caught you playing a game, or messing around had a tactic; and on machines without hard-drives this was perfectly sound; of hitting the master trip to isolate the power to the bench ring supplying the computers, everyones machine went dead and they had you bang to rights with a game disk in the machine.

This teacher however had the nous to see this wasn't a game, but he was only ICT syllabus trained, he had no idea what I was doing, or the power of the machines on these desks, he thought of them as a teaching aid, not a gateway to the future I now have as a programmer.

I explained I was coding, and I just said "I have a machine at home", and this is where the strangeness began, he assumed I meant an A3000 or similar, which were expensive back then, my Atari was not cheap, but it was already nearing five years old, the A3000 was brand new on the market, and cost nearly £800 each.  He'd not found me playing, it looked like work, he didn't know what code looked like.  Quite a damning statement for a school with him as the lead of IT subjects, with this fancy new computer suite, in the dawning of the 90's where the digital age and computers were fast on the ascendancy.

But he really had no clue, his punishment... yes, there I said it, rather than ask, or encourage me, or see what I was up to and realise I knew more about the computers than he did, he decided not to encourage, or help - which tells you a lot about that teacher - he decided I'd done wrong, being in the computer lab without permission.  So his punishment was... Well it was weird.

I don't think he believed I had one of those machines at home, so to challenge me, he locked the lab - stopping me getting into them - and he took me to his office, where he handed me a copy of Lemmings, yes the compute game... And a pack of 10 blank disks... He made me sign for the disks... And he said "Copy that disk onto all those disks"...

Yes, copyright theft via pirating was to be my punishment... I didn't know what he wanted the copies for, there was no internet, so no e-bay, so I guess he couldn't sell the copies... Maybe he had a class to show a game to, ironic considering the stance the school took for having games on machines etc.

So, off I went, I got home and spent a good hour copying these disks, it took ages on a 512K ST, you had to read the first half of the disk into RAM, then write it out, then read the second half in, and write it out, it was one of those tedious tasks, and I'm pretty sure even today my muscle memory is enough to let me swap disks onto the side slot mounted drive of the ST or Acorn machines at speed.

Anyway, with five disks done, we had to go out training that evening, so in the morning I had only half the task done and this bizarre punishment still at hand... My solution was easy, there were two ways into the computer lab at school, the first was through the door, the second was via an English classroom, into the store cupboard at the back, and then on my hands and knees through the floor level vent, this led into the store room in the computer lab, if it's door was unlocked I could get back in...

It would be risky, but I entered the English classroom before the first bell, and moved a pile of books out from under a table to expose the vent, unscrewed it and moved it aside, then found two T ring binder clips and hooked them through the vent, climbed through and pulled the vent back into place from the other side.

Dusting myself down it was pitch black, so I moved slowly with my feet trying to find the door and not hit anything, finding the handle I turned and it opened, thank god!  Because to go back out now would look very dodgy, as the English classroom had resumed.

I quickly fired on the power and brought the nearest five machines up, and started then making copies of the copies I already had.  It was an agonizing two or more minutes to copy the files into RAM, but the machines had RAM enough to hold the whole disk, so I just had to do one mass swap and press Space to continue.

Writing the files back out was even slower, and made more noise, suddenly I heard a key rattle in the door, someone was coming in... I ducked back into the store cupboard, as a teacher came in, a women, she spread out a group of first years to each machine, except the five which were on, thank goodness...

I decided to play it casual, I rattled a few things and emerged from the cupboard, "Morning Miss"... And I just got on with my machines, she didn't even ask why I was there, as I collected up my five disks, and she never queried why I was in the room with a locked door.  I don't think she had the nous.

Anyway, I had my booty, the ten copies, plus the original, and I went off to hand them into the bloke before break - which was his deadline - I knocked on his door and handed them over, he had a class so could not really talk to me, but he did ask - "Did that take long?", "yes Sir", "Let that be a lesson to you"...

You know, to this day, I'm not sure what lesson he was trying to teach, I look back on using 3.5" floppies with a nostalgia, and I look back on that day the sheer balls I had to get away with using the lab, now locked, and their attitude, it stank... They should have encouraged me, I'd have been somewhere other than I was, my skills and fluency with a computer were delays reaching my education by at least three years, I didn't learn anything more than BASIC and the prompting shell script languages until I learned my first 3rd Generation High Level Language (PASCAL) at college.

By then the internet revolution was burning it's way through the stock markets, but I always think, I could have been writing tools I use and wrote five years later that little bit earlier, I could have had an easier time at college and university by earning cash from the tools I had, or even giving them away to make a name or addition for my CV.