I love this quote: "It is not that difficult to get involved (i.e. with OLPC); it is DIFFICULT to get UNINVOLVED" when Tony Anderson spoke in an interview at Linux Tag, Berlin in 2013. With that I insight hope to unwind (or detOX) myself for the coming Mid-Autumn Festival. I will try to stare up into the moon these few days for some inspiration and to remind myself that it is the worth being a volunteer for a good cause.
As a child during mid-autumn festival, playing with lanterns allowed us to understand fire, candles and its hazard. If you are not careful one's dream lantern can go up in flames and smoke! This permissive playtime left deep memories and excitement to millions of Chinese children in Asia and China. You learn when you can follow on curiosities. Bamboo can be sliced thinly nto strips, to CREATE beautiful lighted lanterns that you can carry and walk in the dark with family and friends. My family had a special trolley double rotating lantern with flapping butterfly wings. The wings flap and the double round lanterns spin accompanied by a synchronized mechanical metal drumming as we pushed it along while walking. Yes, it has primitive pully gears and mechanical design system that you can investigate and study. Like the full moon it is visible to inspire!
Today children play with plastic inflated "hello kitty" lantern. It is safe and battery operated. Play with it but don't keep it since the next year model would be more contemporary or cooler (e.g. iron man design lanterns). This is the SAME trend that we see today in the digital gadgets world; and sadly we may be shutting open doors on growing children. For example, I guess I am not able to peep into the source codes of the recent OLPC XO learning tablet to build my personalized dream. Hence the current XO-1 to XO-4 is still appealing to me (despite not knowing to program codes) after the many years! Will the XO fade away?
Lets hope we will get enough diverse voices in November basecamp2013 to discuss how the XO is still a long-life awesome machine that is ideal for children - under the full moon by the Malacca river!
A Happy Mid-Autumm Festival
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