At a friend’s suggestion, I’m reading Cryptonomicon, which is both fascinating and laugh-in-bed-until-I-annoy-Jason hilarious. The only problem is the hubris of trying to read a thousand page book when you have three children under the age of six and a lot of drywall to finish.
Neal Stephenson (author here) manages to do something in this book that I’d aspire to if I could get my shit together enough to write a book: he blends what could be totally disparate interests into this fascinating whole. Until this book, I had no idea what Van Eck Phreaking was, or how a computer actually translated code, pixel by pixel, into the image on screen. Somehow those tidbits fit into a novel on WWII code breaking and modern day data haven development. And, as I said, it’s hysterical.
My brain has a way of latching onto a whole variety of subjects — a trait I usually think of as preventing me from enough focus to really charge into any one area. Whether it’s writing, cooking, construction, communications infrastructure, evolving algorithm data analysis, or the real (and thus far still imaginary) tech expansion of localism, I get totally sucked into the mechanics and possibilities. And then I go back to my day job(s).
But some day, I think I won’t. When Jason is done with school (or maybe before?), I will go off on my own sort of mental dig to see if a driving idea — maybe even one that loops through the topics that seize my brain — is there under all of this clutter. After I finish that book.
