I’ve been friends with Barry Brake since we were both attending rival high schools, but going to the same church. He’s a brilliant guy, with both an incisive mind, which comes through in his speech and writing, and dextrous fingers, which come through in his music. He did the music at Sea World for The Shamu Show a few years back, has played regularly with a jazz trio for over a decade, and is always good for a fascinating conversation on some topic or another.

Barry started this new year with surgery to remove cancer. Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear that the results were as good as he and his doctors had hoped for. He’ll be beginning chemotherapy on Monday. While that is inevitably a slightly-to-terrifically miserable experience, his doctors are optimistic that it will have good results. (His cancer is evidently of a type that responds well to chemo.)

Those who are interested can follow Barry’s progress on his site here. Those who pray, please add Barry to your list.

I’ve had Corey Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom on my reading list for a while, without realizing that it hadn’t actually been released yet. Today it was set loose, to my delight, not only in paper form, but also in a variety of electronic formats that can be downloaded and swapped freely. (For you web types, there’s even a particularly nice CSS trick in the HTML version.)

Corey’s motivation for making his novel available at no charge? One of the more compelling arguments of the musicians who have embraced free music swapping over record contracts as the way to get their material to a listening public: obscurity is a greater enemy to the artist than is piracy. Since this is his first novel, he wants to get it into as many hands as possible, figuring the word-of-month buzz will do more to increase his sales than the sharing will decrease them. Should be an interesting experiment.

I’m to Chapter 3 so far, and it looks like every bit the interesting novel that I’d hoped.

For various reasons, it has become apparent to me that we need something better for handling incoming calls than just Caller ID and voicemail. These are the features I want:

• Restrict calls on a per-number basis
• Restrict calls at certain times of day
• Ask who caller wants to talk to
• Page that person with the caller ID info
• If that person doesn’t pick up, take a message
• Convert that message to MP3, email it to that person

If anyone has any suggestions for something that would fit the bill, I’d very much like to hear about it. It can be standalone, or run on Mac, Linux, or Windows. (I’d cheerfully buy a box off eBay just for this application.)

This looks like it might have potential.

My Dad has worked for the San Antonio Police Department for a couple of decades now. This has always struck me as a somewhat unexpected direction for someone with such a strong mind, excellent academic qualifications, and good work ethic. He could easily be making several times what the city can pay him by working as a consultant, but has chosen to remain where he is, even through the times that they’ve treated him pretty shabbily.

One thing that comes through when I talk to him about his work is how much he values the fact that, through his job, he’s able to make significant positive changes to people’s lives. At first, when he was doing hostage negotiation and crisis management, that effect was immediate and profound. Now that he’s involved in the victim assistance unit, the change he’s able to help people bring about is longer term, but no less far-reaching.

Another friend of mine, Steve Knight, is an ex-military man who has been working in the medical profession for many years and doing quite well financially. He recently got laid off due to cuts at the lab where he had been, and after a couple of months of soul-searching, decided to go to truck driving school to fulfill a lifelong dream of being a trucker. The chance to “live in the moment,” as he puts it, has brought him a tremendous amount of pleasure and satisfaction. Talking with him over Christmas made it very clear to me that he felt he had made a great choice, even though he could have done better financially by continuing to do med tech work.

These two men came strongly to mind when I happened across an article in Fast Company entitled What Should I Do With My Life?. The author, Po Bronson, talks to a number of people who have, like Steve and my Dad, searched out professions that really allow them to pursue some of their life goals in a meaningful way.

The article addresses squarely what I regularly feel about the work I’ve had in the computer industry: though it’s quite stimulating intellectually, and pays the bills more than adequately, it doesn’t feed into the things that I feel are important. Shortly before I married Kathy and became a family man, I had thought fairly seriously about pursuing counseling credentials so that I could be doing something more worthwhile with my days. Since I’ve assumed the role of paterfamilias, I’ve been happier to treat the job as a means to the end of supporting the family, rather than something from which meaning and value should spring. However, I’m still occasionally nagged by the feeling that if I’m investing 40 hours or more per week at something, it should be something more meaningful and of more lasting value than a computer game or a billing system.

I suppose the New Year is an appropriate time to mull one’s direction, to evaluate whether the short-term decisions one is making are congruent with one’s long term goals. I’m off to order the book on which the article is based, and to plan some quality time with some good music, hot tea, and thought-provoking reading material.