

Show HN: How I Spent My Last Few Weekends - jason_slack

My 12-year old son and I are die hard Apple fans. He lives for everything Apple. His life's ambition is to be CEO of Apple someday. Steve Jobs and Bertrand Serlet are his idols. Can anyone else imagine that now-a-days instead of sports heros kids have entrepreneurs as idols? I am stoked.<p>They also say the best way to learn something new is to do a personal project of interest.<p>To this effect I spent the last few weekends putting together a new Apple Fan website. There is a lot more to come! Videos, Pictures and so much more. We have about 60gb of raw content to get up to the site.<p>Currently there are a number of videos broken into categories.<p>Some things I learned so far:
- HTML5 video element is very cool.
- Browsers handle video differently.
- Video encoding is a very deep and involved topic to learn.
- There is a new WebM format I need to work with.<p>Some Items I am researching to learn:
- Ngix vs Apache
- CouchDB vs MySQL
- Moving to Ruby on Rails.
- Google Page Speed
- memcachd<p>I would love feedback so I can learn and enhance.<p>The website is at: http://6colors.net
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revorad
I don't mean to be cynical but it might be more constructive to make your son
a fan of technology and design, rather than a corporation. If Woz's or Jobs's
ambitions were to be CEO of HP or IBM, we'd never have Apple.

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tgrass
As a parent, I'd argue that one can't 'make' a child a fan of anything.

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runjake
For a classic example as to how this statement is completely wrong, I invite
you to Google or Wikipedia "Prussian Blue".

Kids are (by design) impressionable and easily indoctrinated into any scheme.

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jason_slack
Agreed. He loves Apple and entrepreneurship because I do and I always have. He
will probably never be an employee of a company because he already wants to do
his own thing.

He hires his brother and sister to do his chores for a fraction of what he
wants to get paid for them. Pays them and pockets the rest. He saved and
bought his own iPad in July and is now saving for a new AppleTV and Mac Mini.
Apparently his MacBook Pro is not good enough.. _sigh_

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tgrass
Son's homework: find ten sites he thinks look cool. Working with him, pick a
single feature from each site then the two of you should detail what makes it
look cool, and then devise a plan to implement it on your site.

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jason_slack
Yes, Very good idea. This is sort of how this whole endeavor got started was
he would be searching over and over to find Apple items of interest and he was
like I wish there was one place to go....He was very involved in the UI design
and testing. Coding is hard for him as he really go back to the design
elements first....

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arn
I guess if learning is your goal, then have at it. But, I think the none of
those technologies are really the next step. Next step is to build
content/traffic to the point you might need to look at alternative
technologies.

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jason_slack
Good point. Thank for reminding me I might want users first.

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runjake
Apple != Steve Jobs. Has it already been long enough that we don't remember
the post/pre-Steve Jobs Apple of the 1990s?

Maybe I'm a pessimist, but I don't look forward to Post-Jobs Apple v2.

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jason_slack
True. I do recall the days of Michael Spindler and Gil Amelio

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jason_slack
FYI: There may be some IE issues as I have not tested a single drop with it
yet.

