My online friend Rafe Colburn challenged me to pick up the book thread. Here we go…
Total number of books I’ve owned: Since I have a Ph.D. in literature, I’d have to estimate thousands. A couple of years ago I gave away almost all of my grad school books, probably several hundred. I’m a purger, so I generallly get rid of books unless I know I’ll need them again for some specific reason.
We currently have a few hundred books (or maybe a couple thousand; it’s hard to estimate) in the house, but most of those are from Katie’s graduate work in English education and religious studies, and Hannah and Samuel have a large library of children’s and young adult books. There are only a few dozen books in the house that I would identify as belonging only to me, mostly language reference (mostly German) and programming books.
Last book I bought: Well, just this morning I ordered four novels off of Amazon, but three of those were for Katie, and the other was a pre-order of the next Harry Potter book. Although I will read the HP book, I pre-ordered it at Hannah’s request. She’ll get first dibs on it.
I’ve recently become an avid patron of the Pflugerville library, so I don’t buy so many books for myself these days (and I only ordered the three books for Katie because they aren’t in the library). However, a couple of weeks ago I bought ChiRunning at the local Barnes and Noble, since the library doesn’t have it.
Last book I read: I’m currently listening to The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros and reading The Prodigal Spy by Joseph Kanon. I’m also reading ChiRunning on and off.
Last book I finished: Yesterday I completed the audio edition of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon.
Some books that mean a lot to me (everyone else listed five; I changed that to ‘some’), in no particular order:

• The play Woyzeck by nineteenth-century German playwright Georg Büchner. This play was the primary focus of my doctoral research.
• A book whose name I do not recall that I read in high school. Its plot was about people who survived a nuclear holocaust in the backwoods of Florida. I read this book a couple of times and it occupied my imagination for years. Sometime, I should try to figure out what book it was.
• 1984 and Animal Farm by George Orwell. I read these my senior year of high school and did a literary analysis paper on them in senior English. The paper earned me a high A grade, and my teacher used my paper as a model for the next year’s class. Also, due to my participation in competitive extemporaneous and persuasive speaking, I had become very well versed in current political events, and these two political novels opened my eyes politically.

Five People I’d like to do this as well: Since I’m a Z-list blogger, I don’t know of any other bloggers who 1.) haven’t already probably received the challenge, and 2.) read my site to find out that I’ve challenged them. However, if one of my (presumed) handful of readers publishes your own book inventory based on reading mine, please let me know. At least I’ll know I have a reader that way.

This is a photo of me from last weekend at my sister’s ranch. I’m now using this photo as my laptop’s desktop background in order to intimidate my co-workers.
For the record, I didn’t just pose with the shotgun. I shot and killed at least two water snakes in my sister’s tanks (that’s ‘ponds’ for most people) while we were fishing.

I just finished listening to the audio edition of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon.
The novel is narrated by a 15-year-old boy with autism or Asperberger Syndrome. His difficulty understanding other people’s emotions is a powerful literary device for viewing the messy emotional lives of the people around him. I enjoyed this book very much and highly recommend it.

We spent Memorial Day weekend on my sister Andrea’s new ranch south of San Antonio, doing all kinds of things we don’t get to do much: riding horses and ATVs, shooting guns, cooking over a camp fire. I’ve posted a bunch of photos from our weekend on my web site. Mosey on over and check them out.

Steve over at theSneeze.com has a new rant about The Wiggles. Steve is funny, as usual, but while I was reading his post, it hit me that I wasn’t familiar with the details he was ranting about. Praise the Lord! It’s been at least a year since The Wiggles has played in our house. Not to mention such other grating early-childhood TV shows, such as the Teletubbies and Elmo.
No, our kids have finally moved on. Granted, they’ve moved on to some Disney Channel fare of equally questionable quality, but nothing is as painful as repeated preschool shows such as The Wiggles.

I don’t know if this blog entry is biographical or fiction, but it’s powerful and painfully believable in any case. People can be so heartless in the name of religion. Just read this.

Joey deVilla has a good blog post about crunch mode, which he defines as “working extra hours each day for extended periods in order to meet a (usually arbitrary and unrealistic) deadline.”
I agree completely with Joey that extended crunch mode is counter-productive. As work hours increase, productivity decreases, and at some point, you’re making so many errors that it becomes counter-productive.
The issue of work hours almost always comes up in some form when I interview for jobs. My stock answer is: software development is a cyclical enterprise. I understand that there are periods when much greater effort is necessary, and I’m willing to put in that periodic work.
And as a manager myself, I tell my team members that if they have to be in crunch mode more than periodically, then it’s a management failure.
I usually welcome this topic in a job interview, because the interviewer’s attitude toward crunch mode tells me a lot about the culture of the company and whether I want to work there. Thankfully, I’ve had the opportunity to work in several companies where management essentially agrees with me about the dubious value of perpetual crunch mode.

Katie and I are spending a few days in Galveston (by ourselves!). See you next week.

I heard about Eragon a while back on public radio. Christopher Paolini was only fifteen years old when he wrote it. His parents paid to pubilsh the novel and then peddled from the back of their van until they attracted enough attention that he was signed by a publisher.
Hannah checked Eragon out of the library and I started it after she finished. It was very well written, good adolescent fiction. I highly recommend it, and I can’t wait for the next book in the trilogy.

I just remembered that this year is my 10-year anniversary on the web. Unbelievable. In 1995, I was working at Logos Corporation in New Jersey. I remember when we got dial-up internet access for the office and someone at the office started showing us web sites on Mosaic. A contractor working for the company then started developing an interface for our company’s application to allow users to submit documents for translation via the web. Pretty cutting edge stuff at the time.
As soon as Windows 95 was released, Katie and I bought our first Windows home PC (We’d had a Macintosh SE since 1986 or so), and we got dial-up Internet access at home. We lived in the sticks in New Jersey, and at first, the only ISP that had local dial-up numbers was Compuserve. Shortly thereafter, a local ISP started offering local dial-up numbers and we switched to them. I used ‘tippiedog‘ as my login for that account, and I’ve been using it as an online identifier ever since.