[Tom's
Home Page]
[Professional] [Life,
Fun, &c] [Tell Me...]
[Bookmarks] [Publications List]
<and many papers and essays>
Of more general interest: [Apple HI Alumni page] [Interaction Design Patterns page] [Social Computing]
I write a lot, mostly stuff that is professionally related. However, you may be amused by the (true) story of my trip to Maui (The Key), or edified by my description of an area of Yoesemite that is recovering from a fire (After the Fire). If you would like to stick your toe in geekier waters, you might check out essays on how telecommuting has impacted my life (Work and Spirit, On the Experience of Remote Meetings and, Some Notes on Telework), or (geekier yet) essays on email (The Transformation of Email), the web (The World Wide Web as Social Hypertext), and computer-mediated collective poetry (A Fellow Whose Hair Was Bright Orange).
I enjoy gardening,
hiking, biking, and reading. I love to body surf, but that wasn't much fun
in northern California, and is no fun at all in Minnesota (for body surfing
I recommend San Diego which you can take a look at right now.).
I love good food and good beer.
Foci of reading (beyond the professionally related ones, of course) are
science fiction, travel writing, and biographies and diaries of 18th century
folk somehow connected with the literary circle of Samuel
Johnson and James
Boswell . For a peek at Bozzy's writing click here.
And there are a couple of reviews of books I've enjoyed recently (well,
not so recently anymore).
I like blues and jazz of the 20's and 30's, 70's rock (the dead, floyd,
patti smith), and various forms of techno. And Bach lute suites are good
too. ...I can't discern much of a pattern either.
Although I work at IBM in New York (and formerly for Apple in California),
I live in Minneapolis,
Minnesota. (That's about 1000 miles from New York (and 1500 miles from
California) for those of you not versed in the finer points of U.S. geography.)
I've lived here about five years.
I've found Minneapolis to be a wonderful place, though I will not wax too
enthusiastic lest I divert the hoard of Californian's fleeing to the Pacific
Northwest in our direction. Fortunately the winters are a rather strong
deterrent (with the summers running a close second).
A few fun facts about Minneapolis-St Paul:
- More theatres per person than any place except New York,
- It has never gotten below zero in October (November is a different story)
- Largest Hmong population outside of the west coast
- Saunna is pronounced sow-na
- Very ethnically diverse (non-locals frequently don't realize the vast
cultural gaps between those of Swedish and Norwegian descent, etc.)
- Most common explanation to visitors: 'But it's a dry cold.'
I haven't updated this for some time, but I will note that the sequel to Towing Jehova (below), is out, and I've just purchased it (it's called Blameless in Abaddon). Other books I've enjoyed are Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy (Red Mars, Blue Mars, Green Mars), exceptional for their character development, political and social depth, and detailed discussions of Martian geology.
This is a year or so old, but I'm still enthusiastic about "Towing Jehova" by John Morrow. It has something to offend almost everyone (as someone remarked about one of his other books). The premise: God is dead. We know this because his two-mile long body has been discovered floating in the south atlantic, and all that remains to be done is to tow the body to the north pole where the angels hollowed out an iceberg as a tomb before they all died of grief. In charge of the job is the captain of the Exxon Valparioso, a now-reformed alcoholic infamous for having caused the largest oil spill in history (but specially recruited--in a last act of grace?--by the angels). Of course, neither the captain nor the angels have reckoned one of the crew, a radical feminist who, enraged by the incontrovertable evidence that God was, in fact, a white, middle-aged male, is determined to sink the evidence into the mid-Atlantic rift with the help of a military-battle re-enactment society armed with live weaponry. However, then things get seriously weird.
(In the sequel, "Blameless in Abbadon," God's body has been
towed to Florida, where it has been set up as the centerpiece of a religious
theme park (the Catholic Church having sold what they believe to be the
cast off husk of God to the Southern Baptist Church which has rather different
convictions in the matter, believing that The Body is not entirely inanimate).
This conviction is shared by an embittered ex-jurist and cancer victim,
who decides to have God extradited and put on trial in the world court for
crimes against humanity. Then things get seriously weird. [Those who read
Towing Jehova will find this considerably darker in its humor, more in the
vein of Only Begotten Daughter (no, you don't want to get me started).)
For some non-fiction, try "The Beak of the Finch" by Jonathan
Weiner. It is a narrative about a couple of population biologists (and several
generations of their graduate students) who have been observing evolution
in action among an isolated population of Darwin's Finches in the Galapagos.
They have been tracking the complete life history and physical characteristics
(e.g. beak size to the tenths of the millimeter) of every Finch on the island
for about thirty years, and observing how they change in response to weather
and various environmental pressures.
You probably won't care about "A View of the Edinburgh Theatre Season
of 1765", purportedly by none other than James Boswell, though he didn't
admit it because his Father was awfully stuffy (that was back when theatre
was for low lifes) and Bozzy did want to become Laird. But if you like books
you may be interested in (or may want to avoid like the plague) the on-line
bookstore Amazon.com,
their database of a million books, and the diabolical search engine which
suggested that I might like the aforementioned pamphlet even though I wasn't
searching for it.
[Tom's
Home Page]
[Professional] [Life,
Fun, &c] [Tell Me...]
[Bookmarks] [Publications List]
<and many papers and essays>
Of more general interest: [Apple HI Alumni page] [Interaction Design Patterns page] [Social Computing]
Last update: 9/12/97. Release 5.0. Maintained by snowfall@acm.org