STRAY neuron

My oldest kid, a 2nd grader, has started taking some (group) piano classes on a trial basis.

She seems to enjoy it a lot, so I bought her a 5-octave keyboard, a stand and a seat - a $300+ investment.

As it happens, I played piano for 11 years as a kid, so this has also provided the motivation for me pick it up again.

I’ve been YouTube’ing a lot for some good riffs to play and I ran into this video - while I can’t even imagine attempting to play the piece, watching one of the greatest pianists in history, Oscar Peterson, is still a phenomenal and inspiring experience.

I tried out a new video mixing service, Animoto, tonight.

I have it to give it very high marks for ease of use, because even my first video (created during “So You Think You Can Dance” commercials) came out way better than I expected.

One of the (many fruitless) ideas I kicked around in the past has been a website for helping kids with learning to read.

It seemed to me that no one had solved this problem very well in the cyberspace, and as a parent of a 5-year old I was pretty frustrated with that.

Couple of days ago, my buddy Shawn pointed out starfall.com, which has surpassed all my expectations and goes way beyond anything I imagined building. Macromedia Flash really does seem to be the best tool for the job (as well as one missing from my toolbox).

My daughter absolutely adores starfall - if you have a young one in the 4-7 bracket you might want to check it out.

Name: Derek Kaczmarczyk
Hometown: Chicago, IL

I want to be able to find myself in Google BlogSearch
:)