After using Namecheap, Godaddy and a number of others I have settled on Gandi because I find their whole attitude great. I really appreciate the way they dont try and upsell... ever. And a while ago they did a promotion where they gave out a free domain for every year you had been a customer. I believe they really do care about their customers and it shows in the way they do business and how they get out of your way until you need them.
My experience with IT education in the UK is genuinely atrocious. During secondary school we made a spreadsheet in Excel and a couple of Word documents. The closest thing to programming was a picture of traffic lights we had to "programmatically" operate. For a single hour lesson. And that is it. We were lucky if our computers even turned on.
The problem is that teachers are often completely computer-illiterate. This is a chicken-and-egg problem; you won't teach proper, interesting computing activities without competent teachers.
Although true in general, some subset of students will figure out interesting things, and then show them to others, if you at least put them in an environment where that's possible. My middle-school computing class was not particularly well taught, but the curriculum included a few simple things in Hypercard, and Hypercard was the kind of environment where students who finished the official assignments early could find all sorts of other cool things to do in it.
That does also require having free time. There's a trend lately towards assuming that any free time students have is wasted time in which they could be learning instead of goofing off, which I'm not sure is the right way to look at it.
We programmed abstract data structures in Pascal. I think we implemented quicksort. I guess I was lucky?
Fun story: The first time I was truly speechless in CS in high school was when my teacher, looking at my code, told me that, for a boolean variable foo, it's not necessary or reasonable to write
IF foo = TRUE THEN // whatever; "=" is comparison in Pascal BTW
but rather you can just write
IF foo THEN // whatever
It seems trivial, even stupid now, but at the time it was an eye-opener.
I find it very anti-intellectual when people call others snobs for appreciating art. There's nothing snobbish about learning about or appreciating conceptual art. People who don't care enough to learn about something find that they do not undertand it, conclude that it must be phoney or fake or for snobs.
Although I no longer use it, I learned to program with ActionScript. I studied art and had no background in programming, but I found it fun to play with Flash and AS. For example, getting a webcam involved is a couple of lines of code. Now you can do basic motion detection and all kinds of cool stuff. It is a good way to learn programming as everything is included in one package. You can use the Flash GUI to make a simple interface for your application.
Wouldn't that just be a straight up design/branding firm?
It is far easier to pick a random name and match it with some random generic branding, than to be given MySpecificProduct.com and build a brand around that. Branding companies charge a lot of money because it (generally) takes a lot of time, effort and expertise to build good brands.
There is also the fact that it would become a designer-client relationship than a merchant-customer one. Clients get to dictate what they want (to a certain extent), customers see what they are getting before they buy. What if they built a brand around MySpecificProduct.com and you didn't like it?
