My inner MIT geek

The last two days I've been channeling my inner MIT geek. And I wasn't much of one before. But "even" a stay-at-home mom needs to feel not just smart, but intellectual once in a while.

I saw an article on Yahoo! News about attending MIT for free. They were talking about the MIT OpenCourseWare Consortium where all of their course materials are online. I took a look at a couple of my "favorites". I didn't install or really look at the courseware yet. I just looked around at descriptions and titles and was seeing if I could understand any of it anymore.

Then I got the latest issue of the MIT Technology Review magazine. Both Tom and I have remarked about how interesting it is. Honestly, I never really got the big picture of technology while I was at MIT. Or maybe I've matured and seen how innovation can help people who were beyond just my calling at the time. The magazine makes MIT much more cool than I knew when I was there.

Anyway, I read this issue with interest because in the class notes I actually wrote in to update what I've been doing in the last 8 years since the last time I wrote in. And when I read the actual articles, a Q&A with the inventor of C++ as well as an article about some dude at Microsoft and his idea about meta and intentional programming got me entranced in the magazine. Especially with the intentional programming, it wasn't like I thought it was the coolest innovation -- it's still vague to me and some of the ways he was explaining things still made me think, do people really need this?

But it made me feel intellectual to read these articles and be able to understand them (don't ask me about nanotechnology articles though -- whoosh! -- way over my head), all while Tobey ate 2nd breakfast and played next to me with his space shuttle toys. And what person who chases after a 3.5 and 1.5 year old all day, talking about garbage trucks, interpreting traffic signs and picking up thrown food, who of us wouldn't like to feel intellectual every once in a while.