Back when I bought my copy of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations: A Collection of Passages, Phrases, and Proverbs Traced to Their Sources in Ancient and Modern Literature (17th Edition), I was excited to have it. I’ve not used it enough, but I’ve broken it out the last couple days; doing what I have today, I found the source quote of a maxim that I’ve long espoused. I state it as:

The level of a man’s intelligence is the degree to which he agrees with me.

That’s pretty close to how Tom Clancy stated it in one of his novels. I think the source, though, falls from François, Duc de La Rochefoucald:

We rarely find that people have good sense unless they agree with us.

– Reflections, maxim 347

Excellent!

As I prepare to go to Portland, I’m reading the book of one of Portland’s up-and-coming adopted sons, Donald Miller. I enjoyed his Through Painted Deserts, and I’ve been told that I’ll like BLJ. We shall see!

As I’m headed to Portland in May—I wasn’t kidding when I said I’d sell body parts to go see Over the Rhine and Hem together!—I picked up a travel guide to Portland today. I fly out on Saturday the 6th and back home on Tuesday the 9th. Fun exchange with my boss about it yesterday:

Me: I’ll be out of the office on the 8th and 9th.
Boss: Oh? Going somewhere?
Me: Yep. Portland.
Boss: Oregon?
Me: Yep. Remember a couple weeks ago when I was trying to figure out when I could go see Over the Rhine during the [program] monthly?
Boss: Yeah. You were frustrated about the shows in Ohio being on Easter weekend.
Me: You got it. Never been to Portland, always wanted to go, and now I have a great excuse.

Two things:

1. Yes, Sean, we need to talk before I go.
2. Yes, Mom, I will come to Tennessee before I go off on this crazy trip. I’m coming either next weekend or the next, whichever doesn’t have choir singing at church. I know that we’re off one of the two, but I just don’t know which one is clear.

And yes, if you’re curious, this is replacing my longer planned trip in July. I had that trip half-planned, but I’m doing this instead. I’ll just shelve those plans until next year. Actually, I’ll probably shelve them until next April. As this year’s gone by, it’s made sense to me that the best time for me to take vacation is just after Easter: any earlier and I mess up Lent stuff at church and run into co-workers’ Spring Break trips with kids, and any later I run into summer vacations with kids. [And if you're saying, "Well, what about the fall and winter?"---you maroon, that's HOCKEY SEASON!]

Lastly, the greatest thing about all this is that, assuming I don’t take any time the rest of the year, I’ll have a good three weeks banked up by the time I’m ready to take vacation next year. I hit my five-year point at work for accruing vacation time in early September, so by the time I’m ready to do the trip I’d like to do, I’ll be able to make it a driving trip and not a flying one. Driving is what I want to do most of all…

Through Painted Deserts : Light, God, and Beauty on the Open Road was a fast and easy read. I’ll quote what I said on the Don Miller fan forum:

I agree that it would make an interesting movie: the mechanic coming along out of the blue, the providential linkages in the junkyard, the sidebar into Vegas. It’d have to be an art film, though, because I think this kind of a movie would have to be told with a lot of silence, with a lot of still shots and glances and shrugs broken up by brief snippets of dialogue.

Frankly, that’s the way the trip would seem; road trips with guys always start out with flurries of conversation, and then fade into the miles. I was reminded of my old hockey trips, back the year after I finished school, when we would travel to Minnesota or Denver or Connecticut or New York to broadcast a game. It was a familiar rhythm: work the week, gather on Thursday night, throw your stuff in the car, talk until we got to Nashville, and then just drive. When you drive a long time in a row—and Huntsville to Minneapolis is 18 grueling hours, most of it through the Midwest, with Madison and Nashville your only touchstones to urban America—your thoughts turn to God … or at least ours did.

I think that I resonate with TPD mainly because long drives are my thing. Sometimes it takes a trip to give you perspective on what really matters in life, for your thoughts to go away from your boss, your co-workers, your alarm clock, the humdrum crap that annoys you and occupies a bunch of useless brain cycles. Stripped away from all that and put on the road—where, to be honest, we really just have to stay between the lines and under the speed limit—our brains can rest from all the frustrations that so easily flood our consciousness.

Earlier this afternoon, I dropped in to see Jonathan and Ashley, and Jon mentioned that they’re going out to Oregon sometime to visit his sister and her husband. One possibility is that they might drive, which says to me that I should just loan them this book until they’ve made their trip.

I picked up Donald Miller’s Through Painted Deserts the other night, and I’m starting through it. I figured I’d better read him if I’m going to keep administrating the Don Miller Fan Forum I ought to read the man …

Dear Reader: I can’t decide which book I should attempt to tackle next. After polishing off the wonderfulness that was Shteyngart’s The Russian Debutante’s Handbook on Saturday—it was so good, I might even attempt to review it—I’ve got three daunting non-fiction works that have been sitting in my to-do pile for some time. If you have a choice amongst the three, leave a comment telling me the book that you believe I should tackle first.

[I mock these types of entreaties when they're made on message boards ... and yet, I've become what I hate. Typical!]

On the advice of Maciej Ceglowski, who recommended a variety of Eastern European novels to his readers, I’m reading Gary Shteyngart’s The Russian Debutante’s Handbook.

Reading fiction like this is totally outside of my standard fare, but I found it rather hard to put down last night. [I only succumbed because it was late, I was tired, and it was delightfully cold in my house, the kind of cold that begs one to throw the covers overhead and coccoon oneself into the night.

The only weird thing for me is that I keep imagining Shteyngart’s Vladimir to be like my friend Daniel Khaykis … which just isn’t fair. It is, however, amusing…

Yesterday, I was pillaging the bookstores of Huntsville for a copy of when I found the Holy Grail:

It is mine. Oh yes, it is mine. I may end up (ab)using this by stealing Susan’s thunder and ending lifelog entries with quotations that support my main premise.

[Actually, I probably won't, because, well, I'm lazy. But it's a nice thought.]

As I’ve discussed a couple times, I’ve been reading Charles Petzold’s Code I finished just now, and so I’d like to share some scattered thoughts:

• Petzold builds slowly but swiftly, if that makes any sense. He divides the early chapters into small, manageable chunks, talking about things like bits and bytes and Boolean logic in ways that the average layman shouldn’t have any issues with. The first 40% of the books or so fairly flies by [if you're interested in the material and willing to set aside the time to read it, that is].
• The next 20% of the book or so, though, slogs way down, as Petzold jumps from small chunks to large chunks fed to the reader at once. [If you want to compare it to the terminology of the text, he goes from feeding you 1-bit chunks to 8-bit chunks to 16-bit chunks of information at quite some speed.] It’s disconcerting, and this is the point where I lost steam in reading the book and went from reading it to skimming it. That’s unfortunate; Petzold’s voice is extremely strong and engaging early on, and it’s as if he’s like so many engineering professors I had as an undergraduate—suddenly realizing that he’s way behind the syllabus and deciding to just charge forward, Mas alla! over the next hill. My feeling on this book went from “I love it!” to “It’s teaching me a lot, and I should shut up and keep reading.” There’s a difference there, folks.
• The next 25% or so of the book actually slows up a bit, but it covers dreadfully boring material [assembly code, addressing memory, etc.]. Important stuff, and it’s covered in much the same manner as before: a balanced historical perspective told anecdotally. However, I was left wondering when there would be a quiz on the material being covered.
• The next 10% discusses high-level subjects like high-level programming languages, APIs, and things of that ilk. It’s done fairly well, with a sense of history, but the anecdotal nature is lost. At this point, the book has certainly resumed its desperate-to-finish nature.
• The final chapter of the text is an amalgam of stuff under a banner of The Graphical Revolution, but it quickly devolves into a thumbnail sketch of technologies like CD-ROM media, GIF v. JPEG, vector graphics v. raster graphics, DACs, etc. Honestly, you could get more information from these links than you would have gotten reading the final chapter. However, Petzold’s work suffers from covering an exponentially-growing sphere from the perspective of the late 1990s, so while I’m tempted to skewer the ending, any book discussing modern computing is going to be highly prone to grinding to a halt like this.

Please don’t get me wrong: the text is still quite solid, and it comes as recommended reading to people who are interested in how computers work. [Before anyone says otherwise, please understand that I'm a hobbyist administrator, trained in following manual pages, install scripts, and asking for the advice of others. I AM NOT A PROGRAMMER. The only language I've ever written working programs in is FORTRAN 77, and that almost eight years ago. I'm a high-functioning user; this is part of my self-education, serving as a foundation point.]

I would absolutely recommend handing this book to a book-savvy pre-teen who is interested in computers. Had this book been available in 1990, I might be a programmer now instead of an aerospace engineer. [I think I prefer the aero bit. I like blowing stuff up.]

[This entry starts my Booklogging category. If you're interested, see why I'm booklogging.]

So, I finally got around to reading Freakonomics, which makes me a lame Weblogger or something. I found it to be interesting, a nice thumbnail sketch of using statistical analyses to look at the world in interesting ways. A lot of the stuff that Leavitt argues for in the book is the same kind of thing I’ve been reading over the years with the folks who do sabermetrics—taking the data, looking for trends, seeking correlations, and possibly finding causalities.

Doing it from an economist’s point of view, however, widens the scope of the investigation. The things that Leavitt, his colleagues, and others he finds interesting study are really … out there. But they’re pretty doggone cool.

One thing that I found interesting, however, is how Leavitt’s regression analysis that found a correlation between abortion becoming legal with Roe v. Wade and a nationwide drop in crime pretty much kicks the leg out from under the anecdotal argument that Malcom Gladwell made in The Tipping Point about what worked in drawing down crime in New York City. Considering how much the blogosphere talks about both Freakonomics and The Tipping Point, you’d think I’d've run across someone remarking this before. [However, I've probably missed every reference to this contradiction. Oh well. In this case, I'm writing for my limited audience. :)]

Anyhow, if you like unconventional thinking and having your preconceptions challenged a bit—or in watching others’ preconceptions shaken—it’s a good little read. It was great for a Saturday afternoon in Florida.