While yesterday I had never heard of this girl, today I got up praying that she would be ok, and overjoyed that she has been found alive. For anybody who hasn’t followed the story, she is a 16 year old from California who has been attempting to set the world record for youngest solo sail around the world.
I’ve also read many articles today about the story, which show that public sentiment is clearly against the parents right now. The majority of people think the Sunderlands must be nuts, and that they are willfully endangering the life of their child.
So on the one hand, it is ok to send 18 year olds off to war, or off to colleges like the University of Virginia where that lacrosse player was so hideously murdered by a guy on the boy’s team, but to allow your 16 year old daughter to undertake this incredibly bold adventure which she has trained for years to do, can only be nuts.
I think a huge problem in our society is actually the opposite: the overprotection and low expectations placed on teens, along with the supposed “right of passage” that kids are somehow supposed to go off to college and party their brains out for the first year or two, and come out unscathed and more “grown up”. The idea that young adults are too young and dumb to bear any real responsibility, or to understand risk, is a dangerous mindset that helps create a culture of irresponsible and morally bankrupt young adults.
Anybody reading the tech news lately has read all about the feud between Apple and Adobe; or Apple’s recent decision to make any software made for their iPhone or iPad via 3rd party software development tools like Adobe’s Flash – a violation of their terms of service.
Whatever lame arguments Apple has offered – that Flash is too “buggy” to work on the iPhone or iPad, that Adobe is “lazy” and refuses to correct obvious bugs in their software, etc – are all pretty bogus compared to their main objective, which is to crush Adobe.
After struggling with Powerpoint and Captivate for a while, I got my slideshow finished :) It’s just 1 of a slew of things I’m trying to get ready, including a universal login so that people can do a free week trial from Facebook, AOL, Google, Yahoo, etc, and then of course I have to get way more of my actual content into the system – which is really just a several week preview of what’s to come at this point. But progress feels good! Our Teacher Parent Admin is coming this week as well, it’s almost finished, and already up on our developmental server in testing mode.
Well my hope to be online and live already has of course turned into a mere fantasy, as a few tiny glitches kept me waiting for our lead programmer Ben to fix them up before actually adding students to our app and doing a semi official “launch.” The good news is that Ben worked overtime last night and eradicated a couple of the key problems, as well as adding some further interaction between my membership script (Easy Members Pro) and our Flex/GAE e-learning app. When I tell people I’ve been working on a piece of software for nearly a year, they tend to say “hey cool” and then proceed to give me a perplexed look, like they don’t even know what that means. Try using the word RIA on your family members around the Xmas table – you’ll find none of them have a clue what this means :)
Ay caramba it’s been way, way too long! Somehow between burying myself in the biggest software and authoring project of my life, and having not 1 but TWO toddlers (15 months and just a few months shy of 3…) – I’ve been in what would best be described as a constant state of chaos.
My backlog of email is unimaginable; tomorrow I’ll dive in headfirst to see what all I have missed. I have a lot of things I’ve thought about writing about lately. On the technical side, my love of Dos Batch programming! On the family front, a miraculous story of survival against bacterial meningitis on the part of my sister in law. On the language development front, my perplexed and delighted reaction as my son begins to consistently choose the “correct” words when confronted with a babyish word he’s heard way more often…on the childcare front, deciding that I’d rather get up 3 or even 4 hours earlier, and work before they get up, than sacrifice that time with my kids (not a judgement on childcare by any means, after 5 months or so my lady got another job and the getting up early was at first going to be temporary, but ended up working even better than having her).
Don’t know if I have any other fellow moms out there reading the blog, but just in case I thought I’d post a complaint about losing baby weight! :) These images of celebrities and others who seem to lose that weight within a month of giving birth have a tendency to make the rest of us feel like we must be the only ones who just can’t seem to shake the weight off without a fight.
Living in Alaska, the winters can be downright depressing. The sun doesn’t even get up until around 10am, and trying to leave the house with 2 kids under 2 is always a cold and often wet…
I’m trying to figure out how to post streaming music here that wouldn’t violate any copyrights. I’m sure there are 10 ways to do this, I just have to find the best one! My son loves “Soy un Sabordín” by Marco Hernandez and I’d love to post it here for people to hear.
The magnitude-5.7 earthquake that shook late sleepers awake in Anchorage on Saturday morning also sent fragile artwork in the artsy community of Homer -- much closer to the epicenter -- teetering toward the brink.
The earthquake struck Southcentral Alaska at 9:09 a.m. near the mouth of Cook Inlet, about 50 miles southwest of Homer and about 62 miles deep, according to the Alaska Earthquake Information Center.
That’s actually the title of a book I read a while ago – I can’t remember if I read it while living in Buenos Aires, or right after I returned. In any case I do recall thinking that the author’s points were hilarious and pinpoint accurate on some things, while a bit bitter and unforgiving on others. You can look at this book here on Amazon.
My big dream is to pack the kids into a big RV and head S. for the border on a 1 year sabbatical type of thing. AK to Baja or bust, I say!
But one thing I’ve been wondering about is just how safe the baja is for families these days. I’m not so much afraid of things like the water, bad roads, medical facilities not being up to par, etc – as that is to be expected. But the situation with the bandidos is seriously troublesome – it seems violence is way up in the region.
