I've decided to upgrade to WordPress and at the same time move this blog to a shiny new domain. You'll find me now at stpeter.im. Please update your links and feeds accordingly!

While my wife and I were moving a largish pile of bricks today, I was reminded of some words from Stewart Brand in How Buildings Learn (pp. 120-121):

Brick is a superlative building material, the product of 8,000 years of experience in firing clay into modular units that can be mortared together and stacked by hand into unreinforced structures as high as sixteen stories. [insert reference to the Monadnock Building here] .... 'Bricks are heavenly,' says contractor Matisse Enzer, 'because they require relatively little technology to create, build with, and modify. Bricks allow a wonderful variety of patterns and degrees of softness-hardness, permanence-temporariness. Most of all, they are intuitively obvious.' Bricks, more than any other material, look like they were made to fit the human hand. With dimensions of 8 inches by 4 inches by 2-2/3 inches, one brick long equals two bricks wide or three bricks wide (including mortar joints), so a wide variety of bond or decorative patterns is possible....

There is a wonderful stability in long-lived technologies like bricks. Humans have been making and handling them for so long that they do indeed feel natural and intuitively obvious. (To me, books have that same kind of wonderful stability.)

Here's another good reason to keep your blog free of advertising and tipjars: non-commercial websites may protect you from libel lawsuits. (IANAL, YMMV.)

My cousin Ineke has launched her own line of perfumes and it's been getting quite a bit of attention -- check it out at ineke.com.

The last time I was in New York City, I stole a few hours to walk around Morningside Heights and Riverside Park (in the pouring rain!) in search of the many fine public statues I remember from my days at Columbia University. At some point I'll write up a detailed walking tour, but before I forget here are some of the pieces I enjoyed most, in rough walking order from north to south:

• Carl Schurz by Karl Bitter (Morningside Avenue at 116th Street)
• One of 8 original recastings by Auguste Rodin of The Thinker (appropriately enough, in front of Philosophy Hall)
• Scholar's Lion by Greg Wyatt (near Havemeyer Hall)
• The Great God Pan by George Grey Barnard (near Lewisohn Hall)
• Alma Mater by D.C. French (on College Walk)
• Alexander Hamilton by William Ordway Partridge (in front of Hamilton Hall)
• Thomas Jefferson by William Ordway Partridge (in front of Journalism Hall)
• Art and Science by Charles Keck (at the main entrance to the Columbia University campus, Broadway at 116th Street)
• On the campus of Barnard College, an unnamed statue by Charles Beach celebrating the Barnard Greek Games
• Lajos Kossuth (sculptor unknown, further research required) (Riverside at 113th Street)
• Samuel Tilden by William Ordway Partridge (Riverside at 112th Street)
• The Straus Memorial by Augustus Lukeman (West End Avenue at 106th Street)
• Frank Sigel by Karl Bitter (Riverside at 106th Street)
• The Firemen's Memorial by Attilio Piccirilli (Riverside at 100th Street)
• Joan of Arc by Anna Hyatt Huntington (Riverside at 93rd Street)

I'm flying to San Jose in a few hours for VON, where I will be participating in a panel discussion entitled "My Mother Uses Skype -- Why Bother With Standards?"

It should be a lot of fun. :)

I'm flying to Orlando tomorrow for VoiceCon, where I will be participating in a panel discussion (scroll down) on the role of open source software in converged networks. And no I will not be visiting Disney World! ;-)

It seems that I'm not the only family member publishing things on the web. My sister Yvette has written a remembrance of Samantha Smith as part of the celebration of 200 years of diplomatic relations between America and Russia.

Tomorrow will be a travel day for me as I fly from Denver to Brussels for FOSDEM. I should be online again from Brussels sometime on Friday. TTFN. :-)

Tyler Cowen extols the work of Seth Roberts on self-experimentation -- methodically studying the effect on one's own life of changes in diet, exercise, and other habits. As a result of his studies, Roberts does some unusual things, such as stand at least 8 hours a day (which he claims greatly improves his sleep). Although I like the idea of self-experimentation, I think Roberts is too quick to extrapolate from his own experience to principles that might apply to others. While I don't want to sleep poorly, either, I've found that the best way for me to sleep soundly is to stay up later (e.g., last night I went to sleep too early and was awake between 3 and 4 AM or so). Roberts claims that eating breakfast is highly overrated, but I find that for myself it is absolutely essential to optimal functioning both physically and mentally. Etc. So as far as I can see, the key to self-experimentation is to take your own experience seriously. Just because something works for someone else, doesn't mean it will work for you. That's methodological individualism in action!

When you give as many conference talks as I do, eventually someone is going snap some photos of you. That happened to me twice at EuroOSCON 2006, the shooters being Edwin Mons and Piers Cawley -- check out their photos here and here (that last one is a bit freaky, eh?).

There's much talk of a tipping point in this WSJ article (HT: Glenn Reynolds), which notes that in 2006 oil consumption dropped in the developed countries dropped for the first time in twenty years. It's funny how consumption responds to price, eh? Last year I put 4554 miles on my '95 Trooper, and I bet this year the number will be even lower. One swallow does not a summer make, but I for one wouldn't complain if oil-producing countries like Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Venezuela started to feel the pinch of reduced demand...

I used to own a lot of books. Then I started selling them off. Eventually I hope to get down to a short list of fifty books (or fewer!). Here's my start at the list, roughly grouped into categories...

Philosophy: I need my two-volume complete works of Aristotle, plus the Nicomachean Ethics in Greek and English (Terence Irwin's translation) in case I get around to rendering it into English. That's 4.

More Philosophy: I want to translate and compile a "best of Nietzsche" sometime. So I need my four-volume Nietzsche in German, plus various translations by Kaufmann and Hollingdale. +15 = 19.

Even More Philosophy: the Tao Te Ching, the works of Epicurus in English and Greek, "A Soviet Heretic" by Yevgeny Zamyatin, and "On Love" by Jose Ortega y Gasset. +5 = 24.

Reference: The two-volume, photo-reduced version of the Oxford English Dictionary, a more user-friendly English dictionary, The Synonym Finder, and dictionaries and grammars for Latin, ancient Greek, and German. +10 = 34.

History: "The Evolution of Civilizations" by Carroll Quigley, "Albion's Seed" by David Hackett Fischer, "The Anglosphere Challenge" by Jim Bennett. +3 = 37.

Fiction: "WE" by Yevgeny Zamyatin, "Anthem" by Ayn Rand, "Les Miserables" by Victor Hugo, "I Am David" by Anne Holm. +4 = 41.

Poetry: The complete poems of Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, A.E. Housman, Sappho (Greek and English), Horace (Latin and English), Emily Dickinson, and Walter Kaufmann. +9 = 50.

Ta-da!

For the first time since September, my inbox is clear. Wow, what a good feeling.

Why is the world so full of noise? So many people yammering on the phone all day like they can't stand to be alone in their own silence and solitude for more than two minutes. Television sets blaring away at the airport and the car repair place and the dentist's office. Those incessant announcements about homeland security threat levels being raised to orange or puce or mauve or whatever it is now. The visual noise of advertisements and billboards and pop-up ads and junk mail and spam. The vitriolic ravings and ceaseless chatter of talk radio and politicians and pundits. It's all gliding over the surface of things, indicative of a fundamental fear of diving deep into understanding, introspection, and reflection. And I'm tired of it!

End rant.

Here's a choice and timely quote from Mark Twain regarding New Year's resolutions:

Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual. Yesterday, everybody smoked his last cigar, took his last drink, and swore his last oath. Today, we are a pious and exemplary community. Thirty days from now, we shall have cast our reformation to the winds and gone to cutting our ancient shortcomings considerably shorter than ever.

I don't think I've ever made a New Year's resolution, and I don't think I ever shall.

But speaking of the new year, dontcha think it's appropriate to lop off the millennium and call this one "007"? :-)

Here's a fun idea (HT: David Aitken):

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal...along with these instructions.
5. Don't search around and look for the "coolest" book you can find. Do what's actually next to you.

I'd prefer it to be "the last book you've read", but in this case they are one and the same because I've just finished re-reading (parts of) Albion's Seed by David Hackett Fischer. Page 123 is an illustration so I proceed to page 124, where the fifth sentence reads as follows:

Every part of the religious ritual of Congregational New England was thus centered on the word of God -- the design of the meetinghouse; the enforcement of Mosaic law; the structure of the sermon; the pattern of Puritan prayer; the form of psalmody.

This evening I got my inbox down below 300 messages. Unfortunately I'm going to be offline for the next four days, and when I sync back up with my inbox it'll be quite full again. Sigh.

About six months ago I instituted drastic measures regarding the flood of email I receive. For a while I was doing quite well. Unfortunately, in the last few weeks my inbox has ballooned up to 700 items. Ouch! Time to get back to basics. Expect lots of outgoing email from me next week. :-)

In my copious spare time I've been reading the following books of late:

• This Is Your Brain On Music by Daniel Levitin
• Restoring the Lost Constitution by Randy Barnett
• The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition by Michael Tomasello
• Authentic Happiness by Martin Seligman
• Aristotle's Ethics in the fine translation by Terence Irwin
• Before the Dawn by Nicholas Wade

I doubt I'll have time to report on them here, but they're all pretty interesting so far.

I'm currently reading the following books:

• Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being by George Lakoff and Rafael Nuñez
• The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments by Gertrude Himmelfarb
• Why I Am Not a Muslim by Ibn Warraq
• Jihad in the West: Muslim Conquests from the 7th to the 21st Centuries by Paul Fregosi

The last two are pretty depressing, but I'll probably post about that 25 days from now.

On and off over the years, I've considered a switch to the Dvorak keyboard layout, but I've never gotten around to it. However, chatting with Kevin Smith and Remko Tronçon earlier today has spurred me to perhaps give it a try over the next few weeks. Bloggage may be light since my typing skills will be so challenged. :-)

I'll be in Montreal most of next week for IETF 66. In addition to catching up on what's happening with various standardization efforts, I'll be giving brief presentations before the SIMPLE WG (about draft-saintandre-xmpp-simple) and the ATOM WG (about draft-saintandre-atompub-notify). See you in Montreal!

There's a 120-year-old cottonwood tree in my front yard, which this year is home to a family of Cooper's Hawks. Last night around 8:00, one of the nestlings either fell out of the nest or, I think, was forced out by the parent hawks. This morning the nestling was on our porch and seemingly unable to fly, so we called around and located some volunteers who could collect the young hawk and take it to the Birds of Prey Foundation, where we hope it is being well take care of. Thanks to volunteers Ken and Theresa from Northglenn, Colorado, and to the folks at the Birds of Prey Foundation, it seems that the raptor rescue was a success.

Well I added a picture of me to my blog template the other day, and today I created a favicon. What is that little image in your browser's location bar? Why, the keys of stpeter, naturally! :-)

Last night I met with new UPCC president Bill Winn, communications chair Rosemary Stoffel, and my partner in crime Henry Ammons about the website for Denver's University Park neighborhood (where I moved last September). We're using MediaWiki as the content engine so it's easy to update, though the software has its quirks (e.g., modifying the templates is a bit of a pain). But at least I figured out how to link to the RSS feed. Now if only Google would learn that www.upcc.us deserves to be the highest ranking page for searches on University Park Denver... :-)

OK, the experiment is ended: I've removed the Google Ads from this blog. A few reasons:

• I notice the ads don't even show up when I use Tor (and Tor rocks)
• I earned only $3.76 in a little over a month
• I could have earned more but I would have needed to make the ads more prominent (and I didn't want to do that)
• I was never very comfortable with the idea in the first place

I hope you enjoy this public-domain, ad-free corner of the web.

These days I eat lunch alone at my desk. For three or four years I had lunch just about every workday with Peter Millard. There is something special about breaking bread with a friend and talking about anything you please. We had some great, wide-ranging conversations over the years, which I sorely miss.

BTW, the Rocky Mountain News has published an obituary of Peter.

Joe Hildebrand has posted some information about the memorial service for Peter Millard, which will take place on Wednesday, May 3, 2006 at 7:30 PM, at the Broomfield United Methodist Church in Broomfield, Colorado.

Peter's family has requested that, in lieu of flowers, donations be made in Peter's name to the following charities:

• The RMCC Foundation (1683 Red Poppy Drive, Suite 100, Brighton, CO 80601 USA)
• The Boulder Community Hospital Foundation (P.O. Box 9019, Boulder, CO 80301 USA)

As promised, I am still thinking about ways to help Peter's wife Christina and infant daughter Zoe more directly.

OK, despite my trepidations, I'm going to pilot-test inclusion of Google Ads in the right column of my blog. Consider this a temporary experiment.

It seems I forgot to mention that my website recently experienced its tenth anniversary. Back in January of 1996, I started converting The Ism Book and some of my essays to HTML, and the first, ultra-basic version of my website went live in February or March of that year. Although I had been active on various email discussion lists since 1993 (yes, I'm a relative latecomer to the Internet), I was still a clueless newbie when it came to things like HTML (which I probably edited in MS Word!) and FTP (which I recall confused me to no end at first). That sure seems like a long time ago now, but we've all got to start somewhere...

Stowe Boyd says that "the top 20,000 blogs or so (today) can make serious bank, enough to be, as Fleishman puts it, a "significant minority" of the author's income." Technorati says that my blog is ranked around 30,572. I suppose that if I worked at it -- blogged every day, added comments, used a real blogging tool instead of my homegrown system, etc. -- I could crack the top 20,000 quite easily. Then I could replace one of the columns in my layout with Google Ads and I could make some money off these scribblings. But do I want to? I'm not sure...

I admit it: I've lapsed. In particular, my email inbox is no longer clear. Too much of travelling and catching up, not enough of following my personal productivity regimen. It's time to get back on track...

I'm heading to Nashville today to give a talk tomorrow at the VoIPossibilities conference. Unfortunately I don't think I'll have time to check out any hot bluegrass. Maybe next time...

I spent today attending the funeral of Chris Tame. I never met Chris in person -- we corresponded only by email over the years. He re-published several of my essays at the Libertarian Alliance and encouraged me to write several new ones especially for LA, which I did in 2004 (Ayn Rand and American Culture and Ayn Rand and the Ascent of Man). I had always wanted to meet Chris if I ever got to London. This week I got to London but Chris was gone. May he rest in peace.

I've arrived in London. Body time says it's 06:53 AM, local time says it's 14:53 PM. I think I'll take a shower and find a meal -- I suppose that would be lunch...

Paul Hoffman posted the text of an amusing bumper sticker he spotted, so I figured I'd recount a few of my favorites:

• Congress Happens.
• Visualize Using Your Turn Signal.
• Gravity: It's Not Just A Good Idea, It's The Law.
• My Golden Retriever Is Smarter Than Your Honor Student.
• Clinton: The President Who Did It Between The Bushes.

As mentioned, I've been working on my personal productivity habits. I'm happy to report that after 7 days my inbox is still empty! Also I've updated the format of my .plan to better reflect project priorities and the specific tasks I need to complete on each project (plus it's sortable now, too). So far I've studiously avoided the need to perform time and motion studies in my efforts to become a more productive individual... ;-)

OK, back to work!

Next week I'll be participating in a panel discussion on Reinventing Enterprise Communications at the 21st Century Communications World Forum. I'll be in London for about five days, so if you want to get together to talk about Jabber or the Anglosphere or Ayn Rand or poetry or music or anything else (preferably over a pint), do let me know. My daytime schedule is pretty much full of meetings with various companies who are using Jabber, but my evenings are mostly free so far.

For the last day and a half I've been reading through email. I was getting dangerously close to 1000 messages in my inbox again and feeling overloaded. Now my inbox is utterly empty -- that's right, zero messages. Following various suggestions about personal productivity found on the Net, my new regimen is this:

• Dispatch all inbox emails immediately by deleting, replying (if brief), creating calendar events, or adding an item to my todo list.
• If an email generates a calendar event or a todo list item, move it to a dedicated email folder for the relevant project (don't leave it in the inbox!).

Next step: prioritizing my todo list items and getting to work. :-)

Since my post earlier today, I've been thinking about ways to improve my personal productivity. Here's one approach I've come up with:

• Devote the morning hours to my highest priority tasks for the day.
• Don't check email, read news, or log into IM until after lunch.
• At the end of each day, formulate a short list of priority tasks for the next morning.
• Lather, rinse, repeat.

I may try this next week.

Productivity matters, both for nations and for individuals (national productivity is just the sum of the productivity of the individuals living there). Lately I've been feeling a pressing need to become more personally productive. Partly it's that I'm overwhelmed with work. There is so much to do, my email inbox is growing daily, I'm in IM conversations all day long, more and more people want to do stuff with Jabber and it's hard to service them all, and there are many XMPP extensions that I need to solidify because, well, I'm the guy who writes the docs (yes, "I write the specs that make the whole world sing"). So I've started to look into productivity tools and, especially, changes to my work habits. Unfortunately I know that behavior changes will require me to keep careful track of my time and all that, but I suppose there's no avoiding it. Sigh.

Here's the word cloud for one small voice:

Get yours here.

Last night I posted a cartoon (no, not those cartoons!) at my blog but after further reflection I realized that I don't agree with one of the premises behind it: the stereotyping of people from different cultures. I am deeply opposed to any attempt at stifling free speech -- whether that might happen in the Islamic world or in the West (e.g., the recent jailing of a Holocaust-denier in Austria). But not all Muslims or Westerners or whatever are equivalent. More than a defender of free speech or Western civilization, I am an individualist. I realize that individualism is a core value of the West, but it can flourish in non-Western societies as well. Sorry to have posted something with which I don't agree.

The OED says this about "whelm" as a transitive verb:

1. To cover completely with water or other fluid so as to ruin or destroy; to submerge, drown; occasionally, to sink (a boat).
2. To bury under a load of earth, snow, or the like.
3. To engulf or bear down like a flood, storm, avalanche, etc.; hence to involve in destruction or ruin.

I think I am now officially whelmed by work.

Since today is a company holiday at my employer, I finally found time to beef up the website of the University Park Community Council, which I started working on about three weeks ago. The site now includes lots more information about development and transportation, as well as contact information for neighborhood committee chairs, elected representatives, and the like.

As usual, Stowe nails it:

Bloggers are individuals, in general. And as such, what we write on the web is personal, biased, unfiltered, unregulated, and, yes, free. Free as in free speech. Free as in uncensored. Free as in personal, idiosyncratic, and even unpopular.

And:

Bloggers are playing an important role in this new world, where the traditional gatekeepers have less sway. But we aren't the old gatekeepers, and looking at me and /Message like I am the New York Times or ABC News is laughable. There is no organization, no corporate policies, nothing. Just me. Stowe. The person.

I'm not into blogospheric navel-gazing, meta-blogging, or whatever you want to call it. But, dammit, blogging matters because it releases the free voice of the individual. It goes all the way back to the first flowing of individualism among the ancient Greeks, as I talked about in my podcast last night. No disclaimers, no restrictions, no permits, no licenses, no regulations, no censorship, no burkas for the thinking mind. Just the freedom to voice my own thoughts and take responsibility for the consequences.

Repeat after me: I am an individual!

I just split the old "art" category here at one small voice into two categories, one for literature and one for music.

Last night I gave a short presentation at the meeting of my local neighborhood association, the University Park Community Council. Fellow UP resident Henry Ammons and I have been working on a new website for our neighborhood, which we've unveiled at <http://www.upcc.us/>. We still have a lot of content to add, but we'll work to get much of it online in the next few weeks. Enjoy!

For my presentation at ETel yesterday, I adopted the rapid-fire presentation style pioneered by Larry Lessig. Ever since I saw Dick Hardt give his Identity 2.0 talk at OSCON 2005, I've been itching to try it out. It requires more preparation and practice to get the timing right, and the slides don't make much sense to someone who wasn't there, but rapid-fire presenting really grabs the audience (that's how I felt when Dick gave his presentation, and people who experienced my presentation seem to agree). The rapid-fire style also deeply engages the presenter, because you're not just speaking, you're performing. I found the experience similar to playing music, especially the kind of music I've played as a singer-songwriter -- you're all alone on stage with nowhere to hide. This is going to be my preferred presentation style from now on, at least before large groups (for small groups, up to 25 or 30 people, I prefer a more conversational approach with lots of ad-hoc scribbling on a whiteboard).

Inspired by Phil Zimmerman's talk at ETel, I just generated a new PGP key. BTW, Phil's zFone technology for securing RTP might be of interest as we work on Jingle.

It seems that my Atom feeds have been causing problems because my XSLTs were rewriting ID tags (thanks to Joe LaPenna for the bug report!). I think I have that fixed now, but if not, feel free to let me know.

About six weeks ago I listed a bunch of books I need to read. Since then I've read or skimmed Johnson's The Offshore Islanders, Landes's The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, Patterson's Freedom in the Making of Western Culture, McNeil's The Rise of the West, Cipolla's Guns, Sails, and Empires, Gellner's Plough, Sword and Book, Zelinsky's The Cultural Geography of the United States, and a few others besides. Right now I'm reading The Measure of Reality by Alfred W. Crosby, which is triggering yet another reading list:

• C. Cipolla, Before the Industrial Revolution
• J. Gimpel, The Medieval Machine
• D. Landes, Revolution in Time
• R. Lopez, The Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages
• A. Murray, Reason and Society in the Middle Ages
• L. White, Medieval Technology and Social Change

I just spent a few hours updating my essays on Ayn Rand -- mostly cosmetic changes and consistency checks (e.g., to make sure they are all properly labelled as in the public domain). One of these days I'll print them all out and edit them a bit, though I might wait until I finish my essay on Rand and Aristotle...

Update: I've also removed all instances of "obviously", "certainly", "of course", and other such lazy phrases, as well as all instances of "ought" and "should" (consistent with my essay Letting Go of Ought).

Update #2: I've also removed all instances of "very", "really", "just", "actually", and other such nothing words.

No, this blog does not have a comments feature. There are several reasons:

• I prefer to receive comments over a spam-free communications technology (a.k.a. Jabber).
• I already have enough dealings with one spam-infested medium (a.k.a. email) and I don't want to deal with another (a.k.a. blog spam).
• Everything at saint-andre.com is in the public domain. I have no idea if you want your comments to be in the public domain too, so to avoid any possible legal hassles I ask that you post your words somewhere else.

In short, it's not my job to provide an outlet for things you might want to say. If you want to say something in public, become a full citizen of the Internet and run your own damn website.

Yes, this is a harsh policy, but I'm not about to change it. Sorry. :-)

After attending an academic gathering recently, I got to thinking about why I generally don't like university professors. It's not just that most of them have an ego the size of Canada, think they're morally and intellectually superior to us mere professionals, and have political views somewhere to the left of Fidel Castro. No, I realized it's because they are so insulated from the market yet so disdainful of the very market economy that makes it possible for them to have their cozy little existence safely ensconced within the groves of academe. Heck, even the free-market professors I respect tend to teach at large, government-run institutions of higher learning -- it's not as if they are educational entrepreneurs out there exposing themselves to market forces by starting small, innovative, or for-profit schools.

I've gone in halfsies with DizzyD on his new hosting arrangement with RimuHosting. Other than a blog snafu that I just fixed (my blog was pointing to his!), the move is going well so far. If you see anything awry, feel free to contact me.

One of the problems with reading large tomes of history and social science is that every book you pick up leads you to several more. Herewith a rather large number of books that have recently bubbled up onto my reading list:

• C. Cipolla, Guns, Sails, and Empires: Technological Innovation and the Early Phases of European Expansionism
• D. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor
• E.L. Jones, The European Miracle: Environments, Economics, and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia
• W. McNeill, The Rise of the West
• O. Patterson, Freedom in the Making of Western Culture
• P. Rahe, Republics, Ancient and Modern
• B. Bachrach, Merovingian Military Organization
• R. Dales, The Intellectual Life of Western Europe in the Middle Ages
• F. Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century: The Perspective of the World
• S. Eisenstadt, Japanese Civilization: A Comparative View
• G. Woodcock, The Marvellous Century: Archaic Man and the Awakening of Reason
• D. Howell, The Edge of Now: New Questions for Democracy in the Network Age
• T. Sowell, Conquests and Cultures: An International History
• T. Sowell, Migrations and Cultures: A World View
• T. Sowell, Race and Culture: A World View
• P. Johnson, The Offshore Islanders
• N. Cantor, Imagining the Law: Common Law and the Foundations of the American Legal System
• A. Zamoyski, Holy Madness: Romantics, Patriots, and Revolutionaries, 1776-1871
• M. Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic
• D. Gress, From Plato to NATO: The Idea of the West and Its Opponents
• Harrison and Huntington, Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress
• J. Kotkin, Tribes: How Race, Religion and Identity Determine Success in the New Global Economy
• G. Das, India Unbound: The Social and Economic Revolution from Independence to the Global Information Age
• N. van Hear, New Diasporas: The Mass Exodus, Dispersal, and Regrouping of Communities
• G. Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence
• W. Mean, Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World
• J. Jacobs, Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics
• J. Jacobs, Cities and the Wealth of Nations: Principles of Economic Life

Following up on my previous post about the construction project next door, a quick call to the city of Denver's building permit department this morning revealed that the builder is Sonoran Custom Homes. The folks there seemed quite friendly and at my request the superindendent stopped by our house today to chat, so we now have open communication lines, which is a Good Thing [tm]. Still, I'm surprised that it's not standard operating procedure for builders to stop by the homes of near neighbors before they start tearing down the house next door. Not only is that the neighborly thing to do, but you figure it would be a small price to pay for improved relations (read: fewer complaints lodged with the city inspectors).

There are two main forms of residential development in Denver: pops (remove the roof and "pop the top" by adding a second floor) and scrapes (tear down the old house and put up a new one). Sometimes these things can happen quite quickly. For example, I flew out of town on Sunday night to speak at the IP4IT conference in Las Vegas, and when I returned 48 hours later the house next door had been torn down. I don't think this scrape-in-progress is going to be a lot of fun for those of us who live next door. Step one: find out who the developer is...

A few weeks ago I got up to 2500 messages in my email inbox, at which point I vowed that something had to be done. So I implemented a simple rule: end each day with fewer emails than I started with. I've generally stuck to this rule, as a result of which I now have 23 messages in my inbox. It feels like a great weight has been lifted.

My scheduled quiescence is over and we're getting settled into our new house in the University Park neighborhood of Denver (plus I'm getting caught up on all the hundreds of emails I received while offline). Expect a return to blogging normalcy here soon...

After tomorrow's Jabber Council meeting, I'll be offline for about 10 days while Elisa and I complete our previously-mentioned move to the University Park neighborhood of Denver. Blogging forecast: light to nonexistent. :-)

It seems that today is my blogiversary, since the first post to this blog occurred on 2001-09-13 (right after the 9/11 atrocities). I don't know that it's worth celebrating, since the result has been been four years of ceaseless yammering at my little soapbox here (can you say blogorrhea?). We'll let history be the judge, I suppose. :-)

Elisa and I will soon be moving to UP -- no, not to Michigan's Upper Peninsula, but to Denver's University Park neighborhood. Expect me to disappear for a week or so later this month as we move house about 2 miles south from our current location.

Six years ago today, my father died. I still remember.

Several years ago I read The Blank Slate, last weekend I read The Language Instinct, now I'm reading How the Mind Works -- three blockbuster books by Steven Pinker. I'll try to report on them more fully soon.

I was up in Freeport, Maine over the weekend ever so briefly for my sister's wedding. A good time was had by all, though I can do without 100% humidity (Denver has me spoiled in the weather department). I also noticed that Routes 1 and 60 near Logan Airport have more donut shops per capita than any other location on the planet. At one intersection I saw two Dunkin Donuts stores across the street from each other. Weird.

In the last few days I've submitted the following essays to their respective editors:

• "Streaming XML with Jabber/XMPP" to Steve Woods for an upcoming issue of IEEE Internet Computing.
• "Friendship in Atlas Shrugged" to Ed Younkins for Atlas Shrugged: A Philosophical and Literary Companion (forthcoming from Ashgate Press).
• "The Conceptual Nature of Art" to Chris Sciabarra for a forthcoming issue of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies.
• "Nietzsche, Rand, and the Ethics of the Great Task" also to Chris Sciabarra for The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies.

The last three will be part of my essays on Ayn Rand; only two more such essays to finish and I'll be done with that project.

I've started going for a swim on the way home from work on Friday evenings whenever possible. The Denver Department of Parks and Recreation maintains a number of swimming pools, one of which is located downtown not far from the offices of Jabber Inc. Not many folks seem to use the pool around 5 o'clock on a Friday afternoon, but I've found it's a great way to unwind at the end of the week.

Two weeks ago, Don Boudreaux over at Cafe Hayek listed the twelve books that have most influenced his thinking in economics. In fact he treated himself to a baker's dozen by adding an extra book, so since I love the number 13 I figured I would follow his lead by listing (in roughly chronological order) the 13 books that have had the greatest influence on my mental life:

1. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. Yes, it usually begins with Ayn Rand, or at least it did for me. I read this book nine times as a teenager but have not read it in twenty years (I tried to pick it up a few times but got turned off). One of these days I'll re-read it (as I have done in the last few years with Rand's other novels), but even though I disagree with much of her philosophy at this point, I know that Rand's ideas continue to influence me in many ways.
2. Complete Works by Aristotle. I basically majored in Aristotle back in college, which has quite influenced my style of thinking about problems. I'm currently (if slowly) re-reading all of Aristotle, which will enable me to determine how much influence his thought still holds for me.
3. The Epicurus Reader by Epicurus. From Aristotle I moved on to Epicurus. I appreciate the less scholastic approach of Epicurus to ethics and life in general, and his enlightened hedonism still holds quite an appeal for me. But I know that I'm too much of a modern American workaholic to follow his core ideas of pursuing mental calmness (ataraxia) and living in obscurity (lathe biosas).
4. Die Froehliche Wissenschaft by Friedrich Nietzsche. After reading Rand, Aristotle, and Epicurus I absorbed a lot of Nietzsche, and a year or two ago I re-read his complete writings in English. To me, Die Froehliche Wissenschaft (a title often translated into English as "The Gay Science", through I prefer the Provencal subtitle of "la gaya scienza") captures Nietzsche at his most positive and thought-provoking.
5. Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu. Well, one needs to relax after all that serious philosophizing. I still feel that the gnomic expressions of Lao Tzu provide an attractive antidote to the categorical thinking characteristic of Western philosophy. That doesn't mean I'm a spontaneous free spirit, but I try to cultivate that side of my personality despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that I am essentially a categorizing, logical person.
6. A Soviet Heretic by Yevgeny Zamyatin. Zamyatin is one of my big favorites -- a true individualist who provides deep insights into culture, society, and human experience.
7. The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels. About as close I've gotten to Christianity since I became a non-believer at the age of nine. But I find Gnostic thought to be quite appealing in many ways.
8. Complete Poems by Walt Whitman. True Americanism. A wonderful corrective to elitist thinkers like Rand and Nietzsche, with quite a whiff of Gnostic ideals mixed in, suitably democratized for the American experience.
9. The Evolution of Civilizations by Carroll Quigley. I think this is one of the most important books published in the twentieth century. The best analysis I have read of the origin and meaning of human civilizations.
10. How Buildings Learn by Stewart Brand. The power of vernacular, low-road, truly organic architecture -- and, by extension, vernacular, low-road, truly organic thinking.
11. Albion's Seed by David Hackett Fischer. The story of the transmission of America's founding cultures from the British Isles. This book gave me a deep appreciation for culture as opposed to ideology or philosophy.
12. Evolutionary Psychology by David Buss. Although this is "just" a textbook, it provides the best overview yet written of the ongoing application of evolutionary insights to human psychology.
13. The Structure of Liberty by Randy Barnett. The possibility of anarchism. I don't know if I'm really an anarchist, but I don't much believe in government anymore (where I use "believe" in the same sense here that I use when I call myself a religious non-believer), and this book more than any other led me in that direction.

Note that I've read many of these books only in the last few years, so as I read more I'll likely update my list of 13 most influential books. Or at least I hope so: better to keep growing intellectually, especially in these interesting times!

Several people have asked me recently how I got the nickname "stpeter", so I figured I'd record the story here for all time.

My nick has nothing to do with Simon Peter, the "rock" on whom Jesus said he would build his church (and the first Pope), nor is it meant in any kind of anti-Catholic or anti-Christian sense (although I am post-Catholic and a quasi-Gnostic non-believer, I'm not a militant atheist or crusading anti-Christian by any means). No, its origins are a bit more prosaic. When I worked at IBM's Watson Research Center in my last year of high school and first year of college, the head of the materials science lab in which I worked was Jerry Woodall. Because there was already another guy named Peter working in the same lab, Jerry took to calling me "saint peter" -- a fairly natural combination of "Saint-Andre" (my last name) and "Peter" (my first name). A few years later I wrote a somewhat racy blues song using that idea, entitled Gatekeeper Blues (one of these days I'll record it, but it's something of a cross between "Steamroller" by James Taylor and "Doctor Professor Longhair" by New Orleans piano guru Professor Longhair). When I first got involved with the Jabber community back in late 1999, we held daily discussions using IRC (no groupchat back then!) and of course the first thing you have to do when firing up an IRC client is to choose a nick, so I fatefully typed in "stpeter". Little did I know that years later most people I work with would call me stpeter (or, sometimes, psa). Certainly the nick was never intended to confer any special status on me (as in "the patron saint of Jabber") or make me out to be some kind of pope-like figure in the Jabber community, it was a just a fun thing that Jerry came up with so that he could differentiate me from that other Peter in the lab.

Now you know!

Usually I prefer to comment on things I read, but sometimes I use my blog merely to note the existence of interesting sites and stories, so here's a list of some things I've glanced at and shall return to when I have more time:

• Burt Rutan rocks.
• If I get serious about self-publishing, I'll need some good fonts (hat tip: pgm).
• Happiness is the best medicine.
• English idioms are fun.
• Will Colorado get sensible about drug policy?
• Isn't it time to try liberty in Latin America?
• They say you can't fight city hall, but perhaps you can rightsize it.
• People still refer to the philosophical dictionary I wrote some years ago, but I now find it embarrassingly biased and simply must update it one of these years.
• Life -- biological life, that is -- never ceases to fascinate.

While cleaning out some old file folders last night, I found some early writings of mine. They're not really very good, but I've typed them into my computer and put them online anyway. I had not written much by that time in my life, and it shows. At least I've gotten to be a better writer through years of practice -- or so I hope!

The pieces are as follows:

• A journal entry from 1992 that seems to have been an attempt to summarize my philosophy of life at that time. Things have changed since then.
• An essay entitled Secular vs. Sacred: The Modern Dilemma, which won honorable mention in an essay contest run by The Humanist magazine in 1992. Similar in many ways to my blog entry from the other day on spirituality.
• A very early essay entitled What I Love About Maine, which I wrote for my freshman English class at Columbia University. I was painfully afraid of writing back then and my teacher Victoria Redel helped me through that, for which I'm forever in her debt.

Not great writing, and best filed under the heading of juvenilia. But perhaps someone will find them interesting. :-)

Amazon.com bought print-on-demand company BookSurge today. Makes sense. BookSurge's Competitors include AuthorHouse, iUniverse, XLibris, and Lightning Source.

(This is just a note to myself in case I ever decide to self-publish The Ism Book, Ancient Fire, A Philosophy for Living on Earth, or some future book through one of the print-on-demand companies....)

One of my idiosyncrasies is that when I'm starting to catch a cold, I get ravenously hungry. I'm legendary for eating all the time, but when I begin to feel sick my usually fast metabolism seems to go into overdrive. For instance, today I was not feeling very well and ate a tremendous amount of food:

• 06:00: A handful of dried figs and half a cup of yogurt.
• 06:15: A fried egg on whole-grain toast, plus half a grapefruit.
• 06:30: Another fried egg on toast.
• 08:00: A huge bowl of oatmeal with raisins and walnuts.
• 09:30: An apple.
• 10:30: Another half cup of yogurt.
• 11:15: A whole bunch of almonds and some dried apricots.
• 12:15: A chicken fajita and a large bowl of beef chili.
• 14:00: Another half cup of yogurt.
• 16:00: Another fried egg on toast.
• 19:00: A large plate of sausage lasagna.
• 19:45: Two pieces of baklava and two cups of Turkish coffee.
• 21:15: More almonds and dried apricots.

Now excuse me while I rummage around in the kitchen for a snack... ;-)

My friend Chris Sciabarra saith:

Spring is here. Daylight Savings Time has returned. Baseball is back. Life is good.

Indeed.

I've just updated my Colorado Weblogs List with the blogs mentioned here. Keep those cards and letters coming!

Paul Graham strikes again, this time with a thought-provoking essay on How to Start a Startup. The key advice is in the first paragraph (don't you love it when writers get right to the point?):

You need three things to create a successful startup: to start with good people, to make something customers actually want, and to spend as little money as possible. Most startups that fail do it because they fail at one of these. A startup that does all three will probably succeed.

Graham focuses on startups that enable one to get rich. Mostly these are product companies rather than consulting companies. Yet there is something attractive about starting a small consulting company (I've previously likened them to rock bands) whose focus is on solving problems in a more measured way than is possible in