I've been thinking a lot lately about a portion of a book by Vernor Vinge, A Deepness in the Sky, which describes a unique way that a civilization of interstellar traders, the Qeng Ho, deal with worlds they visit that do not meet their technical sophistication.

To quickly summarize: Imagine you are a member of a race that trades goods across stars. You set a course for where you find it likely to find intelligent life, hoping to find someone to trade good with, but are unsure exactly what you'll find when you get there. Upon arrival, the intelligent life there hasn't progressed beyond the bronze age. What do you do?

The answer is simple: You educate them.

In Vinge's book A Fire Upon the Deep, which takes place in the same universe, he presents a situation where some of the characters are in a predicament, marooned in a pre-technology society with enemies all around. They have only a single line of communication with the technological world, and only a very basic set of tools to work with otherwise. The people that they communicate with must find a way to provide them with actionable instructions that will help them build protective devices from the materials on hand.

With these ideas, I've been considering what exactly it might take to build a guide that could explain how to rebuild a technological society from the ground up. The idea being that with enough time and persistence, useful technology could be rebuilt from the ground up within a "short" (over several years, perhaps) period of time.

In Fire, the characters use a vastly complex decision tree to determine what the fastest route to civilization is based on the raw materials on hand. I think if we consider Earth as the place where civilization would need to be rebuilt, we can easily rule out having to build a tree that takes into account a scarcity of materials that are easy to find here. On the other hand it may be useful to be able to rule out finding raw materials based on environment; for example, if you're in the desert, water might be difficult to come by. Practically, I suppose, the guide would assume that certain quantities of raw materials are available in proportion to their scarcity on Earth.

Similar ideas I've found online include solely two other thoughts about rebuilding - survivalism and cultural revival.

There is quite a lot of information about survivalism, which doesn't appeal to me. Too much has been written about how to build shelters and find food and water that I think it's unimportant to retread that path. There's no doubt this information should be included, but in terms of generating something new and useful, there's no new work to be done here.

From a social point of view, there are even crazy monuments erected to keep future people on the path to enlightenment. I question whether this is the best plan, since it seems like someone trying to foist his worldview on people by burning down society to start over. There are a handful of folks dedicated to creating a better post-apocalyptic society than what we have now. I doubt there would be much success with this.

Some other takes on the idea include the Perenno facility, a place where the world's knowledge could be archived and protected for future post-apocalyptic use. This brings to mind some other random thoughts that don't make a lot of sense. I think the problem of information overload becomes tangible to people who have to funnel all the knowledge of the world through a single viewport. Where do you start? I think you need an essential guide; a document with which you can say "Start Here", whether it refers to external works or not relies on whether the guide is meant to be presented as a whole.

Thinking about this brings to mind the books of Jeanne DuPrau, like The City of Ember, in which the fictional progenitors do a horrible job of explaining anything to their descendants. It seems like we should do better.

I'm amused that I mentioned this concept to Nana yesterday, and the idea of a 10,000-year clock, and her response was, "Why bother? We'll all be long gone by then." I suppose I am determined to be more optimistic.

I've been burning the candle at both ends quite a bit lately. Weekends of sleeping in aren't enough to cover it and I'm still not using any of the extra time to be more active. My normal level of mental agility is impaired and it's starting to show. And most disconcertingly, I can't get this stupid Mika song out of my head.

I'm not yet willing to commit to Ben Franklin's regimen, also known as The Old Man Schedule, partially because it doesn't quite suit my activity list, and partially because 5am??? All I'm willing to say at this point is that something must be done to improve the situation.

Clearly ts is a problem with time management. I must learn to be a master of time. It must be apparent to others that I encounter that I have a complete mastery of my schedule and am even able to adjust it nimbly. I will become a Time Lord.

Yeah, it's like that now.

Yesterday afternoon when my PC screens went blanks and the UPSes started chiming incessantly, there was one thing I wasn't worried about: The computers clocks coming back up with the right time. I'm pretty sure that even if the computer didn't have the battery inside to keep the clock up to date, they all connect to an NTP server to update their time, much like cell phones use the cell network to determine the correct time. This is why I'm surprised at the response of the rest of the house clocks when the power goes out.

Sure, there are a few clocks that just lose the time. That's to be expected. But then there is the bedroom alarm clock. The bedroom alarm clock, like most of the other clocks in the house, goes dark when the power goes out. But when the power comes back on, it hasn't lost any time. On the other hand, it hasn't gained any time, either. This is a dangerous business, since it looks close enough to correct - not flashing annoyingly - to convince you not to mess with it, but it's off significantly enough to get you into work late.

Another strange one is Riley's bedroom clock. I just bought this thing as a dock for his iPod, but it has a digital clock on the front. It was the cheapest thing I could find online to plug an iPod into, and I didn't really want the clock, just the speaker, because we were planning on using the iPod for the alarm. In any case, that clock keeps accurate time when the power goes out. How is it that a $12 iPod dock, whose clock is relatively useless when you have the iPod connected, keeps better time than the $600 built-into-the-wall microwave?

We used to get outages more frequently. They'd happen whenever there was a wind storm, which seems pretty frequent around here. These days, power outages only seem to happen for no reason. There was only once in the past two years that I remember a storm causing an outage. Every other time, it's just gone out in the middle of the day for no reason.

I sometimes think that the power company does repairs in residential neighborhoods during the day like this because they think everyone is at work. Obviously, this causes me trouble. I suppose there's some sense to it, but it's pretty inconvenient.

Every time the power goes out, I am reminded that, in spite of having 4 separate UPSes, there are not enough. Here's a strange annoyance, for example: I have a UPS on the PC, but not the monitors. So I can't see what I'm doing to shut down the computer properly, only wait for the power to come back on. If I decide to go mobile with the notebook tethered to my phone, I can, but the process is made annoying by the fact that the router is on the UPS (and not the monitor?), so I get a wifi signal, but because Fios' hardware doesn't have battery backup for the incoming fiber line (it does, but only for the phone part!), I see a network that can't go anywhere.

Usually the power doesn't stay off for too long. I think after that major storm a couple years ago it was out for two days. That's the longest I remember the power being out in anyplace I've lived. When the power came back on, none of the clocks were right. Very odd.

I have some pity for families who have kids that are sports players, and I suspect that as our kids get older we'll start sharing some more of their issues. We've started Riley at a karate (technically Kenpo) school that is nearby to his after school daycare. Yesterday was an interesting day, running back and forth between places, trying to get the information needed to sign him up properly. I spoke briefly with the woman at the desk there about how insane our schedules have become, running the kids to their various activities.

Abby has Orchestra and Chorus on Wednesdays and Thursdays, so Berta runs her to school early on those days. Riley's half-day kindergarten is a royal pain -- I'm not sure how other parents deal with it and why the school district doesn't just switch to full-day. But on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, we send Riley to his after-school daycare, and on Tuesday and Thursday I pick him up and bring him home where Nana watches him. On those days he has after-school daycare, the karate school busses him from daycare to their location for the hour lesson and then returns him to the school, where Berta eventually picks him up on her way home. Sometime during all of that, Abby comes home from school on the bus, where I have to be home to wait for her. All of this is subject to the Girl Scout schedule, which often changes how things work on Fridays, and to Nana's schedule, which includes occasional doctor visits and art lessons that make it impossible for me to be out at meetings past 5pm (which might not be when the meeting is scheduled, but would include travel time home from the city or elsewhere).

Yes, it's headache-inducing.

One of the perplexing things I was talking about recently is how the extracurricular classes in our area tend to offer classes for kids at 4pm, which is great because it keeps them occupied from when they get home from school until when their parents would be home from work. But there's no way for people to get the kids to the class unless they're already not working. This is one of the great things about the karate class in that it picks up Riley from his daycare. When summer comes, I'll end up having to cart him over there myself two days a week, and then in September (since the karate school is a minimum 6-month contract -- why do they do this?) it'll be an additional after-school activity that we'll end up running the kids to.

It's a good thing we keep all of our family appointments in the Google calendar, otherwise we'd be completely lost. Each of us has our own calendar, plus a shared family calendar to keep things straight. I've even allocated scpecific time on my work calendar to make sure I'm not scheduling things during times I need to pick up Riley. Although, it would be handy if the scheduling system was somehow smart enough to know that I shouldn't schedule a meeting that's 45 minutes away to end right before I need to pick up a kid. Perhaps they'll add this feature for beleaguered parents.

I was talking with Nate yesterday about a presentation of sorts I was hoping to give to my fellows at Rock River Star next week, and once again the topic of Getting Things Done came up.

Getting Things Done is a book by some guy that talks about a process of organization that helps produce results. I have a copy of the book, which is currently in the trunk of my car, and I haven't read the whole thing. Mostly this is because I got so far and the book and agreed with most of the premise, but the process that he dictates probably isn't the best one for me.

For example, my office, although it does have some paper and a printer, is relatively paper free. There are very few papers around, and never really a pen when I need one. But that's okay, because I do most of my work in the computer, and I have some applications that help me keep track of things like notes from phone calls and appointments. The book primarily focuses on paper-based methods for organization, including using multiple folders to store to-do items, and I don't even have a place to put file folders in my office. Still, even with those applications, I could probably stand to apply some of the organizational discipline to my routine.

Anyway, I would like to come up with some way to streamline the process that I have for my day-to-day life, not just for work. Not that GTD pertains exclusively to the work environment, but just that I've been thinking more recently that the days are getting any longer and there are so many things that I would like to do, and it seems like I'm not getting any of them done.

One problem I had, was that the process of GTD (and I'm sure I'm getting this wrong and need to reread the book in full) encourages you to accumulate ideas that you can act upon at a later time. Of course, my ability to create new ideas far exceeds the time I have much to accomplish them. And sure, I'm discarding ideas that after a while just don't seem as good as they did when I first thought of them, but I'm still ending up with a whole lot of ideas that I am never able to act on. I see that long list of ideas and think how great any of those things would be to do and yet I'm still stuck on the first or second idea that I ever came up with.

It's not simply the idea that I'm not accomplishing anything, because I'm definitely accomplishing things. I just have a lot of ideas.

What I need is a small team of oompah-loomphs to do all the work for me.

Anyway, with this new topic that I'm hoping to talk about next week, DTD should factor in at least partially, giving me an excuse to pull the book out of the trunk of my car and give it a good going through to see what I missed. Hopefully I will uncover something that I didn't see before and it will help me solve this problem as well as better organize my personal time so I can accomplish some of those great ideas.