{"id":70,"date":"2002-11-12T17:13:44","date_gmt":"2002-11-12T22:13:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.alevin.com\/?p=70"},"modified":"2002-11-12T17:13:44","modified_gmt":"2002-11-12T22:13:44","slug":"at-the-bookstore","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/?p=70","title":{"rendered":"At the bookstore&#8230;."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&#8230; this afternoon, looking for a book on Perl, for some weekend entertainment that I&#8217;ll tell you about if and when it&#8217;s closer to working.<br \/>\nIn the computer aisle, a retired gentleman approached me and asked me for advice. He did some hobbyist programming in BASIC 20 years ago, balancing his checkbook and doing calculations for a rather complicated-sounding home construction project (had to do with calculating the fluid volume in pipes).<br \/>\nHe wanted to do some programming as mental exercise, and asked what I would recommend. I showed him the Microsoft VBasic.NET books, and Python, and PERL. Then I described the <a href=http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/exec\/obidos\/ASIN\/0262062003\/jigzawinc-20>Computational Beauty of Nature<\/a>, and his eyes lit up.<br \/>\nThat was a good &#8220;neighbor moment.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8230; this afternoon, looking for a book on Perl, for some weekend entertainment that I&#8217;ll tell you about if and when it&#8217;s closer to working. In the computer aisle, a retired gentleman approached me and asked me for advice. He did some hobbyist programming in BASIC 20 years ago, balancing his checkbook and doing calculations &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/?p=70\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;At the bookstore&#8230;.&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-70","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/prDRq-18","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=70"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=70"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=70"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=70"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}