What is a Pacesetter, and are they ~ still setting the pace for LIFE?

Funny thing --a past and what it means to your future.  I know mine was impacted that fateful day my parents dropped me off at Hamilton Park Elementary School.   Just a few month earlier something new called a Magnet school opened and certain type of parent overdrive must have kicked in because before I knew it,  me and a couple of my friends are heading to a place called Hamilton Park.

Hamilton Park Pacesetter Magnet opened in 1975, with Bobcats setting the pace as successful academic and social role models; the school made national news and was toured, studied and emulated by other districts in the nation. Link 

Since my mother had been a volunteer leader in South Oak Cliff, Dallas the prospect of attending Hamilton Park wasn't that daunting and or it's the fact that I have the gene that say sure jumping off the roof, waterfall, or business cliff is a perfectly reasonable thing to do.  So I was able to jump in and become part of this amazing community. Stating with being part of the best brass section a 6th grade band  (our version of Roller Coast was the epic ) ever fielded*  to seeing sports and life played out from a perspective that was totally different from my local community and invited to me at the same time.

However ! the most important event for me was the introduction to computers.  I can still remember it like yesterday.  We were all cued up in the hallway and given such a run down of dos and don't that walking into the "Computer room"  was kind of sacred ~at least to me..

BTW the mixed up image of or line nerds, cowboys and urban kids was funny and yes there were a couple a girls including my friend Mary. 

I can still remember being seated at terminals-- I believe hooked up to processor running Texas Instruments new TMS9900 which ironically was heralded as the lynchpin for TI's  new thrust into  - distributed computing;  So sure why not add working/hacking one of the first distributed computers to my list LOL which brings me back to this post.

There are many things I've done in my life ( who knows a book one day may be in order) and  unequivocally I can say that being introduce to computer at the age of 12, almost a decade before most of my peers , gave me the ability to view the role and impact of computers that I don't think too many others can claim and for me what I see today is the same thing I feel way back in 1975.  Computers are an extension of us and helpful to understanding that hacking them or us is a matter of perspective

So getting this High Five from one of my fellow Geeklist especially Dan is a real treat because now having worked with Dan on the last #Hack4Good and now #OpenGoodHacks I can see in him and many others the spirit of discovering what we can do together and having shared this connecting with him over a distributed (now called the Cloud) network is totally fitting if not fated.   So let's just say it made my day and gave me something to blog about here.  

Good on Dan.