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Thursday, February 21, 2008

albatross

In my home office I have four cardboard boxes packed tight with books. Ninety-percent of them are related to programming: languages, frameworks, best practices, and so on. Some of them are life-changing tomes (Design and Evolution of C++ and Effective C++, to name a few) while others are glorified API documentation, but all have one thing in common: they have not been opened in over four years. The Internet has made them irrelevant.

I still appreciate physical books - the remaining ten percent of my books are focused on consitutional law and American history, and it would not have been nearly as enjoyable to read them had they been e-books[1]. But the fact that I these extracurricular books are packed away just as tightly as their technology counterparts makes it clear that I have little use for books even when they provide content that isn't available on the Internet; the additional books that I've collected since my last move now sit on top of the boxes and will likely be packed away one weekend when I happen to have an extra cardboard box. Having contemplated this situation for a couple of days, I eventually found enlightenment in an old episode of Seinfeld:

Jerry: So that's it? You're out?

George: Except for one small problem. I left some books in her apartment.

Jerry: So, go get them.

George: Oh, no. No, I can't go back there. Jerry, it's so awkward and, you know, it could be dangerous... sexually. Something could happen, I'd be right back where I started.

Jerry: So forget about the books. Did you read them?

George: Well, yeah.

Jerry: What do you need them for?

George: I don't know. They're books.

Jerry: What is this obsession people have with books? They put them in their houses like they're trophies. What do you need it for after you've read it?

The books that I own were indispensable during my college years. They drenched my insatiable thirst for knowledge and helped me create the kind of software that was being churned out by real programmers, not just the toy projects that we got for homework. Each semester I would buy my textbooks early, read them, and then spend the rest of the semester learning about the things that weren't covered by RPI's curriculum but seemed really exciting, eventually putting those things to work in side projects that I never seemed to finish. This has led to a situation where all of my books are filled with knowledge that could be considered the foundation of my career or tragically antiquated[2]; either way, these books are just trophies that represent my ability to learn the basic skills required of a professional programmer. All of the new and advanced skills that I use in my day job have been gleaned from the countless tutorials and source code repositories scattered across the Internet.

And they're heavy trophies. When I look back on the last three or four moves I've made, the heaviest and most cumbersome thing to move was always my book collection. It's a chronic back problem waiting to happen, and now that I'm approaching my late twenties, I have to consider these things. The only reason I've looked through my books post-graduation was to find and ship two of them to a friend who was unfortunate enough to be working on a project full of old Win32 code.

Is that what my book collection has become? A used book depository for the handful of programmers that I know? It all seems so wasteful[3]. I think the time has come to get rid of my book collection; as anyone who has visited my past apartments will tell you, I've always been kind of a minimalist, and these books are doing more harm than good here in my office. I will try to give them away to college students and other aspiring programmers, but I have a feeling that many of them will go unclaimed, doomed to the recyling bin.

Of course, I don't think it will matter if I toss all of my books and then forget the ins and outs of the Win32 thread API, but it will matter if I can't articulate why I vote the way that I do or learn from past mistakes; for this reason, the lessons of American history will still have a physical presence in my life. So long as they fit in one box.

[1] I'm not saying that e-books are bad or that they will never be popular - they're just not my cup of tea.

[2] It's sad to look back on all of the books that I had to read just to realize that MFC was a disaster.

[3] And heavy - did I mention that?

Labels: books, career, narcissism

Sunday, September 30, 2007

short-sighted

I recently finished Jan Crawford Greenburg's latest book, Supreme Conflict: The Inside Story of the Struggle for Control of the United States Supreme Court, and I have to say, it was remarkably even-handed given its topic. Details from the personal notes and memos of nine current and former Supreme Court justices provide some insight into how the Court runs; a revealing interview with Justice O'Connor adds some extra drama, explaining her early retirement and how we came to have two SCOTUS vacancies at the same time. It was all very personal, and not terribly political. I would recommend it to anyone who finds the judicial branch somewhat mysterious and wants to understand how it affects the lives of average people.

There were two things that came up repeatedly in Supreme Conflict, and neither was particularly encouraging. The first item was how small the political network is in and around Washington. The book covers SCOTUS appointments from the Reagan Administration through Samuel Alito, but during those thirty years, no more than a dozen or so candidates are considered by other side of the American political spectrum. It is clear that if you were not able to land an appointment to the 4th circuit federal appeals court (which requires knowing and having worked with one or more of the president's advisors), the cards are stacked against you and your dreams of serving in the Court. Judges from other appellate courts in other parts of the country are occasionally considered (like the aforementioned Alito), but the vast majority were nominated because top advisors wanted to push their favorites, and said favorites had the opportunity to participate in the Washington, D.C. social network. Geography-based judicial nominations seem incredibly... injudicious... even for politicians.

The second item was how abortion became the primary issue - if not the only issue - that influenced a candidate's support from legislators and the public. No other issue even comes close. In reading the notes and transcripts provided by multiple instances of the executive branch, it is hard to find more than a token concern paid to other issues that the Court might face. Homosexuality, education, property rights, medical marijuana, the Pledge of Allegiance, government surveillance - these things were mentioned, but none was ever a deal breaker. Abortion is the ultimate deal breaker.

I think it's fair to say that putting so much weight on one issue is bound to negatively affect decisions made on other issues. In every case that does not involve abortion, a justice is forced to spend lots of time and mental energy weighing how his opinion in the case may affect current or future abortion-related cases; he may be pressured to make a sub-optimal decision because he is afraid the optimal one may eventually lead to politically unpopular action on the abortion front.

Justices may not face elections or popularity polls, but they certainly face pressure from politicians, friends of the Court, and talking heads who can demonize them as the face of the enemy. Even notoriously independent and aloof justices like Stevens and Thomas must be affected the pressure. No one wants to go into the history books because of a decision that was really a side effect. That's a lot of stress to put on a person who already has pages and pages of case history and legal arguments to absorb.

Finally, I know that if I were appealing a decision that had a major impact on my life and revolved around, say, privacy, I wouldn't want to be short-changed because Justice Bob was worried about the implications to the pro-X crowd. Despite its prominence in the national discussion over Court rulings, abortion-related cases don't make their way onto the docket very often, and yet these potential cases have a significant affect on topics as disparate as gay rights and terrorism. I'm sure this is a fun twist for the lawyers arguing before the Court.

Despite these common themes of cronyism and questionable priorities, the book was great and I enjoyed the opportunity to blog about one of my favorite subjects: consitutional law. Did you like how I mixed in issues that were "critical" to both liberals and conservatives and used variables in order to hide my own opinions? Aren't corporate blogs fun?

Update: I shouldn't have tried to write this post in such a short period of time. I've cleaned up some of the minor problems, but I still wish I had let it simmer a while longer.

Labels: books, culture, narcissism

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dan jemiolo

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chapel hill

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history

I guess we should start with kindergarten. My parents enrolled me in a local Catholic school despite the fact that we a) had no money and b) weren't Catholic. It was a very tumultuous time in my life. My teacher was the meanest I would have until my sophomore year of college, when a stubborn Korean man tried to teach me formal languages and automata using only six words of English. While I was in kindergarten, I met a beautiful little blonde girl named Erica whom I adored for the entire year. She always seemed kind of interested in me, but I could never get her to commit to anything.

Every so often, our teacher would stop giving us condescending lectures about our relative intelligence and read to us. One day, she brought in a new book, Danny and the Dinosaur, and I fell in love with it before she had finished reading. I asked if I could borrow the book, and she agreed to lend it to me for a few days.

I took the book home and I never brought it back.

It never occurred to me to ask for my own copy of the book. At some point, I decided that if I mentioned the book to my parents, they would put the pieces together and figure out that I had already stolen it. I hid the book under my mattress so no one would find it; every so often I would sneak it out to read it, but it would never sit beside the many other dinosaur books that lined my bookshelf. I was a fugitive.

And I still couldn't get the girl, so I was a heart-broken fugitive. Erica and I would always end up playing with Mike Verville, and he would suck up all of her attention. Mike happened to be my best friend, so I couldn't bad-mouth him, but it seemed like Erica would fawn over him for even the slightest thing; I was a clear second place.

My only respite came from the other members of my class, who had no academic prospects at all (at least, that's what our teacher told them). When we read Stone Soup in class, the teacher decided it would be fun if we actually made stone soup; everyone brought in supplies, and we made a fairly bland chicken soup. Unfortunately, one kid (Philip) managed to get his part wrong; this was pretty hard to do, since the book described stone soup as a bunch of random stuff thrown into water. The teacher pointed this out to the rest of the class and chewed him out.

Stone soup may seem trivial compared to reading and arithmetic, but kids are very impressionable at that age, and you can't let them slip up. If you don't get stone soup right, you won't be able to pass the SSAT (Standard Soup Achievement Test), and if you don't pass that, then you won't get into the smart kids' reading group in first grade, and then you'll never make the honor roll, and then you will fail out of school and spend the rest of your life working at Dollar General, blowing all of your money on Keno and cheap European cigars.

At the end of kindergarten, I had learned three things:

Adults should not be trusted.
Uniforms were uncomfortable.
Girls will only pay attention to you if you ignore them.

The next twenty years served to more or less confirm all of this, so I'm just going to gloss over them:

I grew up in Rhode Island. There were five Dunkin' Donuts within a mile of my home. My town was filled with people who, at any given moment, were working at a strip mall or spending money at a strip mall. After almost two decades of eating donuts and buying things we didn't need, my friends and I graduated from high school. Diploma in hand, I moved to New York so I could learn about computers and develop a caffeine addiction.

By the time I was halfway through college, I had grown tired of the Northeast lifestyle. Too hectic, too greedy, too frustrating. Too damn cold. I moved to North Carolina after graduation, and it makes me happy. There are more trees here.

I currently work for a big, blue company, where I spend my days building air castles with imaginary Legos. It's a lot of sitting and typing. Sometimes just sitting, if I have a lot of meetings on my calendar.

When reading this blog, please keep in mind that I am but a lowly programmer, and nothing I say here reflects on the attitudes, decisions, or future plans of the other people working for my employer. You should not put stock in anything I say (literally), nor should you assume that corporate executives are reading this blog and making decisions based on my input. If I were that important, I wouldn't be sitting here typing to you people.