Gather round and old man Phrontist will tell you a story:
About 4 years ago I had just moved from Kent Island Maryland to Falls Church Virginia. Before I moved, I ordered “Learning Perl” from Amazon and had it sent to my new house. I had done a lot of javascript and such, but now I was learning a “Real Language.”
I remember being so excited about my programming Perl, and all the cool stuff one could do so easily with it (I was 11, give me a break ;)). I went to google and typed in “Cool Uses For Perl” and lo and behold there was a site called Perlmonks with a section by this very name. I was hooked, and I quickly registered as “beretboy”. On this website I often proclaimed I was the youngest member, and one day someone responded with roughly this:
“Are you younger then srawls?”
And then something magical happened (que cheesy hallmark music.) This guy had a picture (see link) of himself surrounded by fine ladies at robotics competition.
Needless to say, this blew my mind, but I promptly forgot about it, assuming it was too good to be true.
Then a few months later, WIRED ran an article about this wild guy called Dean Kamen. He started this FIRST thing. Woah, very cool.
So fast-foward a few years and I’m in a lego mindstorms summer camp (which I hated BTW), and the mentor there told me that if Iwas interested in this kind of thing I should sign my teacher up for a robotics mailing list. I did, and about a year later Mr.Ballou started team #1418.
Just a few moments ago I saw this post. In it, mtrawls links to perlmonks.
Picture the thoughts in my head:
Perlmonks: Srawls, that guy who unknowingly created by FIRST team
CD: Mtrawls, a fellow admin on FIRSTwiki
Gasp! Could it be?
Well if it is true, that the two “rawls” are one in the same, I’d like to thank mtrawls.
Well, thought everyone might find that amusing.
No? Well bah! I don’t care. I thought it was neat