I'm still about 3 weeks behind in my feed reader, and the items I'm working my way through now include a lot of reminders about the Google Summer of Code application deadlines.

I've been the beneficiary of a lot of good timing. In 1997, about a year after my family had moved to Charlotte, I got the opportunity to talk to the astronauts aboard STS-94(vid) through was was then called the SAREX program. It was pretty cool, and part of what drove me to getting my amateur radio licence a few years later.

It was something that the local radio club had been planning for years; the timing just so happened to work out for me to show up at the right time.

Likewise, I spent several years in a French immersion elementary school, through no merit of my own: CMS had just so happened to start a magnet school for French immersion when we moved to Charlotte. (My mother, of course, also deserves credit: I have no idea what amount of bureaucracy she had to navigate to get myself and my sister into that school. Nevertheless, timing still played a role, at least in opening up the possibility.)

And as I moved into my middle-school years, North Carolina briefly lifted age restrictions on who could go to the state's community colleges. I took my first courses at CPCC - French, actually - at 11. Perhaps unfortunately, those credits meant that I never had to take a foreign language after the age of 15 or so, and I know far less French today than I did then.

Unfortunately, other situations haven't worked out so well. Google's summer of code is an example. I've only been programming long enough to really have been interested in it this year and the year before. Last year, I was too young: they had not yet opened it to minors in college. This year, I'm finally of age, and no longer in school.

There is no moral to the story, except perhaps to point out that if I hadn't written this, my non-involvement in SoC would never have been recorded, or measured, at all. Opportunities lost to bad timing, or overly restrictive rules, can never be measured.

If we had moved to Charlotte a year later, I couldn't have told you about how I didn't get to talk to an astronaut; I couldn't have told you how I didn't go to a French immersion school. Absence is far less noticeable than substance.