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Rowing the Pond Again
Gudlyf writes "Anne Quéméré, a French woman who had previously rowed across the Atlantic Ocean from Spain to the West Indian island of Guadeloupe, is currently on her way to doing it again, only this time in the opposite direction. This season's challenge will take Anne 2700 nautical miles, from Chatham, Cape Cod (USA) to Brittany (France), her native land. She hopes to make it in less than 90 days. Is it just me, or does the giant fish on her boat scream 'shark bait' to you?"
sharks are attracted to blood, they cannot 'see' a fish like that on the side of a boat.
But probably death-from-exposure/hypothermia bait.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Wouldn't it have just been easier to buy an airline ticket?
I'm all for exercise and all but geeze!
http://slashome.web1000.com
She has to get back, doesn't she?
If she had the money to get a plane ticket, she wouldn't have made it the first time.
In my day we had to kayak through the Pacific just to buy some foie gras... upstream BOTH WAYS.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
We have to do something about the oil companies, this poor women obviously can't afford gas either. Greedy bastards!
Happy Noodle Boy says "F###ing doughnut! Mock me? You fried cyclops!!"
Shark-Bait HOO-HAH-HAH
Extraordinary Vacations. Exceptional Prices
Got curious and browsed that images (images directory. Some odd stuff, but there's also a small map showing (at least vaguely) the intended journey.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
/)
A. i dont even have a boat you insensitive clod
:)
B. all your oars are belong to us
C. in soviet russia the boat rows you
D.
1. row row row your boat
2. do it again
3. ???
4. profit!!
E. D'OH!
There, I think that about covers it
Geek n.
A person regarded as foolish, inept, or clumsy.
A person who is single-minded or accomplished in scientific or technical pursuits but is felt to be socially inept.
But then it could also be:
A carnival performer whose show consists of bizarre acts, such as biting the head off a live chicken.
I mean how many times do you see "sex with a mare" around here??
Here's her website. It's entirely in French, but you can see pictures of her and the boat on the photo page.
And as she does this, a computer aboard the boat will be running an OpenGL application in PHP. If she succeeds, she will break world impracticality records.
Would you have the balls to attack a woman with the arms to row across the Atlantic? I wouldn't...
High latency, low bandwidth, low reliability, single packet, connectionless protocol. RFC 1149 spawned another RFC (2549) and had two implementations to take it out of just a draft version, so why not this. :-)
Maybe she's hoping that the publicity will encourage another lunat^H^H^H rower to do likewise. (or else she's on the SYN-ACK leg of her first attempt).
I'm sure that there are more nerdly connections we can make when we have too much time on our hands
Similarly, the rest of the planet cannot understand the mind-numbing singlemindedness needed to slog through the hell that is a Gentoo installation.
Different strokes...
Plus, there's all sorts of technology involved -- GPS, satellite phone, and the materials and construction of the boat itself.
But what it really comes down to is clearly illustrated in this bit from the article:Now if that's not geeky, I dunno what is.
She's navigating mainly by GPS
She has a custom made boat (physics, specialized transportation design)
She expects to lose 30 pounds (lots of nerds need to lose weight / Physical effects of long term physical stress is a good topic of scientific discussion)
Quit flapping your bitching hole.
Paul Lenhart writes words!
Exactly. This is, like, all athletic and--how you say?--"outsidish?" no, no. i mean, "out of the doors?" oh yes, "outdoorsy." i do not know of this out of the doors activities of which they write...what with the..the...the sweating. And the exerting.
(and before some pumped up jock wannabe tries to make me seriously believe a true nerd can also be mr. macho athlete guy, lemme say a) we're all very proud of you and b) please go crow on some less nerdly site. you are far too cool for us.)
The US Coast Gaurd announced today that they picked up a determined French refugee in a rowboat off the coast of Massachusetts. She has been taken to an undisclosed location for indefinite detention.
Unknown host pong.
It's about solitude and one-ness with nature as well as accomplishing a goal some would call impossible. She will be by herself exposed to the elements for ~90 days. That's a lot of time for deep thought amidst the hard work of rowing. I'm sure life takes on a new perspective of meaning after an epic journey like that. I cannot claim to have the same drive.
Just imagine a Bay-o-watch cluster of these...
I'm here all week, folks.
Old people fall. Young people spring. Rich people summer and winter.
I hear she used to be a practicing MCSE... maybe there's some explaination to be found in that.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Man, I wish I had the balls to do this. Boats are so cool. Well, boats without motors, anyway. In fact, things built by people with their own hands designed to do something crazy are cool in general. I'd love to build my own sailboat and sail from the southern tip of Japan to the Philippines. That's not even a huge distance, and I'm still too chicken to do it... storms scare me.
As for all you idiots making "What's this doing on Slashdot?" comments, what the hell? You guys are worse than those stupid jocks in HS who used to try to pigeonhole us into the glasses-wearing computer nerd category. Worse because you're doing it to yourselves. People aren't two-dimensional (I mean this figuratively, smart ass) and this includes even you. Lots of nerds like sports. It's just that we often like non-standard ones, like martial arts, fencing, bowling, sailing, whatever. But even if it were some "lame" sport like baseball or football, a true geek could find a way to make it geeky. That you can't speaks to your lack of imagination, nothing else.
Thank you, drive through.
I happen to think it's a fantastic thing.
There's no real "why" of why anyone would willingly climb Everest, go to Antarctica, walk across a desert, play any contact sport, play golf, walk up the stairs to the office and not take the elevator.
All of those things are more prone to injury, take longer, are a "waste" of time. But none of that is the point. All of those things are terrific fun - even walking up the stairs gives you a nice glow just before you hit the airconditioning for 8 hours.
Rowing across the Atlantic Ocean? Imagine the isolation, the memories, the weather you'd see, the sense of having conquered yourself you would feel for the rest of your life.
She's not hurting anyone or anything. And she may actually make observations worth listening to.
My response? Bravo!
Net effect is zero.
Which makes her even with all of us who didn't row at all.
it'd be like getting a handjob from popeye
think about it
Ok, and she is doing all this while reformatting her Windows box, and replacing it with the latest Linux distro ? or ... What is this doing on Slashdot ? :P
This is the perfect opportunity to compile Gentoo!
Karma: Bad (mostly due to all those "In Soviet Russia" jokes)
A man was killed doing this in 2000
Any number of men, and women too, died on their way to work this morning. Commuting is dangerous.
My dad died when I was one year old, while simply tending a shop.
Shit happens, so do what, ummmm, rows your boat.
KFG
no wonder she's in love with the ocean.
AnneQue sounds like Anchor.
Mer = Sea in french.
I s'pose it is one way to beat the queues at the airport though.
How does she sleep?
Where does she keep her food? (90 days of food in this tiny canoe?)
What if there is a storm? (Good weather guaranteed? A ship following her just in case?)
on the wrong day, just getting out of Chatham could be the worst part of the trip. Weatherwise, that is - and the bars (the ones in the water, that is - though around town there' s a bumper sticker that reads "Chatham - a quaint drinking village with a fishing problem.")
Fog blows up over the barrier beach outside of Stage Harbor so thick and fast you'd swear there's a forest fire raging on the other side of the dune - and crossing Stage Harbor on a busy day with a sea kayak is like crossing I-95 on foot in rush hour.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Brittany has a specific language which is in most part unrelated to french.
. . . . . . .
may u!sh 2 sm!le at dz!z bad nn.!m!tat!ion
Is exploring the limits of the human body and mind not a worthy cause? Feats of physical and emotional endurance can inspire, educate, and enrich people's lives. Only considering acts which help people relieve pain "worthy" is an awfully negative outlook on life. I say celebrate the accomplishments of our fellow humans, silly or not.
Really need to mention Raphaela Legouvella here as she recently arived in Tahiti on a windsufer. She already crossed the atlantic back in 2000. http://www.raphaela-legouvello.com/ http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/3236899.st m
As to whether this should be on /. windsurfing seems a more apropriate geek sport to me than rowing (obvoulsy I'm biased on this). Hi tech construction, always pushing the speed records, and it's 95% technique and only 5% fitness.
Her windsurfer looks biger than your average sailing boat but it was built with the help of the european space agency.
The "row boat" looks like a giant rapala lure!
Who in their right mind would row anywhere with that thing?
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
I didn't RTFA (yeah, I've been here a while), but what's so surprising about a French woman doing it again?
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
Offtopic or Interesting? You decide... :-)
Knos: Brittany has a specific language which is in most part unrelated to french.
I know this because my uncle, who is a Welsh speaker, struck up a conversation with what he thought was a fellow Welshman in Brittany. Only half an hour into chatting (and, to be fair, drinking), did he click that the gentleman was in fact a local.
Oh, and interesting fact number two: Brittany is the reason why the largest UK island is called Great Britain- because there is a Little Britain (Brittany) in France. At one point a line of regional kings [1] claimed soverignty over all the Britons (Britons being the Gaelic-speaking peoples of France, Ireland and the UK).
[1] You have to remember that kings were little more than tribal leaders until recent centuries. The word "king" conjures up images of gold and palaces, when in fact for most of Northern European history, kings were the ones who had slightly larger mud huts and slightly warmer animal furs.
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
http://www.adept.net/AmericanPearl/
I think she went the westward direction (Canaries to Carribean) following ocean currents. It was an interesting online event since you could monitor GPS data on the website and she periodically posted messages and photos via satellite. She is now climbing Denali (Mt. McKinley).
Here are some more pics of her canoe and a pic of her too :-)
Karma police, arrest this man, he talks in maths....
There's an image of her actually rowing the beast , which puts the contraption in human perspective.
One other thing to keep in mind, which makes shark statics in FL kinda pointless: Any time a shark is involved it has to be counted as an "attack", regardless of how minor the incident was. Scratches and bruises are all considered attacks. So, for example, in 2001 there were 37 shark attacks in FL, but only one was fatal.
I think I'd be more worried about buckling up.
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"Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief."