Aha! I've been looking at the date, February 24, all day thinking What's special about this date?, Why should it remind me of something? And of course it did, in the end, just now, so:
She's dead. Wrapped in plastic.
The past as a harbour, the tethers keeping each of us together being removed one by one.
Family as the only non-negotiable, non-negotiated ties we'll ever have. We spend the rest of our lives attempting to build a band, a bubble of friends like that: to bridge us to the world, to bind us to the world, to understand us, to complement us, to define ourselves in relation to.
When those tethers go, you're cast out just a little further, just a little closer to being on your own in the world. Does that mean on your own two feet? Does that mean alone?
I struggle with memory. What really happened, how did it change me, did I really know them. It doesn't matter. You don't question that tie any more than you question the sky, or gravity. Imagine the concept of liquidity being removed one day. The Alps.
You can't go backwards. You can only follow the unfolding. We have to rise to life.
We align ourselves into Cooper Pairs to rise above the lattice, eventually. Perhaps the disappearing tethers is why. Then we become superhuman. Not needing to be tied. I hope that's how it works.
When a Komodo Dragon is young it lives in trees. There's one day, as the dragon grows, that is the last it ever climbs down. It's too big to go back.
What if
, says Dan, the drive recovery company have themselves been victim of a server drive failure?
while trying to figure out why they haven't responded to my email of two days ago and not been in contact for a couple of weeks. And now, when I call them, the phone is always busy.
Update. Well, apparently it's a nasty problem (they answered the phone). And because the data isn't time critical, it's not top priority for them. It's so nasty, in fact, that apparently it should've been marked "no fix" before now, but as it happens they got a long way down the road so might-as-well finish the job. Are we going to get data back? Before now I felt confident. Now, not so sure. A partial recovery would do, I said, anything we can get, give me a listing and I'll make a call. Phone back Monday afternoon, they said, We'll work on it over the weekend.
Not the answer I was after, but another item off the todo.
An option I'd like on my email client: When I *send* an email, a checkbox for "cluster replies to this email and do X with them". Example: I send an email to the bank. Any replies to that email should trigger an alert. Example 2: I email a mail list with a questionnaire. Any replies should be saves as text files to a folder on my desktop. Example 3: I email some schoolfriends from a work account. Any email replies should be directed to a folder for personal conversations.
And this option should be sticky. So if I use this option and funnel all replies to a folder, any emails I reply to from that folder should inherit the same instruction. And the folder itself should remember the names, subject lines, etc of emails in that folder, and give me the option of congealing/solidifying/confirming/setting_in_stone those filing instructions, and turning them into rules. Bottom-up email rules, not declarative and top-down. Or, in other words, the rules emerge from task-based "email sending" behaviour, not from outside that behaviour.
I believe this would be relatively easy to do as a Mac OS X Mail.app plugin.
One unexpected side effect of visiting San Diego is that my British skin isn't used to the harsh air conditioning. Within a day or two my top lip was dry and chapped. It gets worse, spending a lot of time on planes and in the cold (New York was especially chilly). I rejected lip salve for almost the whole trip (one time I gave in, I admit), wanting to see what would happen next. I've never had dry lips before. Although slightly painful (drinking orange juice, for example, or smiling even slightly, so whenever anybody made a joke I'd smile just a little bit, for 500ms, then immediately turn very serious. My face is being trained out of microexpressions. The end of mind-reading), the novelty makes the experience worthwhile. And thinking back I can imagine a couple of different endpoints: my lips come to a new equilibrium with the environment, drier than normal but not too dry, or maybe they'd just get better with time.
Well, neither of those two happened. My top lip just got worse and worse until all the skin fell off in patches and it started bleeding. My face is greeting the London return with scabby lips.
Note to self, for future reference: Do not repeat this experiment.
Somehow I forgot that arriving in New York at 6am would actually be 3am San Diego time. I don't feel as knackered as I should be -- spent yesterday with M and F at the zoo and seeing the Pacific sunset, and for some reason that wore me out completely: I slept the whole way on the plane.
Now: checked email in Bryant Park and almost lost my fingers to frostbite. It was a close thing, but fortunately a giant robot cafe came down and scooped me up and put me in its belly (actually I walked a block and a half, but the end result is the same. Modulo the robot death fear and carnage). I'll stay here till either I run out of coffee-dollars or the Guggenheim opens.
Emerging Tech talk done; here are the Glancing slides (and talk, pretty much verbatim).
2004-02-09
Hollow mobiles
Etcon, first day. Evening.
mj: n. releasing mobile phones with functional cases
ben: mobiles are the last antique. soon computing will be everywhere, the functionality won't be objectified.
the functional case will be hollow.
we'll still need to use our fingers as input devices because we have so much of our brain devoted to them.
people use sms because it's a sense and a reach into peer network awareness/manipulation. getting a phone which also does sms is somatic competitiveness.
what else do senses require?
which ones come next?
hot pluggable senses. sensofixing. a proxy over the usual senses that accepts input: the sensorium as a sense notifier daemon. accepts any input. translates into usual output. install em2smell.
smell is the undervalued sense. spectacle is <21st century. potential fields that are interleaved with the brain, part of the personality.
i have a doc on this: smell vs sight. it's about how dogs read reality.
"""
with sight sense exceeds reach so you can see something and anticipate before you get to it
with smell you're entering a field of potential action
wherever you are in it, there's a chance that something will happen
so the field, caused by the smell, primes you for possible happenings.
the emotion is isomorphic with the smell itself, so it's like wandering through aspects of consciousness
so moving through the environment, for a smell-focused animal, is like thinking: navigation == cognition. but there's no concept of moving at all
vision gives anticipation which means knowledge becomes important. this causes science, culture etc. smell otoh is closely joined with the personality so knowing the environment & how to respond better is a matter of knowing yourself better.
there's no division between self and system.
"""
when my dog walks through the house he's not moving, he's exploring his personality-state. travel as introspection. the journey is the destination. when i sneak up on my dog and he doesn't smell me it's not a surprise, it feels like personal innovation. no wonder he's happy.
damn, and more. indian study. weavers using computers, old metaphors on new functionality. the cursor as needle.
progression of unfolding: genome -> phenotype -> extelligence/vapour human [where the ghosts live, the inhabitants of the hollow phones]
see people not as objects but as auras of mind
interfering
not interfering, contributing
the mind as constructive interference from my peer network neighbours
i want a field theory of personality
the brain as mirage, hologram
love as cooper pairs
happiness as room temperature superconductivity
you can feel me/
why can't i feel you?
That's the first leg of my trip nearly over. A one-night stopover in New York at Jason and Meg's, I think quite possibly the two most hospitable people in this city. So yesterday was all gawping at really tall buildings. Like, *really* tall. As ever, with the States, it's really strange to be here: it's the cultural capital of the world, and it really decentres me to experience it. Just to be reminded that the best (by which I mean, the most important) films, ideas, writing -- they're usually American. And here, where the font proportions are slightly different, and there are different senses about what's important in public buildings (the outsides of buildings are worn and well-loved, layers of use of complexity; in London the outsides are often just worn and tatty), here I can see all the references, understand things in a different way. Blah. Whatever. No point articulating it, just let it seep in. Photos maybe, at some point.
Later today I'm off to Chicago from Penn Station (overnight trip. I have enough time for lunch there). And then a two night trip to LA. Check the Amtrack routemap. There should be some good desert going on, on Saturday.
12/01/2003 - 01/01/2004 01/01/2004 - 02/01/2004 02/01/2004 - 03/01/2004 03/01/2004 - 04/01/2004 04/01/2004 - 05/01/2004 05/01/2004 - 06/01/2004 06/01/2004 - 07/01/2004 07/01/2004 - 08/01/2004