Books

In Print
In Process
Past (out of print)
 

Books in Print

Finding Focus: How to Clarify Your Priorities and Live with Purposeful Simplicity:
Published 2008; available through www.lulu.com (follow link above, $14.95 print, $6.95 eBook; 138 pages).

From the Back Cover:

Feel that you're living on auto-pilot, not really sure just what the heck you really want out of life?

Fishing around in the lakes of confusion trying to understand what really matters, yet catching only minnows of insight?

Like to make sense of all your interests and involvements without being told that you should just "let go"?

Utilizing an insightful process that peels back the obscuring layers of appearances, Finding Focus helps you:

• Clearly discern the overarching priorities and values that drive, and have driven, your life;

• Make your actions and choices count by investing your energies where they will be the most personally, socially, ecologically, and spiritually effective;

• Discover how to simultaneously serve as many needs and interests as possible;

• Creatively adapt to changing circumstances without sacrificing your ideals; and

• Bring a profound simplicity to your life within a world of ever-increasing complexity.

Finding Focus is about finding the simple, clear understanding of what gives value and richness to everything you do and all that you experience...finding what, for you, defines success and joy.

Mystic Microsoft: A Journey of Spiritual Transformation in the Halls of High Technology
Published 2007; entire book readable online and as PDF eBook, with print copies available ($18.95 cover price; 272 pages; ISBN: 978-0-6151-4379-8).

From the Back Cover:

Where do you go if you want to grow spiritually? A church? A monastery? India? Tibet?

What about the heart of high-tech corporate multinationalism?

If you’ve ever thought that God only works through formal religious or spiritual channels, think again! Mystic Microsoft demonstrates that when there’s sincerity of heart and a willingness to offer oneself into whatever Life brings, God can (and will) find a way to guide one’s inner growth in any setting.

In this fascinating story, one of Microsoft’s most visible technology experts during the company’s most expansive growth phase (1988-1996) relates how the very circumstances of his career were the vehicle through which he was inwardly transformed. With insight, wit, and colorful
anecdotes about life in the world’s leading software company, Kraig Brockschmidt illustrates how one’s career, such as his experience writing the Windows Calculator and his bestselling book,
Inside OLE 2, can be a tremendous opportunity for spiritual growth. As he writes, “In the course of my eight and a half years with [Microsoft] I learned and experienced exactly what you would expect from direct [spiritual] training in a monastery or ashram…”

Mystic Microsoft thus offers hope to those who feel that their careers are at odds with their inner aspirations and those who seek to find a deeper meaning in their worldly responsibilities.

Reader Comments:

“...a fascinating book, it was so good that I read the whole book in a weekend.” —MF

“I started reading and before long realized that several tasks I had assigned to myself between now and bedtime were going out the window.” —RJ

“A pageturner...” —KNB

 

The Harmonium Handbook: Owning, Playing and Maintaining the Devotional Instrument of India
Published 2003 by Crystal Clarity, Publishers ($12.95 cover price, ISBN: 1-56589-191-0; 159 pages), also in India by New Age Books.

The harmonium is a small, hand-pumped reed organ. These were created in Europe and America in the 1800s, but fell out of vogue by the early part of the 1900s. Christian missionaries took them to India and the Indians fell in love with them; today they're all made in India.

I originally wrote The Harmonium Handbook simply as a user's manual for the instruments I was importing and selling in Seattle (I'm also considered a skilled player). Seeing that there would be some broader interest in the title, Crystal Clarity picked it up and soon sold the foreign rights to New Age Books in India, where it seems to be quite popular. One of the major harmonium manufacturers, Bina, sells many copies with their instruments and features the book on their website.
 

From the Back Cover:

The Harmonium Handbook provides detailed instruction in how to play, maintain, and repair this popular devotional instrument. It also reveals the colorful history of free-reed instruments such as the harmonium, which dates back to the time of Marco Polo. The story behind the modern version of the harmonium is a fascinating testimony to the love, skill, innovation, and intermingling of many of the world's great cultures. The Harmonium Handbook Reveals:

• The history of the Indian harmonium, from Ancient China to Europe and America.

• The essentials of owning and caring for Indian harmoniums, helping them give many years of service.

• How to play the harmonium in a variety of styles, from the simple to the complex, including single-note melody, melody with a drone, chords, and other more advanced methods (a complete appendix of chords and chord inversions is provided.

• How to explore the "inner realms" of the instrument and perform a variety of adjustments and corrections, including how to tune a harmonium's individual brass reeds.
  

"The Harmonium Handbook is a welcome manual and important resource for music scholars and followers of spiritual paths alike. This book a treasure." -Henry Doktorski, Founder of The Classical Free-Reed Company, and author of The Classical Squeezebox

Books in Process

No titles at present.

Past Books (out of print)

Inside OLE, 2nd Edition
Published 1995 by Microsoft Press. Copies can still be found in the secondary market (see amazon.com)

A revision and expansion of Inside OLE 2 (below), to keep up with changing technologies. Though terribly outdated, it's still considered an essential reference by many, though others seem to hate it (probably because they hate Microsoft in general). Can't please everyone, I suppose!

The book is available electronically on the MSDN subscriber CDs and might still be contained within the reference library of Microsoft's Visual Studio products. It also seems that the sample CD contents have disappeared from online resources, so I've uploaded them here (inole.zip, about 5MB).

Inside OLE 2
Published 1993 by Microsoft Press. Copies can still be found in the secondary market (see amazon.com)

My first published book, written in 1993 to meet a pressing need for some kind of comprehensible information on Microsoft's OLE technology (Object Linking and Embedding). The story of how this book came about is the subject of Chapter 10 in Mystic Microsoft.