Carol's Team Newsletter

Summer, 2005

All our activities are overshadowed by Carol's passing on June 24. She continues to inspire us.

Carol

As you are probably already aware, Carol died peacefully on June 24. Her memorial service was a fitting tribute to her joyous life. After the service, there was an informal gathering at the "theater" where Carol and Paul met (it's actually a converted barn, but a decent venue for a small production). Many Carol's Team supporters were there and we received a lot of support.

Along with the remembrances from the memorial service, we've received some more tributes. Feel free to contribute your own.

Sponsorship

We continue to receive donations from individuals. Perhaps most touching is a donation and card from the elementary school class of Carol's cousin, Kirsten Lackey. We are approaching the level of funding where we can consider hiring out some of the programming work rather than doing it all as a volunteer effort. More on this in the next section.

Development

The initial linguistic database has been created. The basis for the database is the Italian for Travelers course that Kate and I took to prepare for our Italy trip with Carol and Paul. It seemed appropriate both symbolically and functionally. If you act like you're a lost tourist, the word distribution is pretty good. If you try to write a dissertation on Chaucer, it doesn't work well at all.

The next step is to write the code that modifies the word distribution based on actual usage. This is the heart of Carol's Song and once we have that working, we'll have a proof of concept to build from.

That brings us to the big question of how to actually get this done. The difference between a proof of concept and a finished piece of software is no small thing. If we can line up a major backer, we will hire a coder and that will speed things along. Otherwise, we'll continue to work on it off hours.

Racing

Carol's Team entered two teams in both Conquer Castlewood and the Goomna, two fun local races. Between the four entries, we logged two wins, a second, and a third. In July, we return to national competition at the Extreme Heart Challenge in Iowa.