Today promised to be the best weather all week–hot but dry, so we put the “Q” tandem on top of the car and headed to Middleton’s Quisling Park, the western terminus of the Pheasant Branch trail system.  The short and fast paved trail meandered along the creek, first through commercial parks on the prairie, then diving and twisting down through a wooded run, ending at a nature conservancy, where the trails were crushed limestone, so we turned around.

The trip back was not as steep as it seemed, so we made good time, and took a couple of side trails a short distance.  On the trail paralleling US 12 West, we were overtaken by a legless man in a racing wheelchair, who was continuing north, while we turned around at the Airport Road.   Another side trail led to the Costco parking lot, but we didn’t have enough cargo space to do our shopping today, so we returned to the main trail and continued on, making a few parking lot loops at the end of the trail to reach our distance goal for the day, 16 km.

In the afternoon, we drove south to the village of Oregon, to meet our grandson after school.  We went for coffee to the Firefly Coffeehouse, one of our favorite anywhere in the country.  CJ was anxious to show us his computer work, after introducing us to his YouTube channel, where he posts videos of games he is working on.  He’s a beta tester for a 2D game and also works on the Wiki to explain tips and tricks of the evolving game, working closely with the designer/programmer.

Somehow, we let ourselves be talked into entering the XBox360 world of Minecraft.  I generally avoid video games altogether, being satisfied with a limited range of what used to be board games–cards, tiles, word and number puzzles, etc.  But, it was important to him to share, so we grasped the ears of the very unfamiliar controller and got quickly sucked into the game grid.  After a brief, on the move introduction, we deduced that the buttons and toggles on the controller consisted of thumb controls for tilt-and-pan and left-right-forward-back, with some sort of switch action, four mode switches, which controlled vertical jumps, switching between first-person and third-person point of view, and other functions we didn’t get.  There are also four  finger switches on the top of the controller that performed actions, like striking and picking up and putting down objects, which ended up in various inventory displays at the top or bottom of the screen.

Sitting close to his large monitor, first-person POV became immersive, with a feeling of moving clumsily through a strange world with a limited field of view and physics that didn’t work quite right, but could be compensated for fairly quickly.  Nevertheless, our first foray into Minecraft consisted primarily of finding shelter and hunkering down, avoiding traps and pitfalls on the way.  Not very exciting for a 13-year old, but he was happy that we at least tried and managed to keep our characters alive (but not without help).

We got into a discussion of programming (he does mostly Javascript, probably due to lack of tools for other languages), inevitably leading to the subject of Linux.  He asked how I came to Linux, and I had to explain that I worked with similar systems before, had built a Linux computer as soon as it had become somewhat functional, and earned a living managing large Linux systems and installations for nearly 20 years.  With the hint that, while Microsoft owns the game world, with Windows and XBox the primary gaming platforms, Linux powers the Internet, we may be able to wean him from the Dark Side yet.

Dinner out, a dog walk, and more gaming demos kept us out very late, for a school night, so we left him with a promise of more time over the weekend.