33 years ago, on an Atari 800 my Dad bought us. Learned BASIC from the books with program listings of games that you had to type in. All of them were for other flavors of BASIC, so had to modify them for the Atari. Then went in and modified the games to make them more fun or challenging.
Went from that to Pascal, to C, to Assembly, back to C/C++, then Java. Was still developing in Java until about 5 years ago, when I migrated over to "Architect" roles. Have since toyed in both Ruby/Rails and Python on side projects to keep from getting too rusty and to learn something new.
what, no Crash Bandicoot jokes yet? I'm actually surprised they didn't mention that on the About page in some fashion, given how much overlap there is between the hacker and gaming communities.
Agreed about the large accumulations. I was more thinking about the smaller ones that leave a thin coating - we seem to get those once or twice a year. With the asphalt, we can just wait until the sun has been up for an hour or two and melted them off.
One thing to keep in mind about the white pavement - it will take longer for snow and ice to melt off of them, which means more equipment/salt/chemicals to clear them. Granted, in warmer climates it probably isn't as much of a concern, but after the mess we've had in Atlanta for the last week it is still a factor.
One big difference between PayPal and Google Checkout has to do with your users signing up for an account on their system. For Google Checkout, your users will also need to have a Google Checkout id before they can complete a payment. On PayPal Website Payments Standard (and I believe Pro as well) they can pay by credit card without being forced to create a PayPal account or log in to PayPal itself.
no problem. What you have now looks good, so you may not need it unless/until you do a redesign.
They basically have a set of predefined CSS classes for layouts to give you a starting point. Blueprint and some of the others also have a default set of styles predefined, and you can find several examples of people who have added to them. It basically gave me a good starting point instead of having to hack up my own CSS from the start.
They also claim to help resolve several of the CSS differences between browsers, but I haven't tested that first hand yet.
Very nice. I'm impressed with turning that out in four weeks based on starting with no programming/html knowledge. As far as the CSS goes, one thing that helped me was using one of the many CSS frameworks out there. You might try that if you run into more issues going forward. I'm using blueprint for now, but there are several out there to choose from.
Teach them how to solve problems, and how to work through getting stuck. I've seen lots of kids (and adults) who give up when they can't figure something out right away or get it to work the first time. Learning how to work through this will certainly help once you are ready to introduce more IT specific knowledge, but will be invaluable in several aspects of their life.
We were hosted at QTS for a little over three years. They are excellent - they were extremely helpful and knowledgeable, problems were very rare and were resolved quickly when they did occur. Much better than the hosting company we were at before them. Only reason we moved out is that we were bought and parent company owns two data centers with spare capacity.