On the first day of school, my oldest child had a book report ready to go for her teacher. She used her iPad and typed it up. It has a cover page with a rating and it’s in a nice folder she spent her own money on.
My first thought when she was showing it off to me was that my kid is a nerd and she’s in for teasing at school once she’s in Middle School. I thought that when she complains about it I’ll be there for her, but realize that she is a nerd.
In my running group, we chuckled a bit at my daughter being a nerd with her book report.
The thing is, I write book reports regularly and publish them for everyone to see. I make videos about them in addition to writing them. I earn money each month from these activities and people thank me for sharing my reads in addition to tech content. When I’ve talked about reading as many books as I do and writing about them with other adults, they’re impressed that I read that much and express a desire to be a person that can do the same.
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At some point, the same behaviour turned from “nerdy” and less desirable into something that others look at fondly.
The same thing happened with the computer ‘nerds’. When I was in high school it was not cool to be a computer programming. Playing console games was fine, but when I said I networked a few computers in my house so we could play Starcraft together I was a nerd. I was pushed outside the “cool” group because I was a nerd.
At some point, this mentality has changed. The computer club at a local high school is a spot that the coolest kids hang out working on apps for their phones. Many people say that everyone should learn to code because it’s a vital life skill and it’s cool if you can build yourself stuff that you’re interested in.
The point is…none. I was thinking about this and thought I’d share it because…it’s my newsletter.
## I Shipped
Monday I put together a video on how to [build Project Templates in TickTick with Shortcuts](https://curtismchale.ca/2020/09/07/task-and-project-templates-in-ticktick). Yes, TickTick does have a built-in template system, but it doesn’t match at all with how I want to deal with tasks.
Wednesday I reviewed the [ProCase iPad Pro keyboard case](https://curtismchale.ca/2020/09/09/procase-ipad-pro-2018-2020-keyboard-case). The case is decent in the protection front, but the keyboard is terrible.
Today I did a video of my [first impressions of ClickUp](https://curtismchale.ca/2020/09/11/clickup-quick-look-and-first-impressions). The iPad app is…only okay and when I tried it I couldn’t sign up from the iPad app. Then the site always wanted to push me to the app so I had to delete it to even sign up. There are some interesting things about ClickUp, but it won’t be pulling me in.