Meet me on CNET for a Xanadu discussion!

The Broadway reincarnation of Xanadu starts today. I feel like a love for Xanadu is a good marker for a Gen-Xer of a certain age--tween or early teen in 1980.

I wrote about this over on our new (parent . thesis) blog on CNET today. There has been so much Transformers coverage over there I couldn't resist injecting a little estrogen into the pop culture discussion. I don't know how the CNET readership will respond. So you'd be doing me a big favor if you'd stop by and leave a comment on my Transformers fanboys, meet Xanadu fangirls posting. (It sounds like there's a potential Meetup dating event in there, doesn't it?)

The CNET blog is an interesting opportunity. It's taking me out of my comfort zone but it's also allowing me to communicate with a whole new audience. Writing the blog with my husband Michael has been a lot of fun. I invited him on as my co-author and he is taking it really seriously. He spent all last weekend following up on a bat-recording project he'd started with our daughter, and had written about on the blog. This wasn't an easy feat, since bat echolocation chirps are out of the range of human hearing. With the help of a high-frequency-sensitive microphone and some powerful audio-processing software he got the job done. He ended up writing new code for an open-source software program to make it work. That's commitment.

Even the conflicts we've had with CNET readers have been productive. I wrote a post about the child-abuse risks inherent in low-cost laptop projects that distribute machines to kids in the developing world. Among the comments I received some of the harshest flames I've ever experienced. It kept me up at night thinking that people could infer that I had bad intentions with that post. It is so tempting to stay within the comfortable, friendly bounds of the Mojo Mom community. Yet I do think it's a valuable opportunity to also write for a high-tech audience that might not think of parenting issues the way I do. I am doing my best to make both work, and don't worry, I'll still be here on the Mojo Mom blog--as my for my sake as for yours!