Author: eboisen

This is the second Jon Krakauer book I have read.  The first was Into the Wild.  The book details the events leading up to and following the ascent of several climbers up the world’s tallest mountain, Mount Everest, during the Spring of 1996.  The author was one of the climbers.  He was there to write a piece for Outdoor magazine, which he did, but the events that unfolded went beyond what was expected and a magazine story was not enough to tell the tale.  The author paints mountain climbing beyond 20,000 ft as something that is far from enjoyable.  Mount Everest is 29,029 ft above sea level.  That means that nearly one third of the ascent is packed with misery even under the best of circumstances.

On this particular excursion, an unexpected storm appears just as several climbers are near the peak of Everest.  Through misfortune and altitude-clouded judgment, a series of unfortunate events occur that leave climbers scattered over the upper portions of the mountain unable to move, see, or communicate with one another in a blinding snowstorm.  In the end, a dozen climbers are lost, including two experienced guides.

I had previously watched the movie Everest, which is based on the same events, but told by a climber named Beck Weathers.  Beck is mentioned heavily in the latter portion of Into Thin Air because his particular story is so incredible.  Beck was left for dead high up on the mountain, only to show up under his own power at a campsite despite being blinded and having frostbite so bad that parts of both his feet, his hands, and nose had to be amputated.  He claimed to have found his way to the campsite, without sight, by following the direction of the wind in an area that had a 7,000 foot drop-off!  Could it have been divine intervention that gave him a guiding breeze.  Was it just luck?  He spent more than 24 hours without shelter in -100° F temperatures with hurricane force winds at an altitude that had 1/3 the oxygen of sea level!  Beck, a physician by trade, was a native of Texas, so none of these were conditions he could have been accustomed to.  He was left for dead again at the campsite where others put him in a tent with the intention of just trying to keep him comfortable until he passed.  He was a frozen zombie that seemingly couldn’t be killed.  Beck still practices medicine and still works as a motivational speaker.

The book is very well-written and paints a very grim picture of high-altitude climbing.  The movies based on this event leave out much of the ill-effects of altitude climbing.  Even under good conditions, people often have difficulty digesting food and sleeping at high altitude.  The movies seem to place most of the blame for the misfortune on the storm.  It becomes obvious from the information provided by the author that even the most advanced and experienced climbers are compromised both mentally and physically as they get above 20,000 ft.  It makes me question why people with a casual interest in climbing the peak are allowed to do so.  It appears that anyone with the desire, basic fitness, and $60,000, or so in cash can attempt a guided climb.  To me, skydiving seems a far safer and enjoyable experience, but to each, his own, I suppose.

The only knock I have on the book is something that I am not sure could have been mitigated.  The author, due to this being a work of non-fiction, includes more characters than is practical for a reader to keep track of.  Many are secondary characters to the story, but the author seems to have a fear of leaving anyone out.  There are seven main characters, which the film adaptations focus on, but the book contains at least 20 characters.  Overall, I highly recommend the book.  It does a great job of bringing vivid pictures of high-altitude climbing to the reader without the inherent risks.

I traveled to Toronto recently and brought this book with me.  It was a very easy read.  I read 89 pages during my flight over and the remainder over the course of two evenings.  The book is implicitly for someone who has a desire to be successful in creative endeavors such as writing.  Obviously, the author, Steven Pressfield, has experience doing this since I am writing about his book.  He also had success with the novel, The Legend of Bagger Vance.  This book goes much deeper than just pursuing something artistic.  It explores avenues to discover your “true genius”.  The author believes that everyone has a strong purpose for existing on this earth.  Every individual may vary on the spectrum of attributes as to what that purpose is.  The idea is to give in to the process of creation in such a manner that allows an almost mystical force to help guide you.

This book is valuable even if you do not view yourself as a creative person.  The point that stuck with me most is to find the non-essential thing in your life that you would still do if you were the last person on earth.  This thing is probably related to your purpose.  The author also touches on individual and societal happiness  as being related to the pursuit of one’s purpose.  In this respect, this book really applies to everyone.

The book was released in 2002, so it makes some references to successful people such as Lance Armstrong, Tiger Woods, and Arnold Schwarzenegger prior to their respective ignominious fiascoes.  The examples are appropriate in referencing their successes, but I am guessing the author would have found different people had he known their not-too-distant futures.  I highly recommend this book.  It is very thought-provoking and was well worth the time you’ll spend reading it.

I just finished my third Kurt Vonnegut novel.  I had high hopes for this one.  It is always cited as one of his most ‘famous’ works, behind Slaughterhouse-Five.  I found Slaughterhouse-Five to be incredibly creative and captivating.   It is a once-in-a-lifetime type of work.  Even Breakfast of Champions was fun to read despite being Vonnegut’s own least favorite work.

I just checked to see where in his career Vonnegut wrote this novel.  It was his first.  That explains some things.  He seemed to have some portions of the book really polished, but there were others that seemed below par for a writer of his caliber.  The pictures he paints so vividly in other novels are obviously being painted with tools he did not enjoy at this point in his career.  Player Piano was published in 1952, and Slaughterhouse-Five in 1969.  That is a world of difference.  I am a little happier with having read the book, knowing this.  I got to see the progression of a really great writer.  He must have really worked on his craft.

The book starts off in a world where everything has been automated and there is no need for the “average” worker.  The automation equipment that produces everything is run by only the most educated engineers.  Revenue is generated by taxing the automation equipment.  The tax proceeds are then distributed to the common people in the form of furnished housing and small stipends.  Anyone with an IQ below a certain number is destined for a life without purpose.  Those with a higher IQ are allowed to maintain the equipment and run the manufacturing facilities.  These higher IQ people are not given lavish wages, but but are given many times the discretionary income of the average person.

Most people fell below the high IQ threshold and were thus marginalized.  Many of them were skilled machinists or tradesmen before the complete takeover of automation.  They were not the smartest people IQ-wise, but some were able to do extraordinarily skilled tasks.  They were proud of their skills and they wanted to use them.  Being provided for was not enough.  A life without a purpose was not a life.

Early in the story, the main character, Paul, a high IQ engineer, stops in a bar frequented by those with lesser IQ’s.  He sees that he is despised for what he has, and what they do not.  He recognizes that his wife enjoys the life of someone with a high IQ despite not having one herself.  She married into it.  He recognizes that this status is all she desires.  She doesn’t really care for him.  This situation causes Paul to become despondent and push away the system that he seems to be the benefactor of.  In the end, he becomes the unlikely figurehead of the “Ghost Shirt Society” that eventually rebels and overthrows the oppressive machines.

I built my first app in Android Studio.  I have used IDEs such as Visual Studio, Netbeans, and Eclipse previously.  I understand that whenever someone is new to something, there is often a natural aversion to it, but this IDE is complete garbage.  Almost nothing is intuitive from a hierarchical menu perspective.  I had to take notes so that I could find my Java code and layout after I had created them.  I can’t think of anything else that is so poorly designed from a human factors perspective.  Why would it not be obvious where the main code would be in the project?  I am having a really hard time believing that people who write apps for a living actually use this.  This is Google’s “Official” platform.  Google is a smart company with really deep pockets.  I can’t  believe this is what they have come up with – even if it is free to download.  Every time I do anything with Android Studio, it seem like it barks a nondescript error that I have to spend 20 minutes looking up on Google.  Maybe that’s the purpose – to make people use their search engine more, or maybe they put their ‘B’ team on creating this one.

Anyway, I wrote an app that encrypts text that is typed into to it by means of a 16 character encryption password, or “key”.

The text is typed into the top field, in this case “Peace sells, but who’s buying?”  A 16 character Encryption key, “a16 CharacterKey”, in this instance, is entered and then the “Encrypt” button is pressed.  The original text becomes jumbled and unreadable.  To get the original text back, the user presses the “Decrypt” button the same number of times the “Encrypt” button was pressed.  This little app allows messages to be hidden from others.  You can copy the jumbled text over to an email or text and send it to a friend.  That friend can read the text only if he/she has the app and knows the encryption key.  It is a pretty bare-bones app, but it does work really well.  The algorithm is basically the same one I used to generate license keys for the DeltaV validation software I wrote.  I came up with it based on the principles taught in my NCSU ECE574 Network Security and Encryption course.  I did not, however, use any standard encryption method.

I finished Isaac Asimov’s Foundation novel.  The entire setting is in a far-off galaxy in the distant future.  The story shows how religion and economics influence and shape society.  The setting is futuristic and fictional, but the core of the story could easily be told with modern day Earth as a setting and each of the fictional worlds as different countries and their representative governments.  Asimov appears to have a keen understanding of how large groups of people function and malfunction as a society.  This novel could easily be made into several films.  I believe it would actually tell much better as a film.

There are far more characters in this book than most people are able to follow without backtracking, myself included.  Multimedia(film/tv) would allow this story to be told without the viewer/reader losing track of who is who.  There are five characters in the beginning  “Psychohistorian” chapters, nine in the “Encyclopedists” chapters, and fifteen in the “Mayors” chapters alone.  I have read that this novel was compiled as a “fix-up” – a collection of four short stories grouped as a novel.  There are two Foundation novels following this one, forming a Trilogy.  It does not appear that the other two novels were compiled in this manner.  I love the story-telling and writing style, but prefer a much shorter list of more-developed characters.   I recommend this book for the great insight that Asimov gives on human behavior, but believe most readers will find the voluminous cast of characters tiresome to follow.  I am likely going to read the next novel in the Foundation trilogy because I enjoyed the story-telling of Asimov and hope the following novels will be more cohesive as they were not written piecemeal as a collection of short stories.  For the time being, however, I already have a copy of Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano, so that is next on my list.

I misplaced my Foundations book last weekend, so I read Theodore Sturgeon’s Microcosmic God.  I became familiar with Theodore Sturgeon through reading Kurt Vonnegut’s novels.  Vonnegut has a fictional author named “Kilgore Trout” as a character in several of his novels.  Kilgore sounds like Theodore, and Trout is a fish just as a sturgeon is a fish.  Vonnegut and Sturgeon were friends and this is, presumably, why his fictional representation exists in Vonnegut novels.  The fictional character is a brilliant, but ignored author who is always a moment away from greatness that is inevitably cut short through a series of extremely unfortunate events.  Perhaps this mirrored Sturgeon’s own life?

Microcosmic God tells the story of an incredibly brilliant, reclusive inventor, Kidder, who, despite making many great inventions at a furious pace, is dissatisfied with his progress.  To combat this, Kidder engineers miniature, human-like species that he keeps in little half-acre, enclosed, worlds on his own private island.  These intelligent creations live entire lifetimes within months.  He employs these communities to do scientific research on his behalf.  They do several generations of scientific work every year to bring Kidder’s ideas to life.  One would worry that these brilliant little people would surpass Kidder’s intelligence and do away with him, but Kidder has thought of everything.  His creations were bred to breathe ammonia and find oxygen toxic, so escape from their little enclosed world is not an option.  Kidder is viewed by his creations as a God.  In the end, unfortunately, Kidder’s undoing is the outside human world.  A banker whose greed has skyrocketed off of Kidder’s continuous stream of profitable inventions forces Kidder to enclose himself and his island under an invisible dome.  A dome that presumably will come down after Kidder lives out his natural life and his little creations eventually figure out a way to take over Earth.

I ditched Jack Kerouac’s novel.  I found myself having to give too much effort to read it.  It is well written in that it does a great job of describing events, but at 65 pages in, it was meandering with no apparent point.  I stumbled upon Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea on a shelf in a place I was staying at in Newport Beach.  It was a really easy read.  I have started a Hemingway novel before and lost interest.  I believe the novel was Death in the Afternoon.  Perhaps I did not enjoy it because I have no interest in bullfighting.  That aside, I really enjoyed The Old Man and the Sea in a Tom Hanks’ Cast Away sort of way.  There are really only two characters – the old man “Santiago” and a younger fisherman’s helper just referred to as the boy.  A great deal of the story is just the Cuban fisherman, Santiago, on his small skiff out in the ocean.  I found it amazing that Hemingway could create such an interesting story with so little in terms of character and setting.  This was a very short book – about 125 pages and I read it in just three sittings.  Anyone who enjoys the ocean would probably love this book.

I finished Breakfast of Champions – the Kurt Vonnegut novel, not Caitlyn’s favorite cereal in a former gender.  The title comes from the phrase a cocktail waitress within the story says every time she serves a martini.  Kurt Vonnegut morphs the narration of the story from third person, slowly to that of him being the narrator by the last chapter.  He is also presented as a sort of Microcosmic God to the characters within.  Despite often moving the story haphazardly through space and time, the story is pretty easy to follow.  This is more a testament to the author’s story-telling prowess rather than the simplicity of his tales.  After I read Slaughterhouse Five, I could not believe how easily he moved his characters to other planets and eras.  That was a very complex story, but it was incredibly easy to read.  Most authors would lose their audience if they attempted such abrupt setting and character changes.  I really do not know how to categorize his work.  It has comic, dramatic, and science fiction elements, but it does not really fit into any of these categories.   His stories tell so easily, in fact, that I wonder if he had the ability to view the goings-on of some alternate universe and he was simply documenting it.  I have Player Piano, which I will get to soon, but I am going to likely read Desolation Angels (Kerouac) – another garage bookshelf find, or Foundations (Asimov) next.

Imagine being an engineer trying to gather parts to build your design:

You find a part on a shelf.  You can put your hand on it.  You can see the part number printed on it.  To order it for a project five people now have to get involved and you have to figure out how to get the part number to order it because the number on the box and the number on the shelf are different than the numbers you need to use to order it.   These numbers are also different than the manufacturer’s part number.  All the numbers that refer to this particular part appear to be unique.  Why are there so many unique numbers?  What is the point of them being unique if they all describe the same part?  These numbers also do not cross-reference each other in the SAP portals engineers have available to them.  How does this system not make the company less efficient and therefore less profitable?  Why is this idiotic system being employed?  If a person participates in this idiotic system does that make that person an idiot by proxy?  I believe that feeling is inescapable.  Perhaps a cone-shaped hat should be ordered as well?