During the week in September that I was attending the Microsoft Build conference and learning all about Windows 8, only one topic made me gloomy: This was the Windows 8 implemention of the Manipulation events. These events provide a high-level application programming interface to touch input, so obviously they are very important.

About 14 months ago I saw the New York premiere of Philip Glass's Concerto for Violin and Orchestra No.2 at Carnegie Hall performed by violinist Robert McDuffie and the Venice Baroque Orchestra. McDuffie had commissioned the Glass work (subtitled "The American Four Seasons") for a program that also included the four violin concertos collected by Antonio Vivaldi as The Four Seasons almost three centuries earlier, and McDuffie took the program on a tour of 30 American cities.

People who live in New York City often inhabit tiny apartments, and the only reason we tolerate them is that we've exchanged private spaces for public spaces. We can frequently be found not in our apartments but walking around outside, or in a store, or a theater, or a concert hall, or a museum.

Dear Spammer,

One of the most common arguments against same-sex marriage is that it would open the floodgates to all sorts of other types of marriage. For example, James Dobson in his book Gay Marriage: Why We Must Win This Battle (Multnomah, 2004) writes:

I've been trying to build an EPUB viewer for Windows 8, mostly because I want to read books on the Windows 8 tablet I got at the Build conference, and it's more fun writing one's own application rather than using someone else's. This will obviously not be a commercial product or I would have thought of a snappier and less wonky name for the program than The New Epublic! [I've decided I don't want to distribute the code at this time. — Jan. 5, 2012]

If this blog entry popped up in a search engine because you're having problems with defining and/or animating dependency properties in the Windows 8 developer's pre-release, you might want to jump towards the end. The early paragraphs merely discuss some deadly boring Windows 8 program I've been developing.

About 35 years ago I picked up a novel from the coffee table in my mother's house and started reading. This particular novel was a big bestseller at the time and I was curious what made it so popular. Sure enough, I discovered a story with the annoying addictiveness of potato chips, and I suspect I finished the whole puffy bag in one sitting.

Three years ago I read that Hilary Hahn had recorded the Schoenberg Violin Concerto, and I was certain that must be a mistake. Surely the reference was to the violin concerto by Arnold Schoenberg's student Alban Berg. I wasn't even sure that Schoenberg had composed a violin concerto!

I am currently engaged in writing an EPUB viewer for Windows 8. EPUB is a popular format for electronic books. The standard is maintained by the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), and that's where you can find the documents that make up the EPUB specification. (I am basing my work on version 2.)

A typical book about Windows 8 programming is likely to be rather oddly structured: It may start out like conventional programming tutorials with "hello world" but very early on the book will likely devote a chapter to a topic commonly relegated to the advanced techniques section: "Asynchronous Processing".

For a couple years now I've seriously considered participating in National Novel Writing Month by joining hundreds of thousands of other crazy writers who spend the month of November writing a novel in 30 days. But not this year. This year I want to spend November in the somewhat related activity of coding an e-book reader for Windows 8.

I don't know how many people still read MSDN Magazine, but over the past several months I've used my monthly column (called "UI Frontiers") to put together a rather substantial Windows Phone program that lets you search, download, and read free plain-text e-books from Project Gutenberg, the repository of over 30,000 public-domain books.

During much of his lifetime Dmitri Shostakovich (1906 – 1975) was the dominant figure in music in the Soviet Union, yet he failed to provide a model that could be emulated by younger composers. Particularly during the Stalin years, his music would often incur the suspicion of the government; yet outside the Soviet Union, this same music was considered hopelessly reactionary. (Pierre Boulez called him "the second, or even third pressing of Mahler.") To Soviet authorities, Shostakovich's politics were often suspect, yet in the rest of the world he was widely perceived as a government lackey.

Soon after I started reading books on my own, I tried reading books in the car, and very quickly discovered this wasn't such a great idea. After a couple incidences of "Mom, I'm going to be sick right away," my mother banned me from reading in the car. Now when I think back about the long car trips we took when I was a kid, I can only picture myself staring out the passenger-side window, my chin on my hand, bored out of my mind and wishing I were reading a book.

Recently I've been trying to remember the last time I wrote a program that targetted the native Windows API. I think it was 2002, when I used C and the Win32 API to write the last of a series of programs for the PC Magazine Utilities column. But even at that time, I had already moved on. In the summer of 2000 I was introduced to the .NET Framework and the marvelous language C#. I became a strong advocate of managed code, and I really haven't had any reason to return to the world of message loops and wayward memory pointers. I already paid my Windows API dues, and plenty of them.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, I designed and built several electronic music instruments, including a computer-controlled digital synthesizer capable of generating 80 simultaneous sine curves combined into 40 simple-FM voices.

Sometimes it seems a miracle that people can communicate at all. Our face-to-face conversations comprise a medley of phrases, half-words, grunts, hums, hesitations, grimaces, and gestures. Only slivers of visual imagery and sound are perceived by the senses, and the brain strives in fill in the blanks. Everything is then interpreted in accordance with — and building upon — our unique inner lives. How easy it is to mishear a word, misread a smile or wink, and completely invalidate what we thought we heard or saw. It's a wonder that we don't daily collapse in complete surrender to confusion and embarrassment.

Even before the play begins, sentries in camouflage fatigues guard the refugee camp. Fenced off with wire, the area is littered with the detritus of a defeated nation after a devastating 10-year battle. What were once residences and industry are now piles of cinder blocks, plumbling, and unrecognizable machine parts. Two television sets have mysteriously survived this destruction only to play nothing but endless cycles of images of war.

I was interviewed a couple times in recent weeks. For IT World, Bob Reselman interviewed me via AIM:

Just fifty years ago, birth control was illegal in the state of Connecticut. The law specifically prohibited "any drug, medicinal article, or instrument for the purpose of preventing conception," and also applied to someone who "assists, abets, counsels, causes, hires or commands anyone" to use these means of birth control. The punishment was a fine of at least $50, and a jail sentence of between 60 days and one year.

I love bookstores, and it's thrilling to see a new bookstore as intelligently conceived and as well-stocked as Ada's Technical Books at 713 Broadway East in Seattle.

Texas Governor Rick Perry is certainly one of America's more spiritually advanced politicians. He recently set up a web site asking people to help solve America's problems using the only solution with proven, guaranteed effectiveness: prayer.

"Hell is other people" says a character in Jean-Paul Sartre's play No Exit. Well, maybe sometimes. But most of the time our lives are enriched by other people, whether it be in a friendship, or a romance, or a family, or a classroom, or a party. Our lives are also enriched by people who we know only through the novels they've written, or the music they've composed, or the art they've created. In a very real sense, life is other people, and our relationship with them.

Recently I met someone who, upon learning that I lived in New York, promptly told me about a study that concluded that New York was the "least free state" in the country.

I am happy to announce that I am the Author of the Month at Ada's Technical Books in Seattle, and I will be appearing there this Thursday, July 14th at 7:00 PM to speak a bit and (I hope) sign some books.

Gosh, it seems like just last year I was working on my free ebook Programming Windows Phone 7, and now they tell me I have to revise the entire book because Windows Phone 7 is going to be superseded by Windows Phone 7.1.

I want to publicly thank everyone involved in and attending CodeStock 2011, and particularly Michael Neel, for making my trip to Knoxville, Tennessee, such a sheer pleasure earlier this month.

The sesquicentennial anniversary of the American Civil War has certainly increased the number of books coming out on the subject, but this has always been a healthy area of book publishing. Perhaps the big difference now is that people seem to be reading more of them. Of the several books I used in researching my blog entry on John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, perhaps the one most fascinating to me was Elizabeth R. Varon's Disunion! The Coming of the American Civil War, 1789-1859 (University of North Carolina Press, 2008) because it focused on the concept of the Union, which was originally somewhat amorphous until it became threatened by the conflict over slavery.

I still have the $1.75 Signet paperback of Atlas Shrugged that I read sometime in the mid-1970s. Fortunately I was old enough to emerge from the experience without permanent scarring. By that time in my life I head read enough real literature to recognize the inferiority of Ayn Rand's cardboard characters and leaden prose. Regardless, there was no denying that in Atlas Shrugged she achieved a marvelous narrative drive with a skillful arrangement of toy soldiers in an epic battle between collectivist cretins and industrialist gods.

When I was at Tech Ed in Atlanta recently, someone asked me how to do screen shots of Windows Phone programs. You might need screen shots if you're writing a book, article, or blog entry about Windows Phone programming. Screen shots are also required when you submit a program to the Windows Phone Marketplace.

I suffer from an affliction where certain words trigger songs to start playing in my head. The word "summertime," for example, triggers the George Gershwin song from Porgy and Bess. (I once told my mother than "Summertime" was my favorite song, and she said "That's funny. I used to sing that song to you when you were an infant and I was carrying you around the apartment.")

I recently received two entirely unrelated emails from people who had posted videos on YouTube that were, in part, inspired by my book Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software (which is one of those rare computer books that doesn't become absurdly obsolete with the passage of time, and which, incidently, has recently become available in a Kindle edition).