NP: Foo Fighters, There Is Nothing Left To Lose

I'm currently re-reading Cryptonomicon from Neal Stephenson -- as part of a plan to kill time until Anathem came out in paperback that was thwarted when I got the new novel for Christmas, but that's not important right now -- and was once again struck with some of the broader sociological parts, particularly about geek culture. I'm not quite the classic hacker archetype like Randy Waterhouse, but I certainly have some personality traits in common.

And there's plenty of other stuff for me to get my geek on, like this bit describing Randy's grandfather working on codebreaking that reads like an instruction manual for how I try to do my job and/or live my life:

He steals some paper of his own, sits down at his desk, and busies himself for an hour or two copying out the ciphertext from the skipper's pages, double- and triple-checking each code group to make sure he's got an accurate copy.

On the one hand, this is a pain in the ass. On the other, it gives him a chance to go through the ciphertext by hand, at the very lowest level, which might be useful later. The ineffable talent for finding patterns in chaos cannot do its thing unless he immerses himself in the chaos first. If they do contain patterns, he does not see them now, in any rational way. But there may be some subrational part of his mind that can go to work, now that the letters have passed before his eyes and through his pencil, and that may suddenly present him with a gift-wrapped clue -- or even a full solution -- a few weeks from now while he is shaving or antenna-twiddling.

And then a shorter summation of the same thing about forty pages later:

Most of the brain's work is done while the brain's owner is ostensibly thinking about something else, so sometimes you have to deliberately find something else to think about and talk about.