Condolences, and best wishes for your project.

I lost a parent as a young teenager. My siblings were tweens. We have lots of peek-a-boo and Saturday morning couch fort memories, and don't get me wrong, we cherish them. But what I really miss now, as a grown woman, was getting to know my father as an adult. He was a great father for us as children, but we were too young and/or too sheltered for really open conversations on those thorny adult issues that most parents dread. The man I've gotten to know second-hand through his peers was a thoughtful, interesting, complicated guy. I wish I could have known him as a peer, too.

Whatever medium you and your wife use (and you should participate too, no parent is an island), don't neglect the shades of gray, and the things you'd only say to someone you trust after a couple of beers.

Ha, I know what you mean about the pictures. The movie's never quite as good as the book, and the illustrator never quite captures it, does she? And TV is better with the subtitles on. But that's how I feel now, as an adult with better reading comprehension than listening comprehension.

Generalizing here, but poor kids in the developing world are not read to on their mothers' laps. Nor are they sprawled on the carpet with the Sunday comics, or even watching Sesame Street. We in the developed world really take for granted all the pre-literacy work it takes to get a first grader reading aloud in class. For small children (and under-served adults) just acquiring literacy, a page full of text is an overwhelming, discouraging sight. Even leaving aside the contextual clues you get from the images themselves, illustrations are valuable just as a way to break the written content into manageable chunks.

I'm all for wiring the developing world. Believe me I'm *exquisitely* sensitive to how expensive per title paper media is in a developing economy. I lived high on the hog by local standards on 300 USD a month while I was there, and did all my reading out of a free library in the capital city, 8 hours away. I couldn't have afforded books and newspapers in my town, even if there had been anyone selling them.

I do mail care packages of children's books back to my old stomping grounds. And I keep an Amazon wishlist of appropriate titles so that friends and family can chip in if they want. And I sent my old laptop down there recently for a school computer lab they want to start.

OLPC and Project Gutenburg and the rest are great steps forward, and perhaps it is small-minded of me to rain on their parade. But the German aid agency (GTZ) that donated my town library's books had the best of intentions, too. It's a little late for me to get heavily involved with any of these organizations, so don't mind me as I wring my hands here and fret :)

And how many of these books are in Spanish? Or French, or Farsi, or what have you? And with pictures?

I used to work in a small, poor town in the developing world. My community had a library with about 10 linear feet of shelving. All the books were in Spanish, but . . .

None of them had pictures.
The "local interest" titles were these impenetrable desk-breakers of 19th century poetry by some aristocrat from the big city.
There were only two or three fiction titles. Dante's Inferno counts, right?

I never once saw a child pick a book off that shelf, not even after an hour's wait while Mom ran an errand. There was nothing there that would appeal to a beginning reader. Hell, given the historical literacy handicaps in the region, those titles would have defeated most of the adults I knew.

If you want to encourage literacy (in the developing world or elsewhere) you've got to start small. Pictures. Rhymes and silly sounds. It takes years to get most kids up to chapter book readiness. Canterbury Tales ain't where you start!

The media keys are the worst. Not just because I never use them. Not just because there are about ten of the stupid things cluttering up the keyboard.

No, the awful thing is that in my new Dell (an Inspiron 15xx model), they replace the uber-useful F keys. Now, I know you can use the Fn key to shift that "reduce screen brightness" key back to F4 like God intended it to be, but Alt+Fn+F4 is awkward as hell. Thankfully, you can get into the BIOS and set the F keys back to their proper priority, but it was a miserable few days before I figured that one out.

. . . but you sure can sue the people who design, build and maintain them! Deep pockets, FTW.

In all seriousness, I can report that I have seen a copy of Windows ME running on an office computer within the last three months. It was in Paraguay. Forty kilometers off the asphalt. In a school.

They mainly used it for a pirated copy of Microsoft Encarta (circa 1990-something), which is a priceless educational resource in a place with no newspapers and no public internet.

And come to it, it was about the only legally licensed copy of Windows in the town. Everybody else was running pirated copies of XP, although some of those had little imitation Vista desktop widgets.

Sure, change is both possible and desirable. I'll be the first one to cheer when high heels and neckties go the way of foot binding and never-changed underwear. But let's be honest about who inspires fashion changes. Forgive me for stereotyping, but the kind of Slashdotter who denies the value of anything above T-shirts and jeans is no one's clothing role model. We base our clothing norms on the style-centered hotties among us. If you want to promote sanity in your workplace dress code, start with the pretty receptionist or the slick execu-bot, not the more cerebral technical types. This is the way of things: In year one, some indie designer does it. In year two, the indie designer becomes a commercial success. In year three, major fashion houses present their version. In year four, the style appears on high-dollar hotties in large urban markets. In year five, it spreads throughout the urban market and hits the fashion-conscious in the hinterlands. In year six, it is mainstream. In year twenty, your old fart boss no longer feels threatened by it and approves the dress code relaxation. At no point in the process does the phrase "revolution by the T-shirt clad proletariat" appear.