Books I can truly say have shaped my life

I would like to begin a series of posts describing my favorite books--books that I don't just love, but that I can truly say have shaped my life. I'll start out by just naming them with their authors, all together in one post, then over time devote one post to each book. I may also add other posts about other books I've read, maybe even my list of every book I've read since I was 17 when I started keeping track. But for now, here are my favorites, in no particular order:

Wild at Heart, by John Eldredge

Mind Children, by Dr. Hans Moravak

Cheap Tricks, by Andy Dappen

What Would Google Do?, by Jeff Jarvis

Operations Manual For Spaceship Earth, by Buckminster Fuller

1984, by George Orwell

Prelude to Foundation, by Isaac Asimov

The Holy Bible, by God

Bio of a Space Tyrant, by Piers Anthony

Heir to the Empire, by Timothy Zahn

At first I was going to write about books that have changed my life, but as I got into it I realized that would constrict my choices considerably. After all, it's a huge thing to change someone's life. So I changed it to books that have shaped my life, because while almost everything you encounter in life affects you in some way, and almost nothing truly changes you, a lot of great things shape you. I hope you enjoy reading about why these books are so important to me, and if you are inspired to read any of them, then great! And if not, that's cool too, I know my tastes are kind of unique. Thanks for reading!

I want a hard-wood computer

Preferably mahogany, or maybe red oak.
I'm serious. Think about an old-fashioned grandfather clock, it's basically a set of delicately made mechanical parts set inside a beautifully crafted wooden housing. Why couldn't somebody take the electronics from a good computer and set it inside a housing, hand crafted according to design, taste, and art? This beautiful machine would look great in somebody's den (somebody like me), and would never go out of style, provided the electronics were properly taken care of, and allowances were made for occasional upgrades.

Blogging

I can't help but notice that I don't blog nearly as often as I have thoughts and experiences to share. The reason for this, of course, is that I simply don't have the time to write down everything that passes through my head. Maybe in the future I'll become more efficient about whipping out Blogger and writing stuff down as it comes to me, so I can move on; I want this blog to be my catch-all for ideas so I can sort them out more easily later. Hmmm, sounds like a pensieve....

Map (con)Quest

Little by little, Nicole and I are covering our map of Washington State with marked lines. Every trip we take we go some place we've never been, expanding our territory. I love our big long road trips, circumnavigating the state. Last weekend we saw Mt. Rainier from the far side for the first time ever, and we were wowed. There's so much cool stuff here to see and experience, and we don't know if we'll ever get enough. I don't know what we'll do when we've seen the entire state; expand to other states, probably, except that it'll will take halve the day just to get to a new highway by then. Oh well, the future and the open road awaits...

What is a Fire Sprinkler Designer?

When I first interviewed for my current job, the man interviewing me told me that being a fire sprinkler designer is about as non-glamorous as a job can get.  He said, "If you're at a party and someone asks you what you do, and you tell them, 'I'm an astronaut', then everybody in the place wants to be your friend, every girl wants to talk to you.  If you tell them, 'I design fire sprinkler systems', you can watch their eyes start to glaze over until they can think of an excuse to walk away."  It's not that what we do is hard to understand.  It's just, you know, boring.

You've probably seen sprinklers go off in movies.  Picture the scene:  the hero is trapped in a building full of enemies and he needs to escape.  He spots a sprinkler head in the ceiling, and is able to get up to it.  He holds his cigarette lighter up to the sprinkler head, and after several seconds, every sprinkler in the building goes off, creating the chaos our hero needs to escape.

In reality only one head goes off at a time, more if needed.  The sprinkler heads are automatic, they're heat sensitive, so when a fire starts below them they activate by themselves, but they don't activate other heads.  If the fire is big, it'll activate multiple heads, which must be strategically placed so that just the right sprinklers will go off.  A huge part of the designer's job is that strategic placement.  They can't be too close to each other, and they can't be to far away from each other.  I could write a book describing all the rules for spacing and placement, but I don't have to; there's already several.  Our primary rule book is the NFPA-13: The Standard for the Installation of Fire Sprinkler Systems, put out by the National Fire Prevention Association, who put out something like one hundred different rule books for different aspects of fire prevention.

The rules for sprinkler design are so stringent because it falls under the heading of Fire Prevention, which falls under Life Safety, which means it's very serious stuff.  Everybody from insurance  agents to the local fire marshal gets a say in any sprinkler design, which makes our job even more difficult.

I love my job, and I'm very proud of the things I know and do.  Oh, and to refer back to my opening paragraph, I've actually had fairly good luck in talking to people about my job, but I think that's because most of my friends have at least some construction background so they're able to put what I say into that context.  My wife Nicole, though, likes hearing me talk sprinklers, and she understands most of what I tell her, which is more than what most of my coworkers and bosses can say.  When we go into buildings and I see an interesting sprinkler feature I point it out to her.  During the six months I spent in training she helped me study every night and got really good at quizzing me.

Anyway, I hope this brief description helps explain a bit about what I do.  As always, thanks for reading.

Internet English

I was thinking recently about the Internet and computers and how new technologies often seem to necessitate changes to our language --abbreviations, new slang terms, etc. How long will it be fore computer keyboards begin changing to better reflect this changing language? Soon there'll be keys for "www", ".com", ".org", and all the rest; not to mention keys for "LOL", "BRB", and other words and phrases commonly used. And why stop there? I believe we are at the beginning of a long process of replacing words made up of the building blocks of letters with conversations made up of pre-made ideas and statements.

As this idea first crossed my mind, I immediately thought, "Oh no! We're dumbing ourselves down, teaching people not to read and write, simplifying the process of thought into a uniform mass of buzzwords!" I envisioned a future nation of people tying on giant keyboards where each key has a picture on it, one for each pre-made thought. A future where we use picture for words --hmmmm, now this is starting to make me think of someting other than "1984".

Consider the Chinese: an ancient people with an ancient language, a complex system of pictograms, a different picture or symbol for each word or idea. It has hundreds of thousands of them, a rich and diverse ecology of communication. This is a far cry from our 101-key keyboards, but what could such a language have developed from? Possibly something similar to what we have now?

Let's talk for a minute about codes. The passwords thatwe use in English are basically strings of letters and numbers that we hope we can remember but that thieves can't. Alphanumeric gibbberish, which only work in an alphanumeric language. When all you have to use are whole words, though, your password needs to be more than just one word, even a long one. It has to be a more complex thought. And thus we get the "passwords" often used in the Orient since antiquity: riddles, puzzles, and mysteries. And thus we have the mysterious culture that is the Far East.

Could that possibly be the direction that our society is going? Instead of constricting the range of thought, maybe the shift in our language from textual to visual is bringing us into a deeper and richer culture than we could ever have imagined. This excites me.

From a historical standpoint, I must point out that the English language is about due for a massive change. For the past two thousand years, the language has changed drastically approximately every five centuries. The last such change occurred just over five hundred years ago, with the invention of the printing press. I suggest that we are in the midst of another change, brought about by the invention of the Internet; we're just not noticing it (these changes take decades or generations to complete themselves).

In fact, I think this change began decades ago, with the invention of recorded sound and imagery. For the first time, young people can hear and see the way people talked in their parents', or even their grandparents', times. This causes turmoil in everyday speech. On the one hand, some pople like the "archaisms" from twenty years ago, and want to preserve them; on the other hand, some people despise them and prefer to invent new words. This accelerates the rate of change while preserving each change to be reexamined later. Throw Internet abbreviations into the mix, and you have the makings for an almost entirely new language another two or three generations down the road.

Another consideration I must bring up: most of the language shifts in the past two millennia have bee nbrough about through invasions of the English speaking people; it's only the last one and the current one that coincided with new technology. Rome conquered the Celtic and Gaelic tribes that occupied england at the time and introduced Latin. Five hundred years later the Romans withdrew and Anglo-Saxon tribes from Germany moved in, bringing their German tongues into the mix which is known as Old English. Another five hundred years later came the Norman invasion, forcing the French language into the Anglo language and forming what we call Middle English. Five hundred years after that saw Gutenberg's invention of the printing press and movable type, which ushered in Modern English and which we've already discussed. And now the Internet is changing things. What else is in store for the future of our language is something I would like to continue to explore.